Family Time/Freelancing Time
I am not a full-time freelancer (hopefully that will change within the next year or two.) I sneak in work while I’m at my day job and after I get home from work. While I dream of not having to go into the office at all, I know from my stint at unemployment that while the lack of office politics and commute can be heavenly, the allures of the TV, the kitchen, the telephone and the blog can be deadly. Even more pressing, I would imagine, would be the call of the family. I wanted to know: how do freelancing moms and dads successfully designate time for their work and time for their family and not let the two spill into each other? I posted this question on Ask Metafilter, and here are some of the most interesting answers:
“Everyone else has a ritual before starting work and after stopping work: travel, coffee, travel back home, whatever. It’s a good idea for you to have something like this. I go for a morning walk, eat breakfast and then start working (other people shower and put on work clothes, but not this stinky guy). Find a TV show that starts at 5:30 or 6:00 in the evening, and plan on watching it to celebrate another day of work. And then you’re home again.”
“As a former freelancer, the only useful advice I have is to make sure that you have a separate office, that your (separate) business phone only rings in there, and that the office has a door that closes and locks. Physical separation is the best way to achieve other kinds of separation.”
“During the school year, my kid-free work life begins around 9-9:30, and I have until 12:45 to get concentrated work done. (This will improve this fall, when my youngest will be in preschool until 2:30.) Generally, between 1 and 6 is running around/picking up kids/dealing with family stuff time, so if I’m doing any work then, it’s keeping up with emails or just noting stuff to get to later. Then once the kids are asleep, my second shift begins, and I get more work done between about 8:30 and 11:30 at night — later if I’m busier or have a deadline to meet, earlier if I’m dead on my feet.
“In some ways, even though I have chafed against the constriction of this kid-determined schedule, it’s been good: knowing I only have about three hours a day to get the quality stuff done has been motivating probably more often than it’s been frustrating. (I wrote my first book during eight weeks of those three-hour increments, while my oldest was in summer pre-school and my youngest was in utero.) My point being that setting aside a block of time to tackle the bulk of your work each day might be a good idea — I know pre-kids I could while away a whole day on musing or talking myself out of ideas. So I get the ‘big stuff’ done in the mornings, and the ‘little stuff’ (research, brainstorming, emailing, networking, book pr, etc.) in the afternoon/evening, when I’m imminently (and predictably) interruptable. The drawback of the working from home is the ‘always on’ thing. I’ve tried to cut down on that over the last six months or so, by NOT taking on that second shift if I don’t have to — no emails, no working into the dead of night, no always being online — and trying instead to funnel it all in to the time I have, when I can. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t, but I definitely feel less stressed when I’m able to shut the laptop at night and be ‘off work.’”
Read all of it here.
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