#SelfieEmployed

Yesterday was National Freelancers Day in the UK and it got me thinking about the pros and cons of working for myself. So here are four things I love and hate most about freelancing:

Loves:

1 I first went freelance back in 2000 primarily because it allows me to manage a chronic pain condition that makes it almost impossible for me to hold down a 9-to-5 job. That 'management' involves rubbish stuff like not having to be bright and perky on days when my pains are really bad or when I'm suffering from a 'painkiller hangover'. But it also involves fun stuff like finding ways to avoid long, unbroken stretches at my desk and making sure I move about as much as possible. At a MaWSIG event back in January, Antonia Clare mentioned my 'dance breaks' - where I get up from my desk for 5 mins and dance round my office to my favourite tunes. Well, these have now been replaced by hula-hooping breaks (thanks to Karen White), which take place in my back garden and also involve being very silly to dodgy dance tracks!

2 Being able to manage my own time has other advantages too. Rather than having to do things at the same time as nine-to-fivers, I can go for a swim, do a bit of shopping or get my haircut at those quiet times in the middle of the day. And no, it's not just slacking ... I still have to put in the hours to get paid, I just have the flexibility to shuffle them around a bit without having to get anyone's permission.

3 One of the great things about being freelance is not being tied to a job title. In my time as a freelancer, I've worked as a lexicographer, a materials' writer (on a massive range of different materials), as an editor, academic proofreader, reviewer, corpus researcher, teacher, teacher trainer, conference presenter ... who knows what I'll try next if it crops up!

4 Although I spend a large chunk of my time alone at my desk, I still come into contact with an amazing variety of lovely people. There are the people I work with on writing projects, both in-house and fellow freelancers. When I do training or give talks, I get to meet teachers and other colleagues from all over the world. And don't even get me started on all my fabulous network of folks I communicate with through social media and meet up with in person at conferences and events.

Hates:

1 My biggest bugbear about being freelance is uneven workflow. However hard I try to plan my schedule so I can tick along happily with a reasonable number of hours per week that will allow me to control my pain, it never seems to work out. Projects that I've planned to fit in perfectly get delayed starting then either they have to be done in half the time or they crash into something else I've agreed to and suddenly I'm working all hours and my pains are building up and I know I should ease off, but deadlines are looming. Then other times I find myself twiddling my thumbs, especially when planned projects are delayed or fall through, and I'm worrying about how I'm going to pay the bills.

2 Which brings me onto the irregular income. Somehow in 16 years I've always managed to make a living from freelancing, but my income's varied wildly - from a low of about £11,000 to around £30,000 in a good year. Sometimes the money comes in in little dribs and drabs, sometimes on a long project, I have months with nothing coming in then a big chunk at the end. I spent a whole year working on one royalties-based project living on just £5000 ... and as yet, I've made absolutely nothing back in royalties.

3 No sick pay, no holiday pay, no IT support ...

4 When you have a job, there's generally a fairly clear career progression; promotions to apply for, a ladder to climb. As a freelancer, it's much more difficult to see how you're going to progress. Over time, I've consciously developed new skills and specialisms, I've worked hard to build my profile and reputation (I'd like to think with some success), but that doesn't necessarily come with a pay rise. Rather depressingly, I often find myself being offered much the same rate of pay now as I was 16 years ago. I know that's probably more of a reflection on the state of the industry than on how much my skills are valued ... but it doesn't always feel that way.

So is it worth it? Well, when I was making my lists, I initially jotted down six 'loves' and could easily have kept going with more, but I struggled to come up with more than four 'hates' .... which I think says it all. #lovefreelancing

A Week in the Life …

After a busy summer of teaching and teacher training,  followed by a well-earned break, this week I’m back at my desk finally and trying to settle back down into a routine. So when I spotted Karen White’s freelancer challenge on her White Ink Facebook page to keep a log of how you spend your working time for a week, it seemed apt …

Monday:

Dealing with email – 2.5 hours

Having finished off several things before I went off on my hols, most of this morning was spent in sorting out what I’m going to do for the next few months. Luckily, I came back to several tempting offers of work in my inbox to mull over and respond to, some enthusiastically, some more tentatively. I also sent off a few emails to chase up things I’d had pencilled in for ‘the autumn’. Now, as the replies start coming back with start dates, deadlines, briefs, etc., I just have to work out what I can reasonably fit in.

