My coronacoaster II: underemployed and restless

Back at the end of May, I wrote about coming to the end of a stretch of work and not having anything more lined up as publishers froze projects and pulled work in-house. Since then, things have been kind of mixed.

Ups: On the plus side, I seem to have a number of projects lined up for the autumn. If everything comes off (which admittedly is far from guaranteed!) I should have a fairly steady stream of work from the end of Sept through into next spring. There’s a nice mix of projects; some corpus research and some writing, some vocab-focused materials and some more general English. It’s a relief to know there’s work coming up, although I’ll be happier when I get some more definite confirmations, schedules and contracts in place. As ever with freelancing, a lot of initial offers are tentative and it can seem to take an age before they’re confirmed, leaving you in an awkward planning limbo.

Downs: On the downside, it’s been a very quiet summer. Since the end of May, I had a few odd hours in July and August on one on-going project. Which was good – and a nice project to work on – but only added up to something like 25% of my usual working hours through June-Aug. That project’s had a (planned) pause since the middle of August and was due to start up again last week, but has now been delayed.

Restlessness: Like most freelancers, I’m not good at being underemployed. I can cope with the odd quiet patch if I know I’ve got something coming up, but especially with not much else to do at the moment (because Covid), I soon get restless and grouchy. Thankfully, the UK’s had a surprisingly good summer this year which has made things a bit easier. When the weather’s warm and sunny, it’s easier to potter in and out of the garden, go for nice long walks and as things have eased up, meet friends for socially-distanced, outdoor coffees. Last week was tough though. First, I had the let-down of expecting work to restart then finding out it wasn’t. Plus the weather was rubbish – grey and rainy and positively autumnal. I’m generally pretty good at keeping myself occupied, but after more than 6 months at home, I admit to getting distinctly bored. I’ve done plenty of walking, but as I don’t have a car, I’m tied to only walking from home and having done the same routes a thousand times, I’m really starting to crave a change of scene now.

Time for a break: Thankfully, this week, the sun’s back out and on Friday, we’re heading off for a week away – woo hoo! - our first holiday for a year and my first night away from home since February. We’re not going very far, just a week in a holiday cottage on the Isle of Wight, but it’s right by the sea and I’m sooo looking forward to just being somewhere different.

So I just have a handful of days to get through feeling restless, unsure whether there’ll be any work this week or not, and not 100% confident that the projects I have pencilled in for when I get back will pan out as I’m hoping. It feels a bit odd to be taking a holiday after doing so little work over the past few months, but boy, am I ready for it and the chance to properly switch off.

A Day in the Life ...

We all love a sneak peek into other people's everyday lives, so inspired by posts from Katherine Bilsborough and Atena Juszko, here's a day in my working life … yesterday, 6 Feb, 2020.

8.00 

My alarm goes off at 8 every day, but I'm always slow to get going in the morning so it's advisory rather than required and I often switch it off and turn over. This morning, I actually get up pretty much straight away. I go downstairs for breakfast, watch a bit of TV news and chat to my partner.

9.00 

Back upstairs in my office, I fire up my desktop, get dressed (no, I don't work in my PJs!) and make a second cup of tea before I sit down at my desk. As a slow starter, I typically spend the first hour at my desk easing myself into the day. I check social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and sometimes Instagram) for both personal and work-related stuff. I'm a member of a Facebook photography group to which I post a photo every day around the day's theme – today's 'frozen' and I find a photo I took of a rose covered in frost. I also check on a Twitter thread I've been involved in. It started with a question from a teacher about teaching phrasal verbs that got linked to a sample unit of a book I worked on, ETpedia Vocabulary. I notice one of my co-authors, Fiona Mauchline, has picked up on a tweet I tagged her in yesterday and joined in the discussion. This is one of the sides of social media I really enjoy. Other general admin today includes checking and replying to a few emails and adding an expense that's come through to my book-keeping spreadsheet.

My workspace ... no tidying for the photo!

10.00 

Tea 3 and I'm ready to start on some actual work. At the moment, I'm reviewing some teaching materials that contain several elements: text documents, slides and videos. I spend an hour working my way through a whole 'module' of the materials to get a feel for how it all flows and fits together, pausing over bits I'm not sure about, coming up with things I might comment on, but not actually writing anything down yet. I want to see the whole module before I formulate my feedback.

11.00 

It's a stunningly bright, crisp day outside my office windows. I'd planned to go out for a walk mid-afternoon, but I'm worried that the sun might not last, so when I get to the end of the module, I decide on a pre-lunch walk instead. Although I'm no longer sticking to the daily walking routine I had to complete my 1000-mile walking challenge last year, I still like to get out most days, especially when the weather's good. Today I do a route of just under 4 miles – that when I get back looks to me a bit like a rhino's head! – which crosses Bristol harbour, goes up through some 'secret' woods, back across the Clifton Suspension Bridge and down through Clifton village, stopping off for a few bits at the supermarket on the way. I get home feeling refreshed and hopeful that spring might not be so far off after all.

