Reflections on my first month of self-employment
January can feel like an endless month, but I was surprised to realise this week that it was already coming to a close. I left my job at Christmas - leaving behind life as an employee, officially, on 31 December. Since then I have been self-employed full-time - early days still, but long enough for a few reflections…
Time
Time has taken a different shape. I have so many hours to dedicate to my work, yet days go so much faster. What I used to cram into three days can now expand into the full week (yes, the full week, more on that later). This takes a lot of the stress away.
Having a migraine (or two or three) with a commission deadline ahead is no longer a disaster. I can finally take that advice to share my making process on Instagram, because I don’t need to worry about how it is slowing me down (or take photos in daylight on winter weekdays!). I can research how to better use Pinterest, or figure out the ins and outs of overhead filming for something I’m planning. Setting up a shop on my website is no longer this huge job I can’t get round to.
I already knew this from jobs, but it feels even more true: a full-time day counts for more than a part-time day, because of the additional space around it.
Rest
I am terrible at resting. My business is what I used to do in my spare time, and that’s still what I instinctively do at weekends. I always intended to do some work at weekends to free up time to socialise during the week, but mostly, so far, I have worked full days in the week and most of the weekends. This is largely a very good thing. I am not a workaholic by nature. I am good at keeping things in balance and looking after myself. I work all week because it is still my idea of fun. I don’t have any caring responsibilities, so I’m very unlikely to exhaust myself, but I’ve learnt that I need to schedule in some of the downtime I was planning to have on weekdays, or I may end up never leaving my house.
A side note on social media
I know many people struggle with spending too much time on Instagram. I have the opposite problem: I worry that I don’t spend enough time engaging on Instagram, and it has at times become a ‘task’ that I resented having to fit in at the end of the day. Now though, Instagram is part of my work, and for me that’s been liberating. Being able to catch up on my feed during the day also helps me with the overwhelm I can get when facing a whole day’s worth of posts to catch up on.
Organisation
The jury is still out on this one… I am, mostly, a little all over the place as I test and try to figure out what works for me. There are both similarities and differences with my experience of working in a job. I was surprised to find that I enjoyed taking a two-hour break for lunch, a walk and some ballet, and then work until dinner time - the reverse to what I did in my job (short lunch breaks to finish as early as possible). But I still work in the same way overall: I swap tasks constantly. This is both efficient, because I work very fast but only in short bursts padded out with a lot of thinking, planning and procrastination, and a terrible habit, because it’s the perfect way to never finish anything. While it isn’t new for me, it is much easier for it to get out of hand with no external accountability. I’m addressing it by identifying the things that I’m avoiding that are also blocks on progressing on projects, and committing to doing them. I still have one to do by the end of the month, but the other two have now been ticked off. I will carry on trying different ways to organise myself and hit those self-imposed deadlines next month - trying to remember to fit in some leisure time too…
Solitude
I am alone almost all the time. This is actually why I was convinced for a very long time that I would never want to take my business full-time. I found working from home during the pandemic pretty much unbearable, so leaving my colleagues behind, once we’d finally got back to the office, was perhaps the riskiest part of my decision. I did know that working for my business alone felt very different to working in my job alone, but I am single, and no stranger to loneliness at the best of times.
The verdict? I feel both less and more lonely. I feel less lonely in my work. While I was nominally part of a team, I worked largely independently, and often felt alone even when I did have colleagues around me. The work anxiety I was plagued with when doing my job from home has vanished, because I no longer need to double-guess anyone else, worry about bothering a busy colleague with a question, or fear I’ll let someone down. Now the decisions are all mine, I feel confident making them. As for the physical solitude, I no longer notice it when I’m working, because I’m doing work I love and can get truly absorbed in.
But… there is a ‘but’. When it gets to the end of the day, having spent it all on my own, my aloneness is more noticeable than ever. More than ever I find I miss, not having people to talk to - I have many friends and family I could just call for a chat - but that one person to share my life with.
Uncertainty
I am not currently making a living from my business. I have a plan for getting there, but I don’t know if it will work. I may fail. I’m very fortunate to have a comfortable amount of time to spend on making it work, but ultimately, I need it to work. While I’m not worrying about it just yet, the uncertainty is unsettling, because as much as I joke to former colleagues that I might be back if it doesn’t work out, I feel, deeply, that this is the right path for me, and I really want to continue on it. Which, all in all, is not a bad conclusion, a month in.
