With Labor Day safely behind me, it’s time to start ramping up my freelancing again.  I’ve been working all year, but with the kids home from school I didn’t have as much time to work and so my income dropped off.  But they’re back in school now so I have my time back.

The teens leave for school at about 8:10 in the morning, and my six-year old gets home around 2:45, which gives me about six and a half hours a day to focus on working.  I figure there’s no reason at all why I can’t be productive for at least four or five of those hours.

The only catch is that I’m going to have to do a better job of time management than I’ve been used to over the summer.  The advantage of my light workload was that it was easy to find time to fit my jobs in around things like playing chauffer and listening to the stories my daughter made up.   Once I get busier, it won’t be quite as easy, though I will have to factor in time for kid-based emergencies.

That means I’m going to have to bite the bullet and use time-management software.

Right now I’m looking at using Mozilla Sunbird because I like its standalone nature.

The key is going to be getting started on work bright and early (shortly after the kids leave for school) and also making sure I have time to look for new projects.  Luckily I can probably do a lot of the searching in the afternoon after the kids get home as that doesn’t need the same kind of sustained concentration as paying work.

If any of you have any specific tricks you use, let me know and maybe we can all take advantage of them.

 

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A spoof is an article or webpage you write as a satire, mimicking some otherwise serious subject. I didn’t even know there was a demand for this until someone asked if I could write ‘humor’. Turns out I can.

My first effort, Math Kills was a great deal of fun to write and it gave me some sorely needed training with pictures and charts. I’m weak on graphics and HTML in general, but I believe this is where the online writing game is headed…

The itch to niche

So, now that I’m all nichey, I’ve got to sell this puppy. First go will be contacting web warriors I’ve worked for in the past to see if they might want a little ‘spice’. And meanwhile, I’ll sit spider-like and cruise the job postings looking for my niche to come up. But not just that, I’m looking for content requests that I might be able to nichify with examples and clever suggestions.

This gives me 3 current niches. And that’s the overall strategy: keep adding oddball assignments I like to do (which translates into ‘pretty good at doing’) and use these as my fishing lures.

This, for me, is where the fun is in online freelancing. I get to try new things and see how they work out. It’s the oddest sort of synchronicity when an assignment blossoms, and it always comes as a nice surprise. The beauty part is that when you find a job to your liking, you’ve just completed a sample you can show to get your next job.

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When you’re running the oDesk client you usually don’t want to be interrupted.  It can be annoying to suspend and restart the client half a dozen times an hour because you keep getting interrupted.  Since six-year-olds don’t always leave Daddy alone even when they know they’re supposed to be asking their sister for anything they want, the temptation to ignore the phone when it rings is just that much stronger.

You might want to think twice before you do that, or at least check the caller ID.

Voicemail has become the twenty-first century’s black hole of information.  More and more people simply don’t listen to it, and many of us are probably the same way.  I dislike voicemail so much that I refused to set it up on my cell phone.  The missed calls list gives me all the information I really need:  I can see who called and call them back without having to wade through the prompts of a voicemail system.

I’m not alone, either.

More and more people are avoiding voicemail whenever possible because retrieving messages takes that much more time than simply calling back, and you’ll probably have to call back after listening to the voicemail anyway.

However, the last thing any freelancer wants is to miss an important message from a client.  It’s not going to do you any good if you do a full week’s work you weren’t supposed to do because you didn’t listen to your voicemail.  Sure if it’s on oDesk you’re likely to be paid, but it may cost you a lot more in the long run in work you don’t get in future.

So if any of your clients do have your phone number, you’d be better off answering the phone than letting it go to a voicemail you may not remember to check.

Also, when you have to contact your client, it’s best to use email or text messages, rather than phone if at all possible.  First it will give you a permanent record of what was said, but it is probably going to be easier for them too.  Few things are quite as annoying as having to listen to a voicemail a dozen times to make sure you wrote the phone number down correctly.

Phones, especially cell phones, are incredibly useful devices and very few of us could live without them.  As I write this I have my cell phone on the desk waiting for my girlfriend’s son to call me for a ride home from the movies.  Having cell phones means I could come home and work while he was in the movie without having to worry about watching the clock.

The important thing to remember is that you can’t rely on voicemail, and if your clients do you had better be prepared to listen to it and act on it.  If you aren’t going to check your voicemail each time you see a missed call you are going to be a lot better off either not handing out your number or just turning the voicemail off completeley.

It’s like any tool:  use it properly or don’t use it at all.

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Once the basics of .docx had been explained they moved on to talking about which formats they used to communicate with clients.  For those who’re interested, the most common were .doc and .pdf.

