7 active projects. 5 pending projects. 10 project proposals (several of which are bound to be accepted). This is no way to live. It is definitely time to raise rates, or I will go insane. The only thing holding me back has been my fear that the work will dry up, but I can’t go on like this and I suppose I could always lower rates when times are tough to stimulate further demand. And with the exception of one large project, none of these lend themselves to outsourcing at all, they are too small. The time it would take me to explain what I need done would only be marginally less than the time it would take me to do them myself. Is this all the result of the economy getting better? Of word getting out about my skills and work? Dumb luck? Or a mix of everything?
I very often have people tell me that they could never be freelance like me, and that I clearly have a great deal of discipline to be able to sit at home and actually get work done (as opposed to, say, hunkering down in front of the TV with a container of ice cream leafing through glossy glam magazines). And it is true that for whatever reason, I don’t find it difficult to focus on my work. That is not to say that I don’t get creatively stuck, I do. But I simply move on to another project while my subconscious comes up with a plan, and then I return to it. I don’t waste a lot of time when working on things that have to be done. Sometimes I will take time out from direct work to learn about some new technique or design strategy, but even these are really in the service of my work and becoming better at it, and they usually relate to a current project. I remember many years ago (long about 1999), when I had my first experience with freelancing. I was an almost total failure at it, and this was largely due to my inability to stay focused on the task at hand. Back then, I never missed an opportunity to leave my workstation, and I had a great deal of trouble getting motivated to do my work, even though I had just as much economic incentive (the need to eat and pay rent) to do so as I do today.
I have often thought about why things are so much different today. What has changed in the intervening years that allows me to be so much more motivated and productive? I have a number of theories:
1. Age – The mere fact of getting older has changed the way I view a lot of things in the world, and in some unexpected ways has made me more focused and disciplined. Being more at ease with the general flow of life has helped to not always jump at every distraction.
2. Deeper knowledge – Interestingly, the more I learn about the areas of my work, and the better I get at making things, the easier it is to stay focused on them. I think this is easily as important (if not more) than number one above (age). The more I am able to express my creativity with the tools at my disposal, the less likely I am to become blocked and give up in frustration. The combination of better tools to do my job (constantly improving technology) and the greater experience I have with those tools keeps me much more engaged. It is the case that the distance between what I can conceive in my mind and what I can realize in my work or personal projects is shrinking with each passing day. This is highly motivating.
I am incredibly lucky I was not born 40 years earlier. I would have been trapped in a world very much at odds with my personality type. I could never have been someone who worked at the same job for 40 years at the same place. The skills that I use and the things that I excel at would have been mostly useless back then. Or at least they would have gone unrecognized, and I would not have had the same opportunities to chart my own course. Not only because of technologies (like the internet) but because of the more rigid social structures I would have found myself in. The globe-trotting, career-changing, self-taught person I am would not have been able to exist unless I had been given some very large trust fund.
Ultimately, I think the key to unlocking everyone’s potential lies in shortening the distance between what they can conceive of and what they can realize. There are many ways to do this, but they involve a huge array of changes in cultural norms, societal structures, and tools and technologies. Many of these are underway, and many seem hopelessly stuck and unmovable. But it is so worthwhile to push ourselves and our world in this direction, because in unlocking people’s creative potential, we open doors to their happiness.
I feel a little sad when I neglect my blog, I have to admit. But the amount of work I have had over the past couple of months has been staggering. And knowing how up and down the work of a freelancer is, I am loathe to say no to any particular project. At some point however, I will have to. I have a project coming up that I decided to take as an experiment. Because I don’t really have the time to do the entire thing myself, I will do the design and technical architecture, and then have it built to my spec by a programmer I will hire over the internet. This is the first time I have done this type of thing, and there are all sorts of practical, ethical and emotional questions swirling about my head, for example:
Personal growth – Part of the reason I like being so “hands on” with everything is that I learn more by doing than by directing other people to do, and I generally find it to be more satisfying. I don’t like the idea of being removed or remote from my work product.
Risk – This is somewhat new territory, and a big part of the success of this project will depend on some factors outside of my control, ie a remote programmer. What if something goes wrong and he screws up the project in some way? What if our interaction at a distance does? What if I am left holding the bag and having to recover from something that is on a tight schedule?
Exploitation – There are multiple things about hiring someone in this way that beg the question, “Is this exploitation?”. If I hire a programmer in India because I can get a good one for $20/hr, is it wrong? Should I hire a programmer in the US at $60/hr with lower (or the same) skill instead? What is the difference? Especially when that $20 there actually goes a lot further than $60 here? Is this a question of loyalty, and to whom? Myself, my country, my planet, my profession, or something else? What about markup? I went to the trouble to find and hire said programmer, am I to recharge my client exactly what I am paying, or a little bit more? And if so, what is just?
Cost and Quality – Hiring someone in this way will actually reduce the total cost to the client, because I am not charging my full rate for anything but the hours I actually work. The quality of what is produced may be better, or it may be worse that what I would make alone.
