My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [4]
A Cure for the Common Waffler
I’m a waffler at heart. Show me a decision that needs making and I’ll show you a woman capable of flip-flopping three dozen times in the course of an hour. You might say I’m a lot like Tevye, the lead character in the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Gifted with the ability to examine any situation from about nineteen different angles, Tevye was freakishly fond of the phrase “on the other hand.”
Dangle a sweet-sounding gig in my face, and you’ll witness this modern-day Freelancer on the Roof in action: Let’s say HotShitStartup .com contacts me out of the blue and offers me serious cash to write web copy for the next two weeks about some newfangled wireless gizmo I don’t give a whit about. In deciding whether to take the job, my thought process might go something like this:
Hmmmm, wasn’t HotShitStartup.com just on the front page of the business section? That gig suuuure would look spiffy on my resume. On the other hand, I’m so over high-tech corporate work; didn’t I swear it off back in 2007 (and 2006, and 2005)? On the other hand, the pay is phenomenal—twice as much as I’ve made on any other project this year. On the other hand, if I take the gig, I’ll have to burn the midnight oil since I already have four magazine articles due this month. On the other hand, it’d be cool to have this new client in the hopper in case I ever need some high-paying tech work to fall back on. On the other hand, I already have enough dull-as-dirt corporate work to fall back on . . .
And that’s just in the first fifteen minutes.
That’s why the idea of getting my goals down on paper resonates with me. Regardless of whether you’re a waffler, if you want to work solo, you too need a written game plan—what I like to call a Business Plan To Go. It doesn’t have to be War and Peace; the CliffsNotes version will do just fine. All you need is a short list of your freelance goals for the year—a roadmap of where you want your career to go, and some directions for how to get there. It might be all of three hundred words. It might be posted on your blog. It might be scrawled on the back of a beer coaster. Point is, jotting down your freelance hopes, along with your to-do list for making those dreams a reality, will help remind you why you’re here, working at home in hot pink pajamas with three-day unwashed hair (or, uh, maybe that’s just me).
Keeping my one-page plan tacked to the wall above my desk ensures that the next time HotShitStartup.com calls, I won’t get bogged down with all that Tevye-like indecision. Instead, I’ll glance at the game plan I wrote long before some flashy webpreneurs with deep pockets began parading a wheelbarrow of carrots in front of me, and I’ll assess. Quickly. Sure, this sounds like a great gig, but is it a great gig for me, given what I want to accomplish this year? If the answer is no, I won’t take the gig; if the gig isn’t in line with my overall freelance goals and I’m not starved for work, why derail my creative hopes and dreams for the next few weeks or months?
Here’s an example, one of the biggest goals from my own Business Plan To Go for 2008:
WRITE FOR MORE NATIONAL PUBLICATIONS.
Game plan:
Introduce myself to the editors of Fancypants Magazine and FiftyMillionEyeballsOnYourWriting.com, whose names a couple of freelance friends kindly passed along over the holidays.
Pitch an article to any of the aforementioned editors who take the bait.
Continue filling my story-idea well by actually reading those online press release and news alert services I’ve subscribed to (Newswise, Google).
Write one new humor essay a quarter and shop it around with doctor’s-office-worthy publications.
Limit corporate gigs to one a month, if that. If I have a gap in my schedule but I’m hitting my monthly financial goals, use the free time to troll for bigger, better journalism gigs and work on aforementioned essays.
If you’re an illustrator or interior