Learning the hard way - Part I

It's been, oh, I suppose several weeks since I switched to full-time freelancing instead of trying to balance it with a full-time job, and I've learned a few things since then, things that nobody tells you about when you're starting out.

The Days Don't Feel Like Days

When you switch from waking up at 5am each day from Monday to Friday, and then switch on a hard dime to not having to set your alarm clock at all, the change is exhilarating. For the first time since university, I could wake up at 11am, watch Netflix until 2, and not feel guilty about it. It was awesome.

The lustre of that wore off pretty quickly, though, and I found my days to be aimless stretches of time. When I didn't have an out-of-home day job to go to, the clock didn't matter anymore. And when time essentially vanished, so, too, did a large chunk of my sense of purpose. I began to struggle with the mentality of getting up and making a day with- well, I don't want to say nothing to get up for, but with nobody to report to. There was no punch clock waiting, no desk to sit down at, no schedule of tasks to work through. It was entirely how I decided to plow through work, and the sudden freedom was a huge adjustment.

It Takes Effort to Get Dressed

A day job (usually) requires an employee to shower in the morning, get dressed in clean clothes, and show up to work looking neat and put-together. A stay-at-home job doesn't. As long as the work gets done, my clients don't give two figs whether I do it in a ball gown or ratty pyjamas. And with that knowledge comes, at first, the luxury of staying in comfy nightwear. After all, why get showered and dressed when you're not going outside, you're not going to see another person, and you're just going to return to bed in a matter of hours?

But while it's tempting, how long is it actually good to not shower and get dressed? Pyjamas- and you- will get pretty smelly pretty quickly, even if nobody's (thankfully) around to be a witness to it. It's so easy to excuse this habit to economy, saying that changing your outfit each day unnecessarily causes more laundry.

That's bull.

Getting showered and dressed each day is one of the most powerful things you can do to give structure to a day. Although it might seem onerous to take half an hour to do that when it could be spent working, the last thing I want to become is that lazy, smelly slob who stays in the same clothes for five days in a row. It also helps me think and feel like freelancing is an actual job, rather than just something to fill my days with.

Stay tuned for Part II!