My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [12]
“It reminds me of going to a liberal arts college and being an art major but having English majors and history majors and political science majors around me,” says illustrator/animator Nina Frenkel, who rents a desk in a coworking space in New York’s garment district for $450 a month. “I get inspired by stuff that’s not necessarily other artists working. It feels very entrepreneurial and exciting. Everybody’s desk has a different world to it. It’s like, ‘Oh, here’s the journalist, and over here is the interior designer.’ And we have a toy-inventor guy. In his workspace is a sewing machine and all this technology because he does all these high-tech plushy toys.”
But companionship and creative inspiration are only part of the story, say the coworking converts. As an added bonus, it’s a great way to pick up job leads. And evidently, segregating work from home does wonders for reacquainting the nose with its old friend, the grindstone. “So many people who come in are like, ‘Wow that’s the most productive workday I’ve had in a year and a half,’” says Susan Evans, an environmental consultant who cofounded Office Nomads, a five-thousand-square-foot community workspace in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
Who knows? Maybe there is something to changing your underwear and stepping outside every morning after all.
Your Workplace or Mine?
Sometimes another option for leaving the house will present itself: Clients ask you to work on their turf. In my early freelance years, I often received calls from clients who needed a copy jockey to work from their office a few hours or days, proofreading legal briefs, editing advertising mock-ups, or writing high-tech marketing docs—deadline: “three days ago.” I dreaded the dressing and commuting, but if I needed the work, I needed the work. And so I’d shed my pajamas, hop in my car, and suck it up.
As you can imagine, working at a client’s office has its pros and cons. For me, the novelty usually wears off after a week, or the first time I’m stuck behind a six-car pileup in rush hour traffic, whichever comes first. No amount of free soda or getting paid to read People magazine while waiting for my next batch of mouthwash ads to edit can make up for it. When I’m right under the client’s schnoz, it feels too much like I’m their bitch, back in the 9-to-5 grind all over again. Either they’re giving me another twenty-seven hot potatoes they need moved to the top of the pile, or they’re peering over my shoulder and asking how the thing they gave me to do five minutes ago is going. Call me a prima donna, but the “Are we there yet?” management style has never enhanced my productivity.
But perhaps you’ve grown weary of attempting to converse with your pet ferret and don’t care about any of the above. Perhaps you’re thrilled to shower, leave the house, commune with other bipeds before noon, and get paid to do so. Or perhaps, like a freelancer I’ll call Betty, who’s been producing corporate videos for high-tech Goliaths for more than a decade, your work is far easier to conduct on the client’s turf.
So what can you expect? On the upside, sitting an iPhone’s-throw away from the key players on a project—in Betty’s case, the people she plans budgets and production schedules with—makes your job infinitely easier. Working onsite means Betty can access her clients’ internal websites, use their equipment, and learn her way around what she calls “all that infrastructure stuff” (the corporate-speak, the branding guidelines, the company culture) in a fraction of the time working from home would take.
On the downside, if you stick around long enough, you might accidentally catch a whiff of some nasty office politics. “Even if it’s not your own, the office morale seeps into your