It was all solid advice, and well-meant, but as I read it, there was one question that kept coming to my mind.

Why not ask your client what they prefer?

When I set up a project with someone, one of my standard questions it to ask what file format they want me to send the deliverables in.   It’s just part of my normal routine.

Every client has different needs and not all use the same software packages.  As a freelancer it’s my job to do the job I was hired for, and part of that job is handing in the finished product in whatever file format they ask for.  If someone uses Open Office they would probably prefer to get their final product in its native format rather than either .rtf or the ubiquitous .doc.

It doesn’t really take all that much to ask someone what format they prefer.

The question isn’t whether they can read what you send them, because most people can at least read .doc files given the number of word processors that support it.  The question is how much do you know about the project you’re working on?

If you haven’t talked to your client about what format they want to receive their final drafts in, you might want to try to ask yourself what else haven’t you asked them?   The key to success in this business has always been giving the client what they want, and you can’t do that if you don’t know what they want.

I am not saying you need to spend all your time every day communicating with your clients:  Neither of you would ever get any work done that way and it would not bode well for your future career.

However, I am saying that you should keep them sufficiently informed that you and they both know what’s going on.

People prefer to work with someone they can communicate with.   Be that person.

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That leads to two questions:  What’s an affiliate?  And, is it good for me?

The principle behind oDesk affiliates is simple:  more people can do more work than one person.  That’s why some people on oDesk band together to work on jobs that are too big for one person to handle alone.  Another advantage to affiliation is that you can have someone with a good reputation find work and manage quality control while you’re finding your feet.

I’m not a member of any affiliate companies on oDesk and right now I don’t intend to join or start one.

I’ve seen a number of people succeed that way on oDesk, so it’s not a decision I’ve taken lightly.

Read on to see why I am not doing it, and why it may be the right idea for you.

No two people are the same:

It sounds obvious doesn’t it.  But that’s my reason for not going into an affiliate situation boiled down as clearly as possible.

As a writer I bring only one thing to the table:  myself.  If I am working alone I can and do guarantee that what you will get is my work.  You will get my interpretation of the discussions you and I have had regarding the project.

You will not get someone else’s interpretation of what I have told them about our discussions.

There’s also a quality control aspect:  If I do all the work, I control the quality.  This isn’t to say everyone else will do bad work, but unless I’m standing over their shoulder monitoring them I am not going to know exactly what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.

I don’t like that when something goes out with my name on it.

If it goes out with my name on it, it needs to be something I have complete control over.

I didn’t take up freelancing to be a manager.  In my last traditional job I was a supervisor and that’s not what I want to do here.  I’d be spending more time looking for work and managing affiliates than doing the work and that’s not what I want to do.

The other option is to join an affiliate company and let someone else run it.

No thanks– that’s too much like working for someone, and that’s not what I want to do either.

I’m here to be in command of my own destiny.  It may sound old-fashioned but thats’ the way I feel.  I want to succeed (or fail) by my own work not someone else’s.  I want to be the one who finds and wins my jobs.

The important thing to remember is that neither option is intrinsically better or worse:

However they may be better or worse for some providers, and in this business it’s vital that you know which is better for you.  It really doesn’t matter which it is, so long as you get yourself into the niche that’s right for you.

For me that niche is that of the independent freelancer.  For others it might be running an affiliate company or working for one.  It doesn’t matter.

Look into it– then decide.

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As I write this the kids are in the pool out back, and half a dozen friends have joined them.  The fridge is full and tonight we’re having a barbecue.

It’s a common picture, and seeing as today’s Father’s Day I wouldn’t be surprised to see the scene repeated all over North America.  The only problem with this scene is the one astute readers have probably already noticed: the kids may be out in the back yard, but I’m here at my desk pounding away at my keyboard.

That’s summer; and for those of us with families it brings a whole new set of challenges.  For the rest of the year I can pretty much count on having the place to myself to work from about 830 AM when the last one leaves for school until 245PM when the first one gets home.  That’s six hours I can use to fit in everything I need to do without fear of interruption.

Not so in summer.

Now I have the kids home all day and have to arrange my work schedule around them:  The teenagers aren’t too bad, all I need to do is throw money at them if I need peace and quiet to work and they’ll go off and do their own thing.

My six-year-old daughter; not so much.  She needs supervision and since I’m the stay-at-home parent (or work-from-home parent) I’m the super left doing the vising.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t do much for my bank account, and being home all day, they’re eating more.

So, here’s the question:  How do I deal with it?

