OnlineFreelance.com

There are two possible scenarios of becoming a freelancer: right from the beginning of your working career or after a certain period of working in the company. We will label the first – Natural Born Freelancer and the second – Newly Converted Freelance Adept. Both of these scenarios have a number of issues that a good freelancer must keep in mind.

Natural Born Freelancer

A good freelancer must know how to work alone, how to organize the working process, working hours, documentation, his working space, etc. There are dozens of things that need much more attention than a newcomer can think of and if you’ll ignore them you can end up with missed deadlines and failed projects. Generally the main problem for the newcomer will be organizing the work process. You are not limited by corporate thinking, but actually you have little understanding of how the work actually goes. The easiest solution will be to get three to six month of work in a company. It will give you very important experience in communicating with people, handling the documentation and organizing the work process. Or you can build your own working style based on your experience and information sources like our blog.

Newly Converted Freelance Adept

The three things that you need to break in your mind are time, team and money. If you are used to 8 working hours – forget it. As a freelancer you can work all the 24 if you are capable of keeping the quality of your work at an appropriate level. Still some people can’t handle the new schedule and end up with working 4 to 12 hours. To avoid such problems pay more attention to time management. During the first time, try to keep the 8 standard hours working shift and have some 2-4 extra hours for emergencies.

You are now on your own, but in most cases you are not alone. Double check your work, to avoid minor mistakes. Keep a good eye on your health and your PC. Most clients usually understand that you can get sick or you can have a hard drive crash, but they will not pay you for this time. Also it is good to have a few friends that can do a part of your work while you are incapable of doing it.

Money is the third problem. People who worked in various companies are used to the fact that they will be paid even during the hours when no actual work was done. That’s the beginning of the end. In freelance you are paid only for the work, it is very easy to understand, but too easy to forget. So try to avoid too much coffee breaks and chatting in IMs with friends during the working hours.

Actually all of these problems can be solved, if you really want to. And maybe after the first difficult months you will start seeing freelancing not as a job, but as an adventure.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 00:03 and is filed under uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.