#StetWalk: Can you see a rhino's head?!

In the woods - in my green woolly hat (esp. for Kath!)

12.30 

Home for lunch. There's half an avocado in the fridge to use up, so it's a classic avocado on toast with a poached egg in front of the lunchtime news.

#freelancelunch

13.30 

Back at my desk and I spend the afternoon writing up my feedback on the materials I was looking at this morning. I have a couple of short breaks for more tea and while the kettle's boiling nip into the garden to refill the bird feeders that I notice are empty.

17.00 

I finish work on the module I was reviewing and spend the last hour at my desk on a bit more admin. Today I'm trying to sort out personal indemnity insurance because one of my contracts requires it. I find a reasonable quote and message a fellow freelancer who I know's been looking at the same thing to see how it matches up with what she's found. She replies straight away and we have a bit of a chat. Having a network of freelance pals is a really important part of my working life – without them, it could get really lonely.

18.00 

I need to ring my mum after missing a call from her yesterday and early evening's a good time, so I shut down my computer and log off for the day.

The day works out at 4.5 billed-for hours plus admin time which is about average for me. Over 20 years of freelancing while managing a chronic health condition, I've found that's a manageable amount of hours. My health's actually much better at the moment, but I'm not rushing to overdo it and risk a set-back. I'm happy to tick along with what feels like a healthy balance.

Manic May

Phew! I've just come out of what felt like a very busy, head-down patch of work. Since I got back from a break mid-April, it's been full-on through to a couple of deadlines at the end of last week … and it's really taken its toll.

As many of you will know, I suffer from a chronic pain condition that tends to flare up when I put in too many hours at my desk. I try really hard to keep a steady, manageable flow of work, but that's always a challenge. In this instance, a number of factors conspired against me:

• The two main projects I was working on expanded significantly from their original briefs, involving a lot more hours' work to complete, but without the deadlines really moving.
• A few unexpected queries came in from projects I thought I'd finished. Although they weren't big things, they did take time emailing to and fro, going back to look through documents, tracking down information and generally getting my head back into a different project.
• Several things also came up about potential future work, all of which is good, but again, is a distraction and requires shifting yourself into a different headspace to consider whether each one is of interest, whether it will fit into your schedule, then flurries of emails, phone conversations and in one case, travelling to a face-to-face meeting.

All of which made for a sense of there being not enough hours in a day and days in a week … and inevitably led to a pain flare-up. That then had its own knock-on effect as I struggled to work through more pain, which made me slower and less productive, so everything took even longer. On bad pain days, there are only so many hours I can manage at my desk, so I tended to work shorter days and with work piling up, that meant I ended up working through five weekends in a row just to keep up. And while fewer hours per day spread across 7 days instead of 5 meant I ultimately managed to keep all those plates spinning and hit my deadlines, the lack of any respite took its toll too.

Thankfully, this week has been much calmer. There's no rest for the wicked though with two new projects starting straight away, albeit at a less hectic pace – so far! – plus decisions to make about what I take on over the next few months. I'm feeling utterly drained and my inclination right now is to say no to everything and just rest, but I need the work and some of it does look interesting.

All of which got me reflecting on my working hours again and took me back to a blog post I wrote  last summer about My Working Life in Stats. As it's almost a year on, I thought I'd do a quick update with this year's stats.

2018-2019 in Stats

It's been a very tricky year for work. Just after I wrote my post last year, I took a couple of months off work almost completely to try and get my health back on track (see Not Working). It did help, in the short term at least. Then, when I got back to working in the late summer, I had a frustrating patch of jobs being delayed and cancelled. This had an especially big impact because I was being cautious about not overdoing it, so I'd only planned in one project at a time and when that dropped off, it left me with nothing to fill in.

As you can see from the graph, things picked up towards the end of the year (the numbers along the bottom are week numbers, so 41 is into October, 01 start of Jan), but work was very bitty with lots of short jobs which led to sudden peaks in busy weeks. January to April was quiet-ish, again with several shorter jobs, then the recent flurry through late April and May.

Financially, the year 2018-19 (that's the tax year April to April) was dreadful with my overall income dropping to about £21K which was just £17K after expenses. In part, that's down to the couple of months I didn't work at all for health reasons, in part it's down to the working time lost through delayed and cancelled projects, and also the bitty nature of short projects (which I wrote about here). I also worked through the autumn and winter on a royalties-only writing project which accounted for around 27% of my hours for the whole year. That paid nothing in the short term (although I have included the hours in my working hours graph), so that's effectively more than a quarter of my year working 'unpaid', but it will, hopefully, pay back in future years (fingers crossed!).

Looking ahead

I'm hoping the year ahead will be an improvement. From a financial perspective, my recent flurry of work through April/May wasn't counted in the income figures above and with solid work through June and into July, I should already be on track for a better start to the new financial year. And with a few potentially interesting projects in discussion, it's looking like the issue over the coming months won't be lack of work but trying to fit it into my schedule in a way that's manageable. In the short term though, I've just booked a week off before things get too busy again to wind down somewhere warm, do very little and hopefully ease off some of those pains!

