For the last five years I have worked as a freelance designer and web developer. Spending so much time on one’s own can be a trying experience. There is no “office time”, the time most people would spend in the office working, interacting, meeting, lunching and generally spending hours soaking up the presence of others.
I became too isolated. I needed out, and I took the first opportunity that arose.
In August last year I took a position at a smallish design firm in Rivonia. I was one of eight people where, and while that isn’t quite the same as working in some large corporation it provided me with a lot of human contact and stimulation. Needless to say it didn’t work out. For. Many. Reasons. One of which is the usage of time, or rather the wastage of it.
An eight hour day gets chopped and carved and sometimes brutally massacred into a four hour day, a three hour day and sometimes even a half hour day. Time is wasted like a macbook in an old age home. There is tea making, coffee making, small talk making, phone call making and trouble making. There is loafing, facebook, skype, twitter, email, web browsing, tinkering and trying to get your computer to behave because somehow MS Windows is the operating system of choice.
As if time isn’t scarce enough after all this, there are the meetings. The dreaded 5 minute meeting that drags on and on and on and… on as if something important is being discussed which it isn’t, it’s all circular. Then there are the meetings at clients where they just want to talk about their kids and their bosses and their own office boring politics. Then there are the “team building” meetings where you get patronised and spoken down to like when you were a kid at veldt school.
It’s like time is free, like the bosses aren’t paying you for work, but rather to look like you’re working. It’s okay, you can do a whole day’s work in a few hours if you concentrate hard. But it feels like waste. It feels like I’m getting nowhere. It feels wrong.
In contrast, when working from home I can spend the time I would usually waste away on more constructive endeavours. (And oh boy, do I have many constructive – and some not so constructive endeavours.) The difference comes in when I log and measure my time. When charge a client for eight hours, it’s for eight hours of work, not for eight hours of being in the office. It’ value for money like nowhere else. It’s bloody liquid gold you hear, and I wish that more companies would realise this, that freelancing professionals are worth more than you think they are and that the fees they charge are lower than you think.
Date: June 11, 2009Tags: freelancer, time, time sink
