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I try to think this way. One thing I try to do is not work too much, so I had been freelancing trying to keep my hours to around 25 a week. It freed up time to

I try to think this way. One thing I try to do is not work too much, so I had been freelancing trying to keep my hours to around 25 a week. It freed up time to do other things, I was learning to play guitar and working on some film scripts (I am using "was" because I decided to take on a full time programming gig until June but even this I didn't take for the money, it's way below market, I took the job because it sounded interesting). One problem I encountered was people just not "getting it." And I don't mean random strangers, I mean potential clients. It's oddly difficult to tell people "I make enough money to support my lifestyle working 25 hours a week and I like to save the rest of my time for other projects that interest me." They expect you to be "doing more" or see you as lazy, after all why not make the most money you can possibly make at all times? When in fact I think I'm far less lazy than most people, I put a ton of effort into coding, educating myself, going the extra mile, working on projects for fun, reading technical books, going to talks. I'm also very serious about my pursuits beyond my programming "day job." And yet I've found it difficult to convey that, and that clients consider me unserious because I was intentionally working less than 40 hours a week even if they are looking for someone for a part time role.

jarrett 13y ago
How do clients become aware that you only work 25 hours per week? If they're asking you "how much do you work," you can reply: "Considering my other commitments, I can give you 25 hours per week." They don't need to know what your other commitments are, and they'll probably be content to assume those commitments consist of other freelancing gigs. My clients don't know any details about each other. They know I have multiple clients, but they don't know each other's identities, how many there are, or how much time I give to each.
- bad_user 13y ago
  Some clients want exclusivity for the period of the contract.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - jarrett 13y ago
    If they say they want that, they probably also mean they want 40+ hours a week. If your goal is to work below 40 hours, then such clients aren't for you. In that case it's not a question of them "getting it." You genuinely don't offer the service they want to buy.
    - jonnathanson 13y ago
      This is very important. One of the best skills you can develop as a freelancer is to read between the lines when doing client development. Some clients say they want a freelancer, but what they really want is a full-time, remote employee. They won't necessarily know that about themselves, and if they don't, they won't articulate it directly. So you need to get good at sussing things out. Taking a pseudo-freelance, client-demands-full-time gig and trying to compress it into ~10 hours a week is a recipe for disaster. You won't please the client, you'll drive yourself insane, and you'll end up resenting the work. The biggest favor you can do for yourself is to discriminate ahead of time. Determine which sorts of jobs, and which sorts of clients, fit with your model. Accept the ones that do; turn down the ones that don't. (Don't be afraid to refer someone who doesn't fit your model to a freelancer you know who is a better fit. It's just a good-karma thing.)
    - bad_user 13y ago
      I disagree with you, it depends a lot on the problem. If I were to hire a contractor to do work for me, I would require exclusivity for the duration of the contract and not because I want a certain number of hours necessarily. Being a developer I know that the delivered value is not directly related to the number of hours, I really do and in fact I'm skeptical of the value delivered by people claiming to work long hours. No, I would want exclusivity because focus is important and people (especially developers) cannot focus on multiple things at the same time, unless we're talking about things that the contractor is very specialized in, has done those things repeatedly and has a track record to show for it. For CRUD stuff for example, I wouldn't care. But for new, more difficult, more challenging problems that require focus and inspiration, then I would require exclusivity. On the types of problems that I currently work on, for example, I cannot focus on multiple things on the same day, or even the same week. Sometimes if I get distracted by conversations that are unrelated to what I'm working on, my whole day is fucked because then I have to remember the context I was in and I'm already tired and out of my zone and I can't get back anymore, ending up staring at the laptop with a stupid look on my face. I have days in which I notify everybody that I need to get work done and don't want to be interrupted, unless there's an emergency. Sometimes I envy devops, or CRUD developers, or other types of freelancers that can rely on experience to place themselves on autopilot or that can deliver value in a short amount of time. For example devops get paid mostly for being on-call, which means they can get calls at 12 o'clock at night, but can also mean that they don't have much to do all day and thus can serve multiple clients at the same time. And note that I'm not comparing the difficulty of the job here, but about the types of gigs on which you can rely on experience or on short amounts of focus to deliver value. Or who knows, maybe I don't have enough experience and some day I'll be able to place myself on autopilot.
- ritchiea 13y ago
  Thanks for the advice. Some people do ask out of curiosity in the initial conversation. Or just ask "what else are you working on?"
  - jarrett 13y ago
    > Or just ask "what else are you working on?" You could say something like this: "I'm generally not able to disclose details about other projects. But I can tell you that their effect on my availability will be..."
    - stinos 13y ago