My working life in stats

Recently, I’ve been following a series of blog posts by ALCS, My Writing Living, and the Society of Authors, My Writing Income (both following on from the ALCS survey of authors’ earnings). It prompted me to think about my own income and after creating my first pie chart, I kind of got carried away with the stats …

Working hours

Before I start talking about income, I need to get clear how much I work. As some of you will know, I originally went freelance back in 2000 to try and manage my health. I suffer from a combination of RSI mixed up with a more general chronic pain condition which means that I need to limit the number of hours I spend at my desk. My condition fluctuates, but generally, I aim for between 15 and 20 billed-for hours a week; so actual time writing. Then on top of that, I’ll generally do something like another 5-10 hours of admin, keeping up with social media, prepping for and attending conferences and events, and various other bits and pieces that make up my working life.

Keeping to that 15-20-hour limit is almost impossible though within publishing schedules where work often comes in concentrated bursts. Below is a chart of my billed-for hours from mid-2017 up until mid-2018 – the red line showing that 20-hour max mark.

The ‘zero-hours’ weeks are for a variety of reasons: there’s one proper week’s holiday, there’s some time off over Christmas, there’s a week’s ‘reading retreat’, there are 2 weeks at a Forensic Linguistics summer school, a week at IATEFL, a week at a corpus linguistics conference and some time teacher training. Then there are a couple of patches of ‘downtime’ at the end of projects, where I was at my desk just catching up on myself.

Income

In the 2017-18 tax year, I had a total income of £29,715. Minus expenses that comes down to £23,596 … and then, of course, you have to take off tax and National Insurance. The sources of that income break down as below.

All of my writing was for a fee rather than a royalty. That isn’t a big shift for me, over 18 years of writing, I’ve only worked on 3 royalty projects – most of my work has always been fee-based. In 2017-18, that comprised of:

•  A small patch of lexicography work
• A substantial writing project writing vocabulary practice activities for a book for the Italian market (as part of a team)
• Learner corpus research and writing of common error pages for two books for the Spanish market
• A set of online grammar practice activities to go with a coursebook series

Then I did a few odd bits of consulting (reports and reviews for publishers mainly) and some teacher training.

The trend:

For some time, I’ve felt as if my income hasn’t really increased since I started out freelancing some 18 years ago. So, I climbed up into the loft to dig out all my old accounts and came up with the following graph. I’ve shown my income after expenses but before tax because that seems to best equate to an employee’s salary. For simplicity, I’ve just shown the year-ending (so 2002 is the figure for the 2001-2002 tax year). The figures for the average UK income come from the ONS website (Office for National Statistics).

As you can see, there’s quite a bit of fluctuation. Some of that is down to personal circumstances – so around 2004-05, I had a lot of changes in my personal circumstances and I took quite a bit of time out travelling and training, then in 2016-17, I did a part-time MA which more-or-less cut my working hours in half. Around 2012-2013, I worked on a year-long royalties project with only a small advance – although I’m not quite sure why the slump carried on into 2014 … perhaps I was just recovering!

Most interestingly, the blue dotted line shows the trend averaged over time … which as you can see, shows that I was right, my income has stayed more-or-less that same for the past 17 years at around £19K. Pretty depressing, huh?

Okay, so the big dip in 2017 is probably skewing the recent figures a bit, but there’s something else going on too. If I look at my total income before expenses, the picture looks slightly different … and slightly more positive in terms of the trend.

So what’s going on? If I compare 2002 and 2018:

	Total income	After expenses	Expenses
2001-02	25,860	24,492	1,368
2017-18	29,715	23,596	6,119

Why have my expenses gone up so dramatically? Well, obviously that’s in part just down to inflation (esp. in terms of the IT kit you’re expected to have). But there are other things at play too.

Finding work: 

Back in 2002, I was largely working on lexicography projects. A big dictionary project would keep me busy with regular hours for months and months. And once you were known, you’d just move from one big project to the next in a fairly steady, reasonably well-paid stream of work. As dictionary work dried up and I moved into more general ELT writing, I had to work harder to find work and going to conferences and events to network and raise my profile became more important.  That’s become especially true in recent years as I’ve tried to move my career on. I probably could have ticked along getting the same kind of work, but to get into new and more interesting areas has required a more proactive approach to putting myself out there … and that costs money.

Conference costs: 

In the old days, most of the conferences I went to were ones I was speaking at on behalf of a publisher, so most of my costs were covered. In recent years, publisher sponsorship for speaking, for me at least, has been dwindling. As publishers tighten their belts, it seems they’re only paying for authors of their new, high-profile courses to speak. And as someone who tends to work in more niche areas – vocab, EAP – despite pushing, I keep being told there’s no budget available. That means I’m increasingly self-funding. Last year, I spent around £2000 on going to conferences and other events.

Which raises the question, should I cut down on my conference habit?! Is all that investment paying off? Well, probably not in financially, but it’s what keeps me interested and engaged, so maybe it’s worth it?