I don’t think there are necessarily “right” answers to the questions above, but they are the ones that are preoccupying me. I will of course make some decisions in the next few days and time will tell if I have made the correct ones. And really, this is just one small project, not the end of the world. That said, it does represent a distinct change in the direction of my work life. As such, I must consider carefully if this is the path I want to walk on.
In my technology career, I have had many types of job, but basically they all fall into one of two major areas: development, or support.
Development includes areas such as research, design, programming, integrating, building, testing.
Support involves customer service, responding to “crises”, fixing things that are broken in a hurry, running maintenance tasks and constantly checking the health of a system to make sure things are operating as expected.
Although I am quite good at both, I much prefer the former. Development is calming to me, feeds my soul, is education. It is (mostly) divorced from client freak-outs. It is iterative, thoughtful, and most of all, creative. And support for minor things (fixing someone’s computer, helping them setup email or some program, explaining to them how facebook works, etc) does not stress me out. I do not mind it, and I feel a bit of good karma in helping others.
“Mission critical” support, on the other hand, is something I do not care for at all. Mission critical systems are those wherein any major problem is potentially catastrophic to that business. It may be a large company’s email system or website, or a service they offer that paying customers have a right to expect will work flawlessly. I am not a huge fan of mission critical support, because it is highly stressful and people lose their heads and all sense of proportion. I don’t blame them, but it is quite a challenge to remain calm in the face of emails in ALL CAPS with many exclamation points (!!!!), to say nothing of the repeated phone calls and yelling. And I have realized over time that this type of support also brings out the worst in me. I don’t like the person I become towards others when people are screaming about fixing a problem (stat!). I definitely keep my cool much more than in the past, and I doubt that I project the agitation or tension that many people do. Still, on the inside, this type of support causes a greater level of anxiety than I would prefer.
I bring this up because I have recently taken on a client for whom there is a great deal of need for just this type of mission critical support, and I am debating with myself whether the stress is worth it to me. I am blessed at the moment to have a huge amount of work of all kinds, but as a freelancer I know it could all be gone in a few months. Feast or famine, as they say. And because of that, I have a slight aversion to turning down any work when I have it. I think I will continue for a couple more months and see how it goes.
This morning I had an appointment with the Apple geniuses to deal with an overheating problem on my laptop (when connected to my new monitor anyway). I went in and dropped it off with them to be picked up later today (hopefully fixed, but I have my doubts). Being without my laptop for a few hours was, I have to admit, a slightly bewildering concept at first, not least of which because I am unable to do any work without it. My entire livelihood is bound up in it, and it gave me pause. Fortunately, it is a fairly easy thing to replace, but it is obvious that in the absence of fairly advanced technology, I would have no job. My personality is such a fit with this kind of work, that I wonder what type of thing I would have done with my life 50 years ago, or 100, or 500 even? Would there have even been an opportunity for me to exercise that part of my brain in the absence of fast-changing technology? How bored would I have been, how underutilized would my native abilites have been? How much of what we are good at is merely an adaptation to the culture and the time? Maybe in fact, I was born too early. Perhaps the best realization of my skill set is at some far flung distant future.
Apple just called (as fate would have it) a minute ago. It is time to pick up my laptop.
With ever increasing frequency over the past few months, I would cringe a little when people asked me for the address of my professional website so they could check out my work. This was because although I was very happy with it when I first launched it, that was back in 2009. The site was definitely showing its age. I had updated the work section a little since that time, but I was feeling less and less convinced that it was presenting me and my work in the best light. I have resolved many times since then to redesign the site, but something (usually other work thankfully) got in the way.
Then last week I was at a party where I met (as I often do) a potential client. I winced as I gave him my contact info with the URL to my work site. It could not go on like this, I thought. I had to at least redo the work section if nothing else. So I resolved to just put up a simple, clean showcase of a few projects, nothing else. This would just be a quick redo so that potential clients could see and understand the work better, and not have to wade through all the other information about me that was cluttering the old site. Just something I could quickly add to or edit, and a placeholder until such time as I could redesign the entire site properly. I would just spend a few hours on it, nothing fancy.
Yeah, right.
Four days of almost constant work and tweaking later, I finally have a new website. And although I spent far more time on it than I originally had envisioned, I am very happy with it. Like most of my sites these days, it is based on WordPress, which will make it super easy to update (as opposed to my last site), and I will be able to modify the template much more easily over time.
So please, check out the new site here, and let me know what you think!
Today was a day when the simple (seeming) was very difficult, and the difficult (seeming) was very easy. I had two separate clients, each with their own project and a deadline. One is a graphic designer who mostly works in print. He presented me with a simple, beautiful design, comprised of some words sitting in the middle of a color field. Simple. Then he told me he wanted the text to be centered on the web page. Not as easy as one would think, but still not very difficult. And then he told me that he wanted the proportion size of that text to stay the same relative to the window size. That meant that when someone resized the browser window, the text had to grow in size and stay centered. While this is a fairly easy thing to accomplish in Flash, that would rule out all iPhones and iPads, so I needed to do it in html and javascript. Believe it or not, this is a pretty tricky thing to make work well in any browser, let alone across browsers and platforms. The effect is simple, the coding — not so much. Still, I managed to make it work (I will post a link once the site is complete for those who are interested), but I feel bad that my client will be wondering why it took so long for something that seemed so simple.