The first part’s simple:  It’s something you need to do from the very beginning.  Make sure the kids understand that when you’re working you’re “WORKING.”  You need to make it clear to them from the beginning that this is important and you can’t be stopping every few minutes because they need something.

The second has to do with scheduling:

During the school year I base much of my work schedule around their school schedule.  Now that they’re not at school I need to base my work schedule around its absence.  I get up early during the week because their mother has a seventy-five mile commute and I get up with her.  She’s out the door by six or six-thirty depending on what she has to do that day.

If I go straight to the computer (coffee’s already been brewed automatically) I can get some work done before the kids get up.

Another option is working after they go to sleep:  Now with a 5AM alarm I’m not going to stay up later than the teenagers.  It’s not going to happen and if it did I’d be a homicidal zombie in a matter of days.  However they’re much less of a problem (except their music) than the six-year-old so I can always just work once she’s gone to sleep.

This is where the renowned flexibility of being a freelancer comes in.  It’s not just that being a freelancer allows you to be flexible, it’s that it requires you to be flexible.

Every single one of those good habits you’ve developed to make sure that you get your work done has to be formed in such a way that you can change it when your situation changes.

In the meantime:  Enjoy your summer!

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Table of contents for Give and Take

1. Give and Take: The Freelance Lifestyle
2. Give and Take Part 2: Electic Boogaloo

Here’s how my average day goes: I wake up anywhere from 5pm to 8pm. Then, I roll out of bed and check my E-Mail and IMs for anything that has popped up. Take a shower. Eat “breakfast.” Check oDesk for any jobs I might like and apply for them. Answer E-Mails. Call Tokyo/Berlin/wherever my international clients are if it’s the right time. Do a few hours of work. Read the news online. Work on another project. Watch a movie. Go to sleep. Rinse, repeat.

Here’s another average day: I wake up at 7am. Do the same things for timezones close to me. Enjoy free time with friends in the daylight hours.

Another thing I have to consider is the amount of money for a job. The buyer wants to find the cheapest (good) deal they can find, and I want them to take out a second mortgage to pay for my skills. Some buyers will offer a fair price for the work they want. That will garner them the most qualified applicants. Others are holding out for that one provider who is desperate enough to do a massive project for a pittance. So, you have to meet somewhere in the middle.

That’s what freelancing is all about. Freedom. A dichotomy exists which that freedom, however. As a freelancer, you’re able to work when you want, but you also have to work with international timezones. Sometimes, it’s necessary to communicate on their terms, so you have to adjust your schedule to fit with their timezone. There have been weeks where I have gone completely nocturnal. You also have to work inside their budget, or you won’t get the job at all.

By balancing my local clients, international clients, and my lifestyle, I’ve learned a few tips which can help you freelance more effectively. These are they:

Timezones

Often, you’ll find that you have local clients as well as clients across the world. Always, you’ll find that you have to communicate with those clients. Sometimes they are kind enough to contact you at a time which is appropriate for you, but chances are, they’re just as busy as you are! If you want their money, it’s a good idea to try to accommodate them.

So, what do you do if you have clients in Australia, the UK, and the US who don’t want to communicate through E-Mail? You could try to never sleep, but I’ve tried it before. It doesn’t work very well and causes you to start seeing and hearing things which aren’t really there.

Solution #1

Try to schedule the phonecalls/IMs as close together as you can. Then, you can sleep before that time so that you will be awake for the period you need to communicate. I’ve tried this solution, and it works to a degree. There are definitely drawbacks to it.

The problem with this solution is that it’s extremely hard to maintain this lifestyle for an extended period of time. Sometimes, you just can’t sync everybody up to fit a normal schedule. Another problem is that you will be shifting your schedule anywhere from a few hours forward or back to a complete flip of day and night, so it’s hard to go to sleep when you need to. Under this schedule, I never knew what day it was. I even forget the month because days, nights, weeks, and months no longer held any meaning for me. I also found it difficult to schedule meetings with friends to relax. Work, eat, sleep. Repeat.

Solution #2

Napping. It’s a wonderful activity. You get up when you like to get up, and you take naps during the day between work, play, and family time so you can be refreshed when you need to be awake. When you’re done working, you can go back to sleep. Everything else is just like Solution #1.

The problem with this solution is that your schedule is in constant chaos as well, but at least you don’t have the drag you get when you’ve been up for 24 hours straight working. You also won’t need to crash out the next day to recover. This is my current solution. I still am disconnected from the meat-world and have my laptop surgically grafted to my hip to keep up with everything.

