Losing track of what day it is
I’ve been freelancing for three weeks now and I’ve seen such a change in the pattern of my work in that small amount of time. At first I must have been just happy to have a week off, doing whatever I felt like and getting around 5 hours work in a day, weekends included. This week though has been totally different.
It’s 3am right now and I got to my desk at 11am yesterday morning. I had about two hours away from my computer in that time to post orders from our shop and pick up food. That’s 14 hours work, though I don’t know if I can class it as ‘today’ seeing as we’re 3 hours into the following day. Is this just normal for freelancers or do you find your rhythm as you go?
Until today I stuck to my midnight rule and cut off work at 12am, but I was still working from 11am with an hour getting food or whatever.
My guess is that I promised too much to too many people thinking no one would want to hire me for at least a month or two. Now not only do I have paying clients, but I also still work 15 hours freelance for my previous employers and I’ve promised around six friends that I’d build websites for them.
I’ve got a lot of pressure building up in my mind, but I’m prioritising using factors like project budgets, approaching deadlines and how long the job has been on for. There’s a big old pile of work to do and my lovely friends are getting pushed to the back of the queue unfortunately.
Anyway I wasn’t really trying to say much, I just wanted to get this down as part of the documentation of my journey into freelance. A rambling post about silly work hours probably isn’t useful to anyone but maybe someone will be happy to share the feeling.