And then a second, brand new client comes to me in a panic today. Her site, where she sells clothing, has stopped working. None of the purchases are going through to Paypal, and she doesn’t know why or how, and isn’t technical enough to tell me the particulars. Without even going into it, and not knowing her system at all, it seems like it could end up being a chase down a rabbit hole to determine what is wrong. I am leery of even taking this on because she has almost no budget and I have no way of knowing beforehand how long this could take. I login to her site admin to poke around, and almost immediately I see a simple misconfiguration that once changed, solves the problem. Total time spent with this client, including emails and fix? About 15 minutes. For something that seemed really complicated.
You never know, do you?
My friend Ricardo left this morning to go back to Peru, and while it was nice seeing him while he was here, I am glad to have my space back. What with the various visitors that I have had in my apartment recently, I really haven’t been as focused on my work as I need to be (especially in generating income). Even when they weren’t here and I tried to work a few hours, a bunch of extra stuff in my small room really cuts my productivity. I find I need a clean empty space with few distractions to really focus on my work.
I am about at my most broke point ever right now, and while some of that is waiting for client payments to come through, some of it is also a lack of billing and work. I really need to get focused on generating more income and billing more regularly, especially given the high cost of living in New York. I am really loathe to take a full time job, but that may be an area to explore soon if I can’t find a more steady stream of contract work. I am going to try to keep to a strict schedule of work hours, winning new business, and monastic life over the next couple of weeks. Let’s see how it goes…
One of the things I have noticed throughout my working career (whenever working on a project basis with client review that is) is the odd distribution of concern over various elements. Time and again, I as the project manager or designer feel certain that some very important and fundamental questions must be answered before we go forward. I present to the client the alternatives and set the table for a particular discussion of central organizing principles. In the case of a web site design, these are things like site structure, organization, and navigation. Secondarily, these important items are also about points of design involving the brand, identity, overall color scheme and the like. Of course along with these decisions, any programming and code must work well across browsers and systems, and work with a consistent interface when clicking through the various choices. These things are fundamental to the structure of a project. The page by page nitty gritty of what extra photo to use here or what subhead wording to use there or whether to link to a particular outside resource are just that – small details that can easily be changed.
So it is with some mirth that I realize that very often clients are much more interested in the nitty gritty than the overarching. The things that speak to them are the small details. I have several theories as to why this may be the case. One is that people inevitably talk about the things they understand. While the big picture elements may very well be important to them, it can be a bit complicated to connect all the dots and make the big decisions, whereas the small ones are easy to make. Another reason is that people’s thought processes are not very often hierarchical, despite what we would like to believe about ourselves, and so every thought about a project is held in the brain with somewhat equal weight, and things are brought up as they occur. A couple of months ago I was working on a project for organizing a photo library, for example, and my client kept bringing up being able to copy resources in a particular way before we had even built the functionality to get those resources into the database in the first place. I kept explaining that there was a hierarchy of importance of functionality, with some things necessarily preceding others, and that we were time limited and could not do everything so it would be necessary to prioritize. I suspected that this did not sit well with him, but we came to agreement. And sometimes, the reasons people focus on the small stuff is that they trust me to take care of the big stuff and really aren’t all that interested in the big picture. This happens more often than you might think, and the challenge for me is to recognize this and not let my ego get in the way. Sometimes I worry that the client (for the lack of feedback I get about the big picture stuff) is unhappy with my work but unable to articulate it. In a situation like this I can sometimes take it personally, but this is pure ego and pride getting in the way of what is actually happening. As long as ample room has been given for the client to express their particular opinions (when they have them), things generally work out well. Sure, there can always be misunderstandings and disappointments. But when I take myself and my pride out of the equation and let the work be the work, things go better and we are all much happier.
The last several days have been a strange period of waiting for things. Waiting on checks to arrive. Waiting on clients to get back to me. Waiting on potential clients to approve a contract that I am not even sure I want. Perhaps because of all this waiting, I have felt a contemporaneous and strange sense of waiting for something else as well. Something unknown and unknowable. Something I can’t put my finger on exactly. I am not at all a fan of this sensation, as it is definitely outside the realm of being in the present. It pulls me somewhere else and makes me immaterial somehow. It places a vague, uneasy cloud over everything, a slight sense of dread. I am not sure exactly what this thing is, except a lack of focus, and a lack of presentness.
Trying to get back into doing something while waiting, I reworked my CV a bit yesterday to add new clients and make the management of the client area easier to change. It is now all stored in a database table, and each client record is now easy to publish or unpublish as well as adding new clients or info without ever having to touch the page design. It gave me a small sense of accomplishment, and luckily today I received some new client information that will allow me to get back to work on their projects.
But this vague sense of waiting remains. What am I waiting for, what are we waiting for?
