My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [77]
Make it your mission in life to avoid Monday deadlines like the plague. Even if your client gives you no say in the due date, consider your deadline the Friday before. Take it from someone who’d like her last umpteen weekends back: Saturdays and Sundays were made for slacking.
“The flip side of success is that you never get away from work,” says Wendy Merrill, owner of WAM Marketing Group. “It took me a while to be disciplined enough to be home and be working. And now it’s like, How do I take time out for lunch and not be sitting at my computer all day or go for a walk and go to yoga?”
In the interest of gaining some semblance of balance, I suggest building a bit of structured downtime into your workweek. (Walking from your computer to your television doesn’t count.) My dog coaxes me out of the house and into the neighborhood park many a morning and late afternoon. Wendy volunteers with homeless kids every Friday from 2:00 to 5:00 PM. And personal trainer Alisa Geller, a woman after my own heart, does not schedule any clients between noon and 3:00 PM. Instead, she heads home, fixes herself lunch, walks her dog, and takes a nice fat nap. Every Monday through Friday.
Don’t overlook the value in getting far, far away from your work as often as possible and taking the time to recharge. A fried freelancer is of no use to herself and her clients. If you’re having trouble concentrating and pulling your weight on even the most routine of projects, what are you going to do when the stuff really hits the fan?
Chapter 18
Your Master Plan for World Domination
Raise your rates, promote yourself like crazy, and do the work you really want to do
“I’m famous. That’s my job.”
—Jerry Rubin
“Where do you see yourself in five years?” will probably go down in history as the dumbest job interview question ever invented by middle management. But in the context of developing your freelance career, there’s some real merit to looking down the road three, five, even ten years. That’s why I asked you to write down your goals in Chapter 1 and your Top Ten client list in Chapter 8. Because if you don’t keep your eyes on the road ahead, it’s all too easy to lose your bearings and wind up miles from where you thought you were headed.
As I said at the start of the book, there’s no one formula for freelance success. For some, the dream is to substitute as much of the bread-and-butter work with the paid creative work they really want to do—be that illustrating books, performing in nightclubs, or selling screenplays. For others, it’s to trade in their hired-gun hat for that of management and grow their business of one into a twelve-person creative agency. Still others aim to make such an impressive chunk of change that they can afford to take four days off every week, donate 15 percent of their profits to charity, or globetrot two or three months a year.
No matter what your destination, something tells me you’ll be able to relate to illustrator Molly Crabapple, who says, “I have had a master plan since I was seven.” In fact, I have yet to meet a freelancer who isn’t looking to boost her income, spread the word about her talents from Kansas to Cannes, and do as many “pinch me—I’m dreaming!” projects as soon as humanly possible. So in the name of making the world drop to its collective knees and offer you the keys to the freelance kingdom, let’s talk about how you can do all three.
Give Yourself a Raise
I hate to break it to you, but in my umpteen years of freelancing, not once has a steady client said to me or any other freelancer I know, “You do such great work for us that we’d like to bump up your pay by 25 percent. Is that okay with you?” Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way. Instead, we indie professionals need to create our own pay raises. Besides helping us keep up with the cost of living,