So. I admit it. I’ve done it. I’ve overcommitted myself, and its uncomfortable. I now have almost exactly the number of hours contracted work as I have hours available to work. Perfect, right? Wrong! Work doesn’t stay in neat little day boxes, tasks don’t always finish on time and no breathing space means a whole lot extra stress.
How did it happen?
My two previous contracts extended, and then the extra client I took on (because I was about to be contract-less) has solidly taken up another chunk of my week. Plus, because I’m a glutton for punishment, when a repeat client messaged about me doing another event with them, I found myself saying yes without giving myself any time to process how on earth I’d fit it all in. I knew the instant I agreed I’d be walking a bit of a tightrope, balancing work with my sanity. Perhaps that should have been my first “no”. A very grateful and reluctant no, but no all the same. I already knew I had maxed out my capacity but I somehow ploughed on. In my defence it was a charity I really enjoyed working with, doing work I love. And event work is short and sharp, there’s a short intensive prep, then delivery, a lull and then a report from feedback, with most of it (obviously bar the event itself) being flexible about when you do the work. I can’t lie, I was also flattered to be asked back and I didn’t want to lose that relationship. I did recognise I was putting myself under a lot of pressure, and that I’d perhaps undercharged before, so my agreement was based on a price increase.
How is it panning out?
There’s no two ways about it, it’s hard. There is a relentlessness to the weeks which is taking it’s toll. There’s been some steep learning curves, and some near misses. Trying to keep in a positive frame of mind about it, I’d say what I’d learnt is:
1. Slow start
Try and start every day easing into work – open BBC news, check Twitter, catch up on the freelance networks I’m part of. When I’m stressed, the danger is I try and jump straight in and get tangled trying to simultaneously do 10 things. Ironically risking being incredibly efficient for the sake of efficiency.
2. Set priorities
I now do a weekly to-do list, broken down across all clients plus a category for my own business to cover things like logging hours, invoicing or LinkedIn posts. There’s probably a million more beautiful and effective ways of doing this digitally but with limited (or more accurately none!) spare brainspace at the moment, I’m sticking with traditional pad and some fancy coloured pens
3. All inboxes
Every day check every inbox. Before, I might have had a cursory scan but now even if a day is dedicated to one charity, I always check all inboxes and answer any urgent items. This one was a very near miss on leaving something until that charity’s day in my week, and it turned out to be very nearly too late to complete something. Now I understand you have to flex a part of each day to keep on top of it.
4. Track
Before I was able to keep days fairly locked to certain work but increasingly now I have to use any available space which means beg, borrow and stealing time constantly across the week. If it’s a 4 person meeting and you only offer a Tuesday, you could hold up the entire team for a few weeks. So now I try and religiously keep a spreadsheet of hours to keep an eye on what hours I’ve done, when, for who. It’s a huge help to know that if you’ve “borrowed” two hours from one day, you can see it and know you pay it back on another one. Admittedly, there’s probably also better ways to do this digitally but I’m back to my earlier point of no brain space.
5. Boundaries
Linked to the tracking, I’ve got better at this. Prioritising the right things and calling time when the hours are up. It can be so hard to walk away when the to-do list is still long, but I’m getting better at reminding myself if the charity is only paying for, say, one day a week, then both they and I recognise that there’s a limit to what can be done. I was really lucky to have had a great client for one of my first contracts. When I flagged the to do list was huge and I was struggling to keep to the hours, her response was encouraging me to shorten the list. Something I need to keep reminding myself to do.
6. Down time
This one is a bit of a hard one. Some days I just acknowledge I need to get something done and/or out of my brain, and I’ll feel and sleep better if I work in the evening to do it. Other days, I recognise I just need to turn the laptop off because you need to recharge if you’re going to have any chance of keeping on going. While I try not to work in the evenings, I haven’t set any definitive rules on it. Sometimes I just need to do it.
What’s next?
It looks like I’m overcommitted now until April. That feels like a really long period of time. The stress is two-fold – some of this work is less of my area of expertise so it’s taking longer and the imposter syndrome is strong and the lack of any time unaccounted by a paid contract each week means my business admin, my CPD, my networking, any business development is taking a huge hit. On the weeks I’ve tried to prioritise this, I’ve then suffered the knock-on effect of not doing enough contract work. It’s a lose-lose.
Also with two small kids, it’s not a period of life with a lot of flex. Evenings are precious and often booked with sports, friend catch ups and important date-night box-set binges, and weekends are even less our own. Work has to stay firmly within a 9-5 for my sanity.
My two biggest learnings though are that I’m at risk of overcommitting and under-delivering, the exact risk I was warned about from a colleague before I started this crazy adventure. If there’s one thing that is sacred, it’s your reputation, and for that reason alone, I definitely wouldn’t repeat this level of work again in a hurry. The second one is that one of the primary reasons I went freelance was for a better work/life balance, especially while the kids were small. But at the moment, the opposite is happening. I’m eating into those down days with my daughter in order to keep up with the work, and this isn’t the time. With just over a year left before she starts school, now is the time to do less, max out that time and bank the memories. Freelancing will still be there when both are at school and that’s when I can work out realistically what the right amount of work is across the week. But right now, it’s a bit too much. I guess I knew it was going to happen at some point, so now it’s a case of knuckling down until I can ease myself out the other side of it with my sanity/waistline/relationships in tact. But first, more biscuits.
Photo by Matthew Waring on Unsplash