      don't do that, just be straightforward instead. At least they know what they are dealing with, liking it or not is simething else. Sure, it's not a blatant lie, but imo it comes close enough. Suppose you do say this, and later a client finds out you actually hardly have any or no other projects ('work' projects, that is), I'm pretty sure they would think you haven't been completely honest. And such thoughts harm trust.
      - jarrett 13y ago
        > Sure, it's not a blatant lie, but imo it comes close enough. That's only the case if you have literally no other projects. If you have even one other project, it's not the slightest bit misleading. All I recommended saying is that you don't disclose details about your other work. That statement implies nothing about the volume of the other work, except that it's non-zero.
  - jackowayed 13y ago
    If I were in your shoes, I would frame the rest of the time as professional development, which is likely a positive sign that might convince them to give you high rates that at times grow. "I aim for about 25 hours/week of client work so I have plenty of time for professional development and personal projects where I can focus on learning instead of delivering the best results for my clients." If phrased right, you can make it sound like you're already an expert at what you're doing for them, which is why you don't necessarily learn as much from it, so it's important to spend time honing your skills in new areas so you can expand your offerings.
sebslomski 13y ago
I envy your work style, but I'm constantly afraid I would then be poor when I'm old. What's your retirement plan? Do you even have one yet? Don't take me wrong, I'm in my mid 20s and I live in a country with offers you an ok retirement.
- ritchiea 13y ago
  Well, to be frank, I am putting off thinking seriously about retirement. I feel like I can accomplish some substantial creative work and that the time to try to do that is now while I'm young. I guess you could say I'm hedging multiple interests, with the expectation that if none of my experiments takes off I'll have to try out something different and more full time in the future. Just to be clear, the idea isn't to not work. In many cases I'm actually working far more than 40 hours a week, but I'm only doing 25 hours of work for some person or organization that is paying me. But I'm working on stuff I personally care about.
  - josefresco 13y ago
    Some of us work for today ... but many of us work for tomorrow. Let's hope your side projects prove fruitful.
    - psyklic 13y ago
      Even at working 25 hours a week, a freelancer can make a good income.
      - ritchiea 13y ago
        That's true. I am doing far better than just scraping by but I also don't have much in terms of savings. One challenge is that I live in Brooklyn, which has a high cost of living.
- jmaschad 13y ago
  I used to think like that a lot but more and more I wonder if it is really a good idea to go through life in a way so you have it nice when you retire.
hindsightbias 13y ago
Good luck. My goal is to retire to a 20 hour or 3 day work week some day. Need to think of some passive-aggressive domain name to get that thought across. Maybe retiredguru.com or something.
udfalkso 13y ago
A few years ago I decided that I wanted more free time to work on side projects, travel, whatever, and I made what I thought was a rather reasonable offer to my current employer and a couple of suitors. I said "pay me 3/5ths of the salary you just offered me and I'll work 3 days a week". I also offered to keep this arrangement flexible so that I could work in stretches of varying lengths if needed. This did not go over well. People were actually offended by this proposition and it went nowhere. As a founder myself, I understand the desire to only hire people that will give you their full heart and soul. But, I'm also a practical person and if someone's skills are valuable to me, then they are very likely still valuable in part. In fact, when it comes to a product/engineering position, I think the employer would come out on top in such a scenario. They still get access to the person's brain and all of their knowledge and ideas. For someone that's being offered high compensation, their knowledge and ideas are probably a big part of the reason why.
- embwbam 13y ago
  I've tried this several times too and it has never worked well. I've been both employee and employer and I really wish people were more rational about this. Not only that but I think this is the key to fix the economy! Think about it: if people could accept salary cuts for less work we would have more jobs and could transition to an eventual post-scarcity economy smoothly. Creative workers don't output more than 25 quality hours a week anyway.
  - ritchiea 13y ago
    I think for many people, most people even, this is not a rational decision. It's not about your time being worth a certain amount of value to the company and 4/5 or 3/5 of availability being worth proportionately less. Some people are offended by the idea of you wanting to structure your weeks differently in the first place & think of it purely as special treatment. They are obsessed with the idea of a five day work week and the traditional employer-employee relationship and accepting employment on non-standard terms would be giving away the employer's implicit power over the employee.
    - 13y ago
goatforce5 13y ago
I left a job in the midst of Dotcom Boom 1.0. When I was trying to resign, my boss was like "Where are you going? How much are they paying? We'll match it! We'll better it!" He found it hard to grasp that my plan was to do absolutely nothing. In fact, I told him my plan was to go watch TV for a while. I was by no means rich but I had enough money to keep me going for a few months and this was during the Boom. It wouldn't take more than a couple of days to find a job when I was ready for one. If you're living paycheck to paycheck and have big responsibilities (kids, a mortgage, etc) it can be inconceivable that you're willing/able to not play the game of trying to always acquire as much money as possible.

