It’s been a month or so since I ditched the corporate life and decided to head for the freelance hills, despite my previous predictions of the good and the bad of freelancing things have been surprising me day by day.

Nothing has really turned out as expected but this is not a bad thing, it’s just interesting to see how things really are on the other side once you step over that line. A friend of mine always use to quote a saying that someone told her many years ago:

It’s not bad, it’s just different.

That’s a great frame of mind to be in when you are encountering things that don’t make much sense to you. Whether you are traveling overseas, learning a new language or simply trying to start your own business these words are something I think about or occasionally pass on to others.

So what exactly is different then?

Time Management, or lack thereof

Time has a strange way of bending in the home office. Something seems to just move a lot faster and you are much more conscious of things you are doing at home, whether they are counting towards your work day or if they are in fact wasting them.

Working in the office, you could often stop working for 15 minute social stints but just because you are in the office there is something non-threatening about this distraction to your work day. At home, these minor distractions can add up and before you know it the day ends with just a blank screen and a guilty feeling festering inside you.

On the other hand, a good 3 hours sitting down tends to be better than a full eight hours in the office. This comes in bursts, but I am finding the real talent of home office efficiency is getting to know when these times are and knowing when to leave the computer and go do a load of laundry. You need to do both I find, or you can remain in a sort of limbo… getting neither home or work duties done at all.

So far I am having no issues with this, I am at my desk around 9am every morning and usually end at 6pm. I play one album on iTunes and once that finishes I go out and buy a coffee, or have lunch and break from the computer. Routine is my friend at this stage and is keeping me on track.

Social Interaction

I have never hung out with the cat so much in my life… this is true. A good session just chilling on the couch petting the cat is now equally therapeutic for us both. Any blog post or friend will tell you working from home is isolating and not to do it for too long, or you go crazy. I am starting to see the truths of these statements.

It’s easy sometimes to get bogged down in a job when you are busy and realise by the end of the day you haven’t even left the house to get the mail. When you do, everything moves a bit faster and it’s like you have lost a bit of that social edge and it’s all a bit overwhelming.

Get out of the house, this is my mantra each day. I have to go get a coffee, the mail must be gathered and hopefully I can fit in a gym visit, a journey to the shops, breakfast or a lunch with a friend or anything else that keeps me on the social norm.

Luckily, my old team was a good crew and we keep in touch and I see them almost weekly for the odd breakfast or beer and we talk shop and it gives me a bit of that corporate catch-up that keeps me in the loop. I am, I fear, that guy now. The one that left and still hangs out every Friday like he’s still on the team, I always loved bugging that guy when I worked in corporate.

Quotes, Quotes and oh, Quotes

The jobs haven’t been flooding in quite yet, but if you asked me about quotes I might have to tell you some other time. I would be too busy filling out quotes.

Something I never even considered going into this, how do we estimate a project? More importantly, how much time is invested in estimating the hours, money and work that has to be done for an individual project.

This is time consuming and I can’t tell you how surprised I am by this process. It feels as some days you just do quotes, never hear back from people and then it’s your billable hours that suffer in the end.

This is definitely a skill that would be refined over the months and years of freelancing, but the initial effort and choices of time tracking applications out there at the moment can be somewhat overwhelming. This process is all over the shop right now, crossing out certain methods as we find flaws in each of them or disagree with a joint decision on one way of doing things.

This will continue to be a pain for the next while I am guessing. It’s a pretty integral part to the whole freelance situation. Here are my prices, this is the work. Do you want my service? For now it seems to be convoluted and this needs to be answered for sanity’s sake.

The Emergency Stash

This is the last bit of advice that you would always hear about when anyone advises you on the jump to freelance. This is the advice that I will end with and stress that it is also extremely accurate and should be accounted for anytime you decide to make this jump.

I had (and have) a surplus of money to ride me that 3 months while things are slow and slowly build up over the initial stages. The reasons provided are essentially as money to allow you to live while you wait for work and don’t have a steady stream of income. You might have mouths to feed, mortgages to pay or simply iPhones to buy, whatever your vice.

Another important reason is you need to have the ability to say no to work that doesn’t suit your own needs. I may not be flooded with work at the moment, but I have also turned down a few jobs. If you can’t do this then you will end up doing work that does not reflect the whole reason you started on your own in the first place.

It’s not easy to turn down something while you are watching your bank balance steadily decline, I find it a bit nerve racking actually. But I do still feel like I am running my own show, cash or little cash and that still makes every day quite empowering as a freelancer. This is the reason I want to work like this, I want to choose what we work on.

But then again, talk to me in another month :-) These are the diaries of a freelancer…