I recently read on the 4 Reasons Why Freelancing Sometimes is not Desirable. All the while, I am promoting the advantage of full-time freelance life. However, Logan Strain enlighten me on the disadvantage of becoming a full time freelancer. Let’s share her thought with you folks.

Though freelancing has become a revolution in the way people earn their living, some things haven’t changed for years. Many freelancers find it difficult to cope with, which ultimately leads to an abandonment of this avenue. This article will shed light on such 4 reasons, which compels many freelancers to think twice about the prospect of their work.

Children

For those freelancers who are married, it is important to earn enough money to provide sufficient daycare service for the children in the early stages of their lives. Freelancers often do not earn as expected, and they tend to leave out the optional luxuries of life and family. But it is important to remember, ‘daycare’ service is pretty much on the top of importance list for a child. And you must have that extra bit of income to ensure that service for you children.

Free Time

Sometimes freelancers have to work real hard and at a stretch for long hours. If this is done in a regular basis, life can become quite strenuous; which ultimately takes its toll on the health issues. However, with effective time management techniques on a regular basis, this problem can mostly be tackled with good effect.

Insurance

This is another aspect that is vastly important for those freelancers who is having a family. Due to the fluctuation in earning rate and sometimes insufficient revenue, many freelancers might have faced problems affording the insurance. Thus, many freelancer choose to completely ditch this burden of maintaining insurance for his family members, which, in the long run, may not turn out profitable.

Security

The hardest drawback of freelancing is the fact that there may not be any stable pay-cheque at the end of month. If you don’t know in advance how much you are going to earn, it may become pretty problematic to draw up the budget scale. This is one issue that hurt majority of freelancers at some point of their career.

Thus, it’s a mix baggage. If you are truly courageous enough to withstand all this problems with bold virtues, and are ready to deploy counter plans and measures to ameliorate these unwanted situations, you will surely reap the benefit of freelancing.

Photo by Parthshah.

Hey folks, I recently read an Interview With Adrian Diaconescu of Rubiqube. I would like to share part of the interview which talked about essential tools that Adrian used for his freelance work. If you don’t know who is Adrian, here is a short introduction on him:-

My name is Adrian Diaconescu and I’m a freelance designer based in Bucharest, Romania.

Professionally speaking, I tried pretty much everything: the 9 to 5 job, the entrepreneurship,the corporate world. I took the plunge and quit my last day job in March 2007. Since then, I made a lot of new friends and worked on many cool projects.

Freelance design is an exciting form of freelance work, which can be of great fun, creativeness and challenging . However, to successful, modern day designers must use various kinds of available tools. Here is the essential tools to help you success :-

Adobe Fireworks CS3

It is a product from Adobe, which is widely in use for creating and optimising images for the web and rapidly prototyping websites. The primary advantages the software renders are its ability to integrate between Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, improved layer organisation, improved scaling, integrating Adobe Bridge, customisable asset, integration between Flash and Dreamweaver and multi-page support. I guess most of the freelance designers should know about this tool. Personally, I am using Adobe Photoshop to edit some simple images on this blog. Perhaps, I should try out Fireworks as well.

Skype

Well-known application to make phone calls over Internet. It is actually free when the called person is also using Skype, while calls to landlines and cell phones can be made for a pretty low affordable cost. All in all it’s a one-stop shop when it comes to communication with your clients. Personally, I’ve been using it to call my customers from oversea in a very low rate. I guess, the rate is cheaper than the rate offered by any of the local telco such as Maxis, Celcom or Digi.

Thunderbird/FireFox

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. It has number of features that makes it arguably one of the most efficient products in its field. Personally, I would recommend you to Add-On the FireBug to help on website designing. Another good add-on is the color picker which you simply capture a color from any nice website.

Pymo

It is a web portal aimed at the freelancer and managers who are looking for solution to manage, schedule time allocation and adjustments for the involved projects. It has a central database with all employee timesheets in one place, generate the detailed timesheet reports for each employee (in fact reports on employee performance can also be generated). It is ideal for geographically distributed teams. Use this tool to keep track on your project management.

Wordpress

Software that furnishes a way to manage your website is commonly called a CMS or "Content Management System". Wordpress is such kind of web based blogging tool. It has various useful and necessary features. Now, blogging is part of the lifestyle for Freelance Designer. Most of them use blog as the platform to showcase their freelance portfolio just like what Adrian did. Perhaps, you should have a good showcase to show off your previous works. It helps in gaining confident from your client.

These were few of the most reputed and useful tools for freelance Designers. Effective use of these tools can really make your freelance life a lot easier.

To be an effective freelancer, it is vitally important to continuously produce work of high quality. However, humans are not machines and the pressure of producing and performing can be hectic at times. It may resulting in the loss of attention and focus, unprofitable change in direction, or shortcuts being applied to just get the work through anyhow.

This article will show some of the ways to a relaxing stress-less freelancing lifestyle:

DEAL AT PRESENT

May be at present you have a average car, average PC and house. But don’t grieve over not being able to achieve the highest standard of life at one shot. Instead, deal with what you have, and try to do best with those, fix your target for a life of top level, but just don’t mourn over it day and night, forgetting the work in hand. Work for it with what you have, enjoy with what you have got at current day.  Don’t be too much materialistic.