Social media – 30+ mins

A bit of catching up on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and a quick request sent out to help with my next task …

Preparing a talk –   4 hours

At the weekend, I’m off to Munich for an event for EAP teachers organized byMELTA. I’m giving two talks, one on EAP vocabulary, the other on EAP grammar. I managed to put my vocab talk together before I went away, but today I sat down to prepare my grammar talk. I sort of had in mind what I want to talk about, so it was mostly a case of preparing my PowerPoint slides.  I wanted to include a few student examples from my summer teaching, so that involved a certain amount of rummaging back through paperwork. I also got rather distracted rewatching a great video of apresentation by Steven Pinker that I reference in the talk.

I think I’m more-or-less happy with the slides now, but I’ll probably run through both talks again before I go at the end of the week.

Tuesday:

Rather a bitty, uninspired day after my initial spurt of enthusiasm yesterday, mostly waiting for responses to the emails I’d sent out and a bit unsure what to get on with.

Email/admin/social media – 2 hours

Blog post – 1 hour

I got round to typing up a guest blog post for the OUP blog about the new Oxford EAP Advanced coursebook (which I worked on). I’d actually sketched out the post a few weeks back when I was invigilating an exam at the end of my summer EAP teaching. The post was mostly inspired by my class who were pretty much target audience for the book and happily, confirmed a lot of the ideas about advanced EAP students that we’d tried to incorporate in the writing. I’ll reread it tomorrow before I send it off … and let you know when it’s posted.

Aimless corpus research – 1 hour

A response from a colleague about specific issues for German EAP students to incorporate into my talks  prompted a bit of browsing on the BAWE corpus. It’s a corpus of academic writing by UK university students (and available for free) and although a lot of it is native speaker writing, as it reflects the whole student body at a UK university, it does include work from international students too. So I was able to search for writing by German students to test out a few thoughts. I’m very aware that the EAP students I’m used to teaching, largely Asian, have quite different issues from the German speakers my audience will be dealing with.  I didn’t find any specific examples to use in my talk, but it helped confirm a lot of what I’d thought. Any guesses from the example below about what I might focus on in my grammar talk?!

Hence, positioning is about placing the product on the market from a customers' point of view and not the management's one. It has to be developed an image, the client's advantage needs to be shown and the product must differentiate itself from competitive products.

Reading/research – 1 hour

I finished the day reading through a load of information I’d been sent about a potential new project and mulling it over.

Wednesday:

A lovely sunny day and a fabulously long lunch with a friend and colleague … one of the perks of the freelance lifestyle!

Email/social media/admin – 2 hours

I turned down one piece of work and accepted another. It leaves me with rather a quiet October at the moment, but had I said yes to everything, I would have been left overloaded in December and January – always a tricky juggling act.

 

Editing blog post – 1 hour

I returned to what I’d written yesterday, reread and edited it. I always tell my students to ‘sleep on’ their writing before they hand it in and it’s definitely true that you see something quite differently when you come back to it with a fresh eye – I cut a whole rather rambling, irrelevant first paragraph!

Feedback – 2.5 hours

Although I finished my summer teaching at Bristol University nearly 3 weeks ago, because I went off on holiday right afterwards, I hadn’t yet filled in the tutor feedback form and it was sitting menacingly on my to-do list. The course and materials had been completely overhauled for this year and with quite a lot of thoughts on how it’d all worked out, my feedback turned into something of an essay … sorry guys, but you did ask!!

Thursday:

Email/admin – 2 hours

I think I’ve worked through most of my to-do list for the week and I’m starting to get my schedule for the next few months pinned down now.

Preparing for talks – 4 hours

This afternoon has been spent getting ready for my trip to Munich. I ran through both my talks in full to check for timing. They’re meant to be 45 mins each and they both came out as about 5 mins over, which should be close enough, but I’ve got in mind bits I can skip if needed on the day.

My bag’s packed, taxi’s booked for the morning and I think I’m as ready as I can be.  I’ll let you know how it goes …

Away from my desk ...

Well, I'm now almost exactly halfway through my 5 weeks of summer teaching and I don't think I've managed to improve my time management skills any - I'm still spending much more time "in school" than I should be and struggling to get any time at my desk. Very behind with my schedule for other projects, but not panicking just yet!

Below are a few other things I've noticed since I've been "out at work" for most of my time:

• My tea consumption has dropped considerably - one flask has to last me through most of the day!
• I'm feeling really out-of-touch with the news. I'm so used to listening to the radio for most of the day - a bit of breakfast TV and the evening news doesn't feel the same. Didn't realise I had become such a news junkie!
• Lunch has been reduced from a nice hot salad or a dish of pasta to a snatched egg sandwich!
• I'm struggling to switch off at the end of the day - I'm dreaming about teaching.
• My regular swimming has been almost completely sacrificed :(

On the plus side though, I'm really enjoying the adrenaline buzz of teaching and the interaction with colleagues. I'm feeling much more alert and perky than usual, even though I'm exhausted at the end of the day. I'm also getting a chance to pull lots of things out my wardrobe that I don't usually wear and enjoy putting together new outfits each morning :)

Teaching?

