by Leo Wiles
10 February 2017
Every day it brings a new story, it seems, about the joys of quitting a soulless 9-5 office job to go freelance. However, if you’ve been in the game a bit longer than six weeks, you know it’s a little more complex than that.
With Valentine’s Day next week, we thought it was the perfect time to talk about the love-hate relationship most of us have with our choice of career.
On the plus side, we have the freedom to pitch ideas on subjects we’re passionate about, choose our own hours, wear what we like to work and never have to sit through another mind-numbing meeting. On the flipside, there’s the pitch void, isolation, late payments and the need to fight and protect our pay rates so we can chase some kind of financial stability.
So if you’ve lost that loving feeling, here’s a reminder from List members who answered the question, ‘What do you love most about freelancing?’ in our latest survey, in order of most popular:
1. Flexibility to set my own hours and choose when and how I work
2. Working from home (in my tracky-dacks if I so desire)
3. Ability to fit work around family / kids
4. I love the variety of work I do
5. Not having to deal with office politics
6. Being able to pitch /choose who I work for/what I want to write about
7. The ‘remote’ nature of freelancing and ability to work and travel at the same time
8. I love bit feeling trapped by a permanent role
9. I have the option to work harder and potentially make more money than I would if I was salaried in –house
10. No-one breathing down my neck or timing my lunch hour
11. I love the isolation and lack of workplace distractions
12. Less stress working from home
We also loved the comments you guys left, such as:
‘I like the flexibility to pick and choose the jobs I say yes to, and how they fit around the goals and workflow of my other part-time gig’
‘Freelancing gives me the flexibility I need with a school-aged child’
‘Freelance = autonomy, independence, flexibility. No-one can sack a freelancer’
‘I never had the same creativity or career opportunities in-house. I’m crazy about freelancing’
‘No salary cap, the sky is the limit!’
‘I love being able to ditch clients who are rude, horrible or hard to work with gives me a great sense of power over my own destiny’
‘Freelancing gives me the free time and space to write my YA and MG fiction, and other books/blogs’
‘The joy of actually writing and working with copy instead of the mountains of random admin and marketing jobs that piled up on my desk when I was an editor’
‘Honourable mentions go to: not having to deal with office politics, not feeling trapped by a permanent role and loving the isolation and the variety of work’
‘Freelance = autonomy, independence, flexibility. No-one can sack a freelancer!’
What do you love most about freelancing?