REMOVE THE NON-ESSENTIALS

Try to figure out what is actually needed in your life which will benefit you in some way. If you can think of something that is not relevant, ditch it, both in your digital warehouse and materialistic possessions. This will considerably free you up from unnecessary complicity and thus will gain you a lot more free dimensions to relax a bit.

SIMPLIFY THE WORKLOAD

Think of everyday works that you don’t enjoy at all but are having to do. Once you have decided, delegate the work to someone else or find some other way around, if it costs you money, then it is also a worthy investment, as it will relieve you of some torrid mental pressure. For example, if you do not like cooking, hire a maid to do it for you. Though you will have some expenditure, but the return will be a lot more profitable.

SEE OFF SMALLER TASKS

Tasks that doesn’t require a lot of time, you should finish it then and there, do not add it to your TO-DO list. Anything that entail for 5-10 minutes of your time, just go through it and see it off.

GOALS ARE IMPORTANT

It is vitally essential that you set a goal within a definite time- frame. Do not pass month after months aimlessly. Set a target, it may be a part of some bigger target and work for it. Without a sound and achievable aim, you will go nowhere.

By following these steps, a happy and enjoyable freelance lifestyle can be lead, with more profit and client satisfaction.

This post is summarized from Lead a More Relaxing Freelance Lifestyle. Photo by Here.Vi.

Photo by FreshPeel.com.

Freelancing business has many forms and shapes. Each has its own dimension and each individual freelancer find different issues to be their main obstacle in their way of success. This article will illustrate some of the common challenges that the freelance designers of these days have to tackle with:-

Looking for Client

Initially, it is a challenge for many freelancers as they are new and naive in this field. The effective way to tackle this problem is an aggressive self-promotion.

Networking

To get a really good client base, the freelancers often has to have a strong network of people who can both be taken as client and people who can hire clients. This network of people will grow steadily as the freelancer goes through his job with success. Always keep your portfolio shine.

Marketing

Marketing is another big hurdle for newbies. The knowledge of marketing is as essential as the ability in doing the work. Without effective marketing, no one will figure out your service and you will not be able to grow your client base.

Managing Clients

It is really challenging to manage all types of clients in design projects as clients will ask for basically anything that comes into their mind regarding project at any point of time. But for the freelancer, it may become very difficult to effectively handle all the requests. Failing to do so brings the profit margin down and also offends the clients.

Pricing

Pricing is of great confusion to many freelancers. How to evaluate the project or how to set the price standard are something that puts many freelancers into a state of total ambivalence. However, the best to set the price according to your skill level.

Maintaining Workload

Sometimes the pressure of work can be too much to handle and easily the freelancers can lose their time track, which may affect their other jobs in hand and personal affairs. The effective solution is to draw a plan of time-frame and stick to that plan at any cost. Read more about How to Balance Your Freelance Life?

These are some of the obstacles that a freelance designers have to face in a consistence basis. But it differs person to person which one is their biggest nemesis for them. For example, one designer can find the ‘Pricing’ to be the foremost problem, but for a newbie designer, ‘Getting the clients’ can be the hardest challenge. All in all, with effective plan and execution, all these can be neutralized.

This article is the second part of the The Balance Between Freelance Work and Daily Life. Let’s shed some lights on finding your balance in your freelance life:

ACCEPT HELP FROM OTHERS

If you are married and your partner is not involved in her own work or business, then you can give her some of the non-essential tasks to handle such  as accounts, bills and other paperworks. It helps in freeing up yourself for other core tasks. And if you are single, you can also hire some assistant for these non-core tasks.

TIME MANAGEMENT

Doing full-time work with freelancing leaves basically no extra time for doing anything other than essential. So beside spending some time with family, you must make sure that the remaining times are judiciously used for freelancing work. To achieve this feat, you need the tools such as Client information database, Necessary software, Accounting, Rules-based automated Email system, Feed Reader etc.

HEALTH CARE

This is one of the most important aspect if you are to look after both the jobs. Falling indisposed just simply won’t help, in neither of the duties. Thus staying fit is a crucial consideration and following steps such as keeping off the junk food, consuming alcohol, caffeine and sugar in a controlled proportion, having adequate sleep, adhering to the healthy and clean food. Finally setting up a nice and relaxed home-office environment can help a lot.

KEEP BOTH THE JOBS SEPARATE

You may develop a incitement to work on your freelancing projects during your full time working our. However, generally it is not considered as a good idea as you may get caught and your boss may become easily offended. However, during the ‘break’ periods, checking emails and related feeds shouldn’t be a too much of a problem.

TAKE VACATIONS

It is vitally important to take vacations in between and do not overdo yourself with work. The idea is to spread the two or three weeks vacations that you get from your full-time job throughout the whole year. In this way you can recharge yourself frequently.

So, by following the above steps, it is likely that you will have a nice balance between two of your responsibility and thus excelling in both the fields.

Photo by SoxFirst.