Well, I've made it to the end of the first week of my summer teaching stint ... and now I'm spending the weekend trying to catch up on myself!! As ever, my first week seemed to be largely taken up being incredibly inefficient - rushing around chasing up computer log-ins, missing textbooks and board markers. Although I'm only meant to be teaching three mornings a week plus one full day, somehow the morning's seem to spread across to mid-afternoon and by the time I've sat down and had a cup of tea and sorted out my huge accumulated pile of papers, the day seems to have disappeared and I haven't done any of my 'other work'. I really do need to set aside clear non-teaching blocks this week when I don't get tempted into marking or researching lesson ideas.

The actual teaching has been the relatively easy bit. I've got a nice little class and this year I'm taking over a group who've already done 5 weeks, so they're already 'broken in' and not quite as shell-shocked as the new intake. Even so, I've had the niggling feeling that I haven't really done any proper language teaching yet. Most of the week's been taken up with setting out the ground rules for the end-of-course assessment - lots of academic skills stuff about format and word limits, choosing a topic and writing an outline, using the library and all that preliminary stuff. I'm hoping that next week I'll get onto something a bit more linguistic - I'm itching to get down to some nice juicy grammar rules and the AWL ...

Year planner

Fitting in freelance projects is always a bit of a juggling act, with things starting and finishing all the time, short projects and long projects, delayed starts and extended deadlines. I try to keep track of everything on a wall planner with different coloured lines to show different jobs I'm working on or have coming up:

Sadly, I generally end up using quite a bit of Tipp-Ex as start dates and timings constantly shift! Which is why I always look forward to the one fixed point in my year; my summer teaching stint at Bristol University that starts on Monday. Although it can be hard work and a bit of a shock to the system - getting up in the morning and having to get out the house on time! - it's also a fantastic break from my usual routine and gets me away from my desk for a big chunk of the day. And it helps me to divide my year up into pre-teaching and post-teaching, a gap that's going to be extended this year by a long holiday at the end of my teaching stint which means that I won't be back at my desk properly again until the start of October - hopefully, feeling fully refreshed and raring to go again.

Just got to get as many bits and pieces finished off and loose ends tied up as I can this week so that I don't have too much spilling over into my teaching time.

What counts as work?

When I'm working, I usually keep a note of the hours I work on each project each day in my diary. It's partly to keep track of what I need to invoice for and also to keep an eye on the number of hours I'm working each week from a health point of view. I only write down hours spent on "actual work" that I'm going to invoice for though.

Yesterday, I managed to spend more-or-less the whole day at my desk without writing down a single hour in my diary. It was a day spent catching up on "admin"; checking over the work I've done while I was away, sending it off with accompanying emails and invoices, replying to non-urgent e-mails that I hadn't dealt with, getting together a new bookkeeping folder for the new tax year and getting going on a couple of new projects - looking at documents, reading briefs and sending more emails with answers and queries. It felt like a really productive day and by the end of it, I felt like I was back on top of things after nearly 3 weeks away. I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed though that I had no hours written in my diary to show for it!

Mental gymnastics

Despite my recent attempts to cut my workload, I seem to find myself juggling work on four different projects at the same time at the moment! Actually, it's not as bad as it sounds as a couple of them are very small bits of work and the others can be divided up into smallish chunks. That suits me quite well when I'm trying to keep down to just three or four working hours a day - I can manage a chunk of day and don't get quite as tempted to just plough on as I might do with work on a longer term project.

The tricky bit though is switching from job to job and remembering what you're meant to be doing, especially as each of the four are at quite different levels; pre-intermediate editing, upper intermediate reviewing, CAE corpus research and IELTS consultation! As I say, although I try and work on only one project in any one day, inevitably, emails come in from various different sources which need to be read and replied to, then they trigger off different thoughts and ideas which end up as mental background noise.

Of course, back in the days when I was teaching, I'd happily go from a class of beginners to an advanced level Proficiency group with no more than a 10-minute break for a quick slurp of coffee and a fight with the photocopier in-between times and think nothing of it! Although, perhaps it's easier to make the switch when you've got real students sitting in front of you rather than doing it as an abstract exercise in front of a computer screen.