Solution #3

This is the most interesting solution, and I’m interested in trying it out. Have you ever heard of polyphasic sleeping? If not, finish reading this article; then, use those research skills I was talking about and Google it. Essentially, it’s taking a set number of naps spaced evenly throughout the day that add up to two hours of sleep. For example, one schedule is to take 30-minute naps at
12:00am, 6:00am, 12:00pm, and 6:00pm. Simple and easy to remember.

But, wait! You’re supposed to get eight hours of sleep in a row every night, right?

In a way, yes. The reason you need eight hours is so that you get the proper amount of rest by going in and out of the sleep cycle. You can force your body to instantly snap into the proper part of the sleep cycle for the 30 minutes you are asleep, and you get all the proper rest without the other time. This schedule has been used by numerous people successfully including one of my close friends. He tried it out for a few months and likes it, but it conflicts with his 9-5 job. As a freelancer, though, you are able to pull this feat off without too much hassle. That allows you to have 22 fully-rested hours a day for work and life. That adds up to a lot of extra time to find jobs and make money! The drawback is that you can’t skip a nap, and you can only move them 30 minutes to an hour away from the schedule, or you’ll feel awful!

Google for Uberman Sleep Schedule to see a few different takes on it. I’m going to try it out for myself because I’m disconnected from society already with my night schedule (so I’ve got nothing to lose) and I can always use some extra waking hours to do work.

In the next installment of this series, I’ll tell you about different methods to manage money better with your clients.

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I disagree.

It doesn’t matter how many of the wrong fish there are in the pond.

Not everyone on oDesk is going to do well at every job. Programmers, designers, and writers are all going to be looking for different jobs. That takes out the majority of the “competition” (other providers) right there. All it leaves are members of your own category: In my case other writers.

I’m not in competition with all of them either.

Some of them are going to be looking for completely different jobs than I am.  They’re looking for things that I wouldn’t want to do, so there’s no competition there.

But what about the people directly competing for the jobs I want?

No, they don’t count either.

Before you think I’ve lost my head, let me explain where I’m coming from.

When I apply for a job my goal is to prove to the buyer that I am the one person best suited to meet their needs.  I want to show that what they need is what I bring to the table, that I have the exact mix of skills and experience to do their job the way that they want it done.  I want to show them that I understand their needs better than any other applicant.

By doing just that much I’ve already taken myself past a good half the applicants:  I’ve applied to the specific job.  That automatically puts me past everyone who just dumped a cut and paste cover letter and application into the form.

Let me tell you a bit of a story:

Some time ago, I was on another freelancing site and saw a job posting for a writer to ghostwrite a novel.  The buyer stated that they needed a new ghostwriter as they weren’t satisfied with the quality of a previous freelancer.

When I applied for the job I made sure to focus on two things:  First that I understood that they needed quality, and also that I had already written more than one novel.  By doing that I started turning a number of the other applicants into the “wrong fish.”

I did that by raising the quality bar.  By setting my focus on the customer’s concern for quality I was able to make the point that he wouldn’t get that quality from someone who did not already know how to complete a novel.  Two thirds or more of the applicants didn’t say they had ever written a novel so that took them out of competition.

I got that job because I proved to the buyer that I was the right fish, and all the other fish in the pond were the wrong ones.

You need to do the same thing.

Next time you apply to a job on oDesk, look at the other candidates.  Look at their feedback, their test scores, and their profiles.  I went to one job and looked at three candidates at random.  One had no feedback, and had only taken one test and done very poorly on it, coming in below the 40th percentile.  More than 60% of the people on oDesk had done better on this test than this individual, and it was their only test and directly related to the job.  They’re a wrong fish.  The next was a wrong fish too– they had no feedback and were under the 60th percentile in both tests they had taken.

Only the third was possible competition.  This person had taken multiple tests, dropping down to the top 20% for only one of them.  They also had good feedback and a history on oDesk.  Still that’s one out of three and if we can shave the “odds” that much that quickly then there really isn’t as much to worry about as one might think.

The reason numbers don’t matter is because it’s not based on chance.  Buyers aren’t rolling dice to select providers.  They read the applications and look at people’s profiles and work history.  It all adds up.  Convince the buyer that you alone are exactly the right person for the job and it doesn’t matter how many apply.

The wrong fish don’t matter.

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So, if you’re down in the dumps, what can you do to drag yourself out? Well, that’s easier said than done. However, I have some tips to keep you on track.