jarrett 13y ago

How do clients become aware that you only work 25 hours per week? If they're asking you "how much do you work," you can reply: "Considering my other commitments, I can give you 25 hours per week." They don't need to know what your other commitments are, and they'll probably be content to assume those commitments consist of other freelancing gigs. My clients don't know any details about each other. They know I have multiple clients, but they don't know each other's identities, how many there are, or how much time I give to each.

bad_user 13y ago
Some clients want exclusivity for the period of the contract.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jarrett 13y ago
  If they say they want that, they probably also mean they want 40+ hours a week. If your goal is to work below 40 hours, then such clients aren't for you. In that case it's not a question of them "getting it." You genuinely don't offer the service they want to buy.
  - jonnathanson 13y ago
    This is very important. One of the best skills you can develop as a freelancer is to read between the lines when doing client development. Some clients say they want a freelancer, but what they really want is a full-time, remote employee. They won't necessarily know that about themselves, and if they don't, they won't articulate it directly. So you need to get good at sussing things out. Taking a pseudo-freelance, client-demands-full-time gig and trying to compress it into ~10 hours a week is a recipe for disaster. You won't please the client, you'll drive yourself insane, and you'll end up resenting the work. The biggest favor you can do for yourself is to discriminate ahead of time. Determine which sorts of jobs, and which sorts of clients, fit with your model. Accept the ones that do; turn down the ones that don't. (Don't be afraid to refer someone who doesn't fit your model to a freelancer you know who is a better fit. It's just a good-karma thing.)
  - bad_user 13y ago
    I disagree with you, it depends a lot on the problem. If I were to hire a contractor to do work for me, I would require exclusivity for the duration of the contract and not because I want a certain number of hours necessarily. Being a developer I know that the delivered value is not directly related to the number of hours, I really do and in fact I'm skeptical of the value delivered by people claiming to work long hours. No, I would want exclusivity because focus is important and people (especially developers) cannot focus on multiple things at the same time, unless we're talking about things that the contractor is very specialized in, has done those things repeatedly and has a track record to show for it. For CRUD stuff for example, I wouldn't care. But for new, more difficult, more challenging problems that require focus and inspiration, then I would require exclusivity. On the types of problems that I currently work on, for example, I cannot focus on multiple things on the same day, or even the same week. Sometimes if I get distracted by conversations that are unrelated to what I'm working on, my whole day is fucked because then I have to remember the context I was in and I'm already tired and out of my zone and I can't get back anymore, ending up staring at the laptop with a stupid look on my face. I have days in which I notify everybody that I need to get work done and don't want to be interrupted, unless there's an emergency. Sometimes I envy devops, or CRUD developers, or other types of freelancers that can rely on experience to place themselves on autopilot or that can deliver value in a short amount of time. For example devops get paid mostly for being on-call, which means they can get calls at 12 o'clock at night, but can also mean that they don't have much to do all day and thus can serve multiple clients at the same time. And note that I'm not comparing the difficulty of the job here, but about the types of gigs on which you can rely on experience or on short amounts of focus to deliver value. Or who knows, maybe I don't have enough experience and some day I'll be able to place myself on autopilot.
ritchiea 13y ago
Thanks for the advice. Some people do ask out of curiosity in the initial conversation. Or just ask "what else are you working on?"
- jarrett 13y ago
  > Or just ask "what else are you working on?" You could say something like this: "I'm generally not able to disclose details about other projects. But I can tell you that their effect on my availability will be..."
  - stinos 13y ago
    don't do that, just be straightforward instead. At least they know what they are dealing with, liking it or not is simething else. Sure, it's not a blatant lie, but imo it comes close enough. Suppose you do say this, and later a client finds out you actually hardly have any or no other projects ('work' projects, that is), I'm pretty sure they would think you haven't been completely honest. And such thoughts harm trust.
    - jarrett 13y ago
      > Sure, it's not a blatant lie, but imo it comes close enough. That's only the case if you have literally no other projects. If you have even one other project, it's not the slightest bit misleading. All I recommended saying is that you don't disclose details about your other work. That statement implies nothing about the volume of the other work, except that it's non-zero.
- jackowayed 13y ago
  If I were in your shoes, I would frame the rest of the time as professional development, which is likely a positive sign that might convince them to give you high rates that at times grow. "I aim for about 25 hours/week of client work so I have plenty of time for professional development and personal projects where I can focus on learning instead of delivering the best results for my clients." If phrased right, you can make it sound like you're already an expert at what you're doing for them, which is why you don't necessarily learn as much from it, so it's important to spend time honing your skills in new areas so you can expand your offerings.

