#FreelanceLife - overcoming the inertia of self-employment

If you've never been self-employed, you're unlikely to have run across this. Even the least supportive of office space job will have its days' structures and challenges laid out for you by someone else (and/or require you to lay out this structures for your employees each day).  There's a comfortable reliable rhythm to it.

For us folk who venture out on our own, it's all too easy to get stumped by our own blank desks some mornings


image courtesy of deathtostockphoto

Usually the initial excitement and drive that lured us out of the comfort of employment (or, in some cases, that falling-from-a-great-height feeling that comes from losing regular employment) gives you a certain momentum. It's a rush. While it lasts of course...





Seuss nailed it: unslumping ourselves, escaping the waiting places we inevitably fetch up, it's not easily done and the trick (I think) is hook int some good springy support structures that can give you back your bounce when you fall flat, felled by that dreaded blank page, or empty screen.

Personally I get the most energy back by collaborating with others. I have a weekly creative "play date" with another design studio here in Edinburgh which perks me up immeasurably, and I'm lucky in my clients  - I leave most meetings buzzing with new ideas and (I hope) having generated some of the same for them.

We're social creatures, and adding that interaction to your solo freelance life is worth remembering, and cultivating, getting out of our bubbles and interacting, gives us energy to create when we climb back into them.

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