First off, try to stay busy. If you’re unable to find work, then work on your profile, portfolio, or something along those lines. I call it “pseudo-working,” and often people will ask me what I’m doing, and I’ll say, “I’m working…well, pseudo-working.” I’m doing things to improve my situation. It’s a lot like working on a project except you don’t get paid right now. If you have an awesome portfolio, profile, and you do things to acquire jobs which you really like, you will make more money and be happier in the long run.

Second, try this exercise. Figure out where you want your career to go, and figure out where you are at right now. On a sheet of paper, list your career goals on one side. On the other side, list the actions you are currently taking to pursue those goals. Then, on another sheet of paper, write down an ordered list of the steps you think you need to take to achieve your goals. Make it sequential and detailed.

Now, look at this information. On the first page, you can probably draw several lines between the things you’ve done and your goals. That’s encouraging because you know you’re well on your way to get where you want to be. If you don’t have a lot of items you can connect, then you have several items that you can add to the second sheet to work on.

With that second sheet, put it where you can see it and reference it often. Tape it up to the wall above your monitor. When you’re not actually working, you need to be pursuing those goals actively. The great part about it is that pseudo-working is less stressful, but it’s a vital part of maintaining a healthy career. Any time you feel lost, hopeless, and helpless when it comes to work, you can always look up at that list and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

You’re never helpless, so you have to help yourself. You can’t count on lucky breaks.

Another tactic to make yourself feel better is to help out other freelancers. When you assist another freelancer by giving them advice or referring a job to them, then you are building a network of colleagues who will return the favor and refer jobs to you. Also, the community support will keep you in good spirits when you’re working.

So, try to keep your chin up and your outlook positive because having a good attitude about work makes the day go so much easier.

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If you’re a freelancer, chances are that you want the job to improve your quality of life financially as well as through freedom, but if you’re doing work you despise, it’s self-defeating. Also, doing jobs you hate can hurt your career more than improve it. How? Either by making it a chore to log on and start work on that blasted project again or by reducing your quality of work and earning a poor rating.

What’s a way to avoid harming your career? Keep reading.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

What’s Cost-Benefit Analysis? It’s a fancy phrase about a topic we’ve covered a few times: you’re doing a job that costs you more than you’re earning. It can cost you more financially by wasting your time, or it can cost you by reducing your morale and precious provider rating.

When you’re looking for jobs,  consider if you are going to be sick to your stomach after doing it for a few hours. You won’t always know, but there’s a few tell-tale signs that you’ll encounter problems including: a buyer who throws work at you and doesn’t have time to properly brief you on what needs to be done, the job listing has three lines of text which doesn’t describe the job, or the work is of a nature that you know you wouldn’t like.

Most of these signs can be seen in the interview phase. If the buyer says “You want to do this?” and you ask “Yeah, but what exactly do you want me to do?” and they never answer, then you will encounter major resistance if you take the job. You could take a stab at what you’re supposed to do, be completely wrong, and never get paid. Even worse, you could also come out with a nasty rating which will make buyers less likely to hire you in the future.

So, Cost-Benefit Analysis works like this:

I have to spend X amount (energy, money, time, my sanity) and gain Y profit (money, ratings, prestige, future work with this buyer) for a net gain of Z. You calculate Z with the equation Z = X – Y. Pretty simple.

Here’s an example. I hate doing SEO article mills with a passion. I avoid them like my ex-girlfriend avoided anything that could possibly make her IQ higher than 60 (boosh). Also, SEO article mills don’t exist in the pay-grade I’m used to. Further, they tend to be demanding in time. Using the formula, X = me losing time, potential money, and my marbles. Y = about 20 hours of work at 100 bucks. Therefore, Z = a waste of my time. I will hate doing it, I will make less money, and I will probably get a bad rating because I will speed through it.

My advice is to not freak out if you go a day or two without a job. There will be more jobs popping up later that day and even more tomorrow, so have a little patience and wait it out. You will end up in a better situation by doing a job you enjoy for more money than you will by taking whatever comes along. It sounds obvious, but I’ve seen many people not put it into practice.

Some people take on jobs to “boost their ratings” even if they hate doing the job and it’s not related to their field. Yes, when a buyer initially looks at your provider rating, they will see a nice high number, but they look through the comments and jobs that go with that rating, they will see that it doesn’t apply to the work they need you to do. I’ve got a good rating doing writing jobs, but that doesn’t mean a buyer will trust me to draw a splash screen for their software unless they have a screw loose. I drew a stick man once, but even that looked bad.

So take the magical formula I’ve given you and apply it to your application process. Don’t let it stop you from applying to jobs because they MAY turn out to be bad, but if you ever catch yourself saying, “Well, this job is going to really suck, but I need something to do,” then you probably shouldn’t take it.

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