sebslomski 13y ago

I envy your work style, but I'm constantly afraid I would then be poor when I'm old. What's your retirement plan? Do you even have one yet? Don't take me wrong, I'm in my mid 20s and I live in a country with offers you an ok retirement.

ritchiea 13y ago
Well, to be frank, I am putting off thinking seriously about retirement. I feel like I can accomplish some substantial creative work and that the time to try to do that is now while I'm young. I guess you could say I'm hedging multiple interests, with the expectation that if none of my experiments takes off I'll have to try out something different and more full time in the future. Just to be clear, the idea isn't to not work. In many cases I'm actually working far more than 40 hours a week, but I'm only doing 25 hours of work for some person or organization that is paying me. But I'm working on stuff I personally care about.
- josefresco 13y ago
  Some of us work for today ... but many of us work for tomorrow. Let's hope your side projects prove fruitful.
  - psyklic 13y ago
    Even at working 25 hours a week, a freelancer can make a good income.
    - ritchiea 13y ago
      That's true. I am doing far better than just scraping by but I also don't have much in terms of savings. One challenge is that I live in Brooklyn, which has a high cost of living.
jmaschad 13y ago
I used to think like that a lot but more and more I wonder if it is really a good idea to go through life in a way so you have it nice when you retire.

hindsightbias 13y ago

Good luck. My goal is to retire to a 20 hour or 3 day work week some day. Need to think of some passive-aggressive domain name to get that thought across. Maybe retiredguru.com or something.

udfalkso 13y ago

A few years ago I decided that I wanted more free time to work on side projects, travel, whatever, and I made what I thought was a rather reasonable offer to my current employer and a couple of suitors. I said "pay me 3/5ths of the salary you just offered me and I'll work 3 days a week". I also offered to keep this arrangement flexible so that I could work in stretches of varying lengths if needed. This did not go over well. People were actually offended by this proposition and it went nowhere. As a founder myself, I understand the desire to only hire people that will give you their full heart and soul. But, I'm also a practical person and if someone's skills are valuable to me, then they are very likely still valuable in part. In fact, when it comes to a product/engineering position, I think the employer would come out on top in such a scenario. They still get access to the person's brain and all of their knowledge and ideas. For someone that's being offered high compensation, their knowledge and ideas are probably a big part of the reason why.

embwbam 13y ago
I've tried this several times too and it has never worked well. I've been both employee and employer and I really wish people were more rational about this. Not only that but I think this is the key to fix the economy! Think about it: if people could accept salary cuts for less work we would have more jobs and could transition to an eventual post-scarcity economy smoothly. Creative workers don't output more than 25 quality hours a week anyway.
- ritchiea 13y ago
  I think for many people, most people even, this is not a rational decision. It's not about your time being worth a certain amount of value to the company and 4/5 or 3/5 of availability being worth proportionately less. Some people are offended by the idea of you wanting to structure your weeks differently in the first place & think of it purely as special treatment. They are obsessed with the idea of a five day work week and the traditional employer-employee relationship and accepting employment on non-standard terms would be giving away the employer's implicit power over the employee.
  - 13y ago

goatforce5 13y ago

I left a job in the midst of Dotcom Boom 1.0. When I was trying to resign, my boss was like "Where are you going? How much are they paying? We'll match it! We'll better it!" He found it hard to grasp that my plan was to do absolutely nothing. In fact, I told him my plan was to go watch TV for a while. I was by no means rich but I had enough money to keep me going for a few months and this was during the Boom. It wouldn't take more than a couple of days to find a job when I was ready for one. If you're living paycheck to paycheck and have big responsibilities (kids, a mortgage, etc) it can be inconceivable that you're willing/able to not play the game of trying to always acquire as much money as possible.