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Walking supports creativity. If you are a freelance creative or creativity is crucial to your work, it makes good sense to incorporate walks into your work routine.
“Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity,” explains the scientific paper Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking, recently re-published with useful comments by Fermat’s Library:
People have noted that walking seems to have a special relation to creativity. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” The current research puts such observations on solid footing. Four studies demonstrate that walking increases creative ideation. The effect is not simply due to the increased perceptual stimulation of moving through an environment, but rather it is due to walking. Whether one is outdoors or on a treadmill, walking improves the generation of novel-yet-appropriate ideas, and the effect even extends to when people sit down to do their creative work shortly after.
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Personal time management is an area dominated by freelancers. As independent professionals, we are so highly motivated (and financially incentivized) to increase productivity that we come up with many inventive ways to do so.
Here’s just another example. Strawberry Nevill’s article How to Take Charge of Your Time in 4 Steps thinks of time in personal-energy units: “Most of us think of our workday in terms of time. But our raw material isn’t time, it’s energy.”
The author points out that once we think of our work in terms of energy, rather than time, we shift our focus to energy preservation and distribution rather than working a certain amount of time. It then leads to more realistic time estimates and improved overall balance.
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Are freelancers recession-proof? Sarah Duran argues in her article that we are:
“When you work for other people, you put your life in their hands. When you lose your job, you lose your only source of income, your benefits, and your livelihood. Freelancers are naturally more resilient than the average 9–5 employee because we’ve built flexible, decentralized business models that mean we never rely on income from just one source; we have decreased our dependence on the opinions and control of others.”
The article also outlines some strategies related to Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility (hit up your network, diversify everything, don’t plan too long in advance), with a nod to companies seeking to hire more freelancers if the recession worsens.
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UK has many likable traditions, one of which are the annual Freelance Awards presented by IPSE.
Winners are selected by a (rather small) 3-member jury from the finalists in 8 categories: Outstanding Freelancer, Young Freelancer, Freelancer Project, New Freelancer, Wellbeing, Self-Employed Supplier, Sustainable Freelancer, and Freelancer Community Award.
This year’s results will be announced on 23 November 2022 in London.
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Selma Franssen makes an important point in her article Do you know how much your freelance friends make? for The Friendly Freelancer newsletter:
“People who know how much others make are more likely to negotiate. … If freelancers don’t talk about money, incorrect assumptions will continue to live on.”
In other words, it is highly beneficial to talk money with other freelancers to grasp the underlying market reality. Selma gives several tips on how to approach the topic, including one for those who are less comfortable about discussing their freelance income with colleagues: “Find … a friend with whom you feel comfortable and start throwing out some numbers.“
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Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster is an excellent book in which the world-famous British naturalist David Attenborough describes his career from the very beginning when he worked in publishing and then joined the BBC as a producer. At that time, in the early 1950s, natural science programs were just being made – and as Attenborough mentions, more than once it was by trial and error. The technique was simple and the processes were still being fine-tuned.
This book is certainly one of those engaging memoirs that take you behind the scenes of broadcasting and, more importantly, the decades-long career of a truly exceptional professional, his first expeditions into the world, and his general approach to his work. Attenborough, by the way, was initially discouraged from appearing on camera because his teeth were said to be too big.
Life on Air as an audiobook was narrated by Attenborough himself. Highly engaging and recommended!
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Specific business advice for part-time freelancers is hard to find, points out Sara Polsky in her article on Adding a part-time freelance job, and she’s right.
Her key takeaway (as a part-time freelancer with a full-time job) is to allocate a certain amount of hours each month to freelance work in order to prevent burnout or getting into projects that are too time-consuming or require meeting tight deadlines.
“I’ve figured out that I can take on between 20 and 40 hours of freelance work per month, depending on how busy I am at my full-time job and in other areas of my life,” writes Sara. She also observes that her part-time gigs make her a better professional because she is acquiring new skills, experience, and business contacts.
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A guest post on the Freelancers Union blog explains the basics of the Profit First method from a namesake best-selling book on cash flow management by Mike Michalowicz.
It replaces the traditional counting method (Sales – Expenses = Profit) with a profit-seeking one (Sales – Profit = Expenses) and the article outlines how the money is allocated along the way into several categories (Profit, Owner’s pay, Tax, Operating expenses).
Some freelancers consider the Profit First method to be useful for turning in greater profits, while others see it as clumsy or have other business priorities before profit (not unusual among freelancers). Anyway, it’s great that more articles on freelance finance are popping up ahead of a probable recession.
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We like articles where freelancers recap their years in business and share tips for beginners. Such as 8 Best Freelancing Tips For Beginners by Kim Hobson:
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A so-called feast-or-famine cycle is a problem known to many freelancers — periods of busy work and strong income alternate with periods when work and money are scarce. This is followed by hustling for new work to stop the slump, the work picks up again, and the cycle repeats itself over time.
The root cause of the problem is typically connected to poorly grasped personal marketing, rather than market seasonality. As Poornima Apte explains in her article Avoid the Freelance Feast-or-Famine Cycle by Soft Marketing Your Skills, one of the solutions is the strategy of continuous or “soft” marketing, i.e. spreading self-promotion and business networking evenly over time, and not just into periods of income hunger.
Finally, the author adds a charming gamification tip: Every day counts, so she moves 3 beans from one jar to another every time she does something small to promote or present herself. One look at the jars and she knows right away how she’s doing this month. After all, good freelance marketing is a bit like planting seeds. (Want to plant one too? Join us!)
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