Searching for balance
Not long before I stepped away from a permanent job and went freelance I had some coaching. I remember being asked, “are you running away from something or towards something?”
There were definitely things I wanted to run towards. I wanted to rebalance my time and spend more time with our young daughter. She was about to start at the school nursery and would be doing fewer hours. If I had more time, I could also become chair of governors at the same school, something I was only happy to do if I had more time.
This was the positive spin, the version I tended to tell people when I was leaving. My “I’m leaving to spend more time with the family” moment. But really, a big chunk of the decision was me running away.
If I wasn’t actually burnt out, then I was pretty close. I love managing people but I couldn’t find the energy it required. I still felt a deep connection to the organisation I worked for but had lost my bearings and felt disorientated and unbalanced. We all spent too much time on Microsoft Teams calls — I wanted more space to do work that didn’t require so many meetings.
I’m 18 months into my freelance journey and still working on finding the right balance in a range of areas.
Choose your work or allow the work to choose you?
Some freelancers I’ve met seem very clear about who they are and what they want to do. That hasn’t worked for me. I’ve done lots of different things over the last 18 months. This has included facilitation, training, developing business cases, building dashboards, and designing and setting up new services. This work has mostly chosen me. People have gotten in touch, mostly via former colleagues to see if I can help.
I sometimes worry that I should be taking more control, defining myself, and setting my own course. I’ve asked myself: “am I doing freelancing wrong?” I talked about this with my action learning set recently and found that a very helpful process. It was nice to hear that other freelancers often feel the same.
Rather than trying to be someone setting the direction, I’m very happy to be someone that is supporting others to get where they are heading.
Part-time or full-time with longer breaks?
One of the joys of freelance work is having more control over your time but it doesn’t give you total control. I really don't understand how people manage school holidays with young children if you have a full-time job and only 25–30 days of annual leave! I see some freelancers working flat out and then taking the summer off, while others work at a more consistent pace throughout the year.
I have found a fairly good balance of working around three to four days a week, spread across five days. This means I can do school drop off and picks ups while earning a similar amount of money as I used to earn in a full-time role. I have a plan that should allow me to take some extended time off over the summer holidays. That would have been hard in my old job, both from a financial perspective and also my own sense of not being able to down tools for such a chunk of time.
Long-term engagements vs. smaller pieces of work?
I have worked for seven different organisations in the last 18 months. That has been split into two very distinct types of work. With two clients I have had longer-term engagements on an associate basis. These have provided a lot of stability and given me people to work alongside over a period of time. I’ve appreciated those relationships and having a sense of being in a team. This is where I’ve done a lot of programme management and service design and implementation work.
I have then worked for five other organisations on smaller pieces of work, worth between £2k — £5k. This has been much more in the facilitation, training and business case/options paper development. These projects have added variety to my work and allowed me lots of opportunities to work directly with communities and people working in user-facing roles.
I think this balance is working really well for me. Just the right amount of stability and variation to feel secure, challenged and helpful. I’ll keep reflecting on how it goes. I think I’ll probably return to a permanent job at some point in the future but at this point in my life what I have works really well for me and my family.
