This could equally have been titled: ‘Discovering that I’m actually a workaholic’ because finding ‘the balance’ so far has proved elusive.
There are a multitude of reasons that I decided to go freelance, but one of them was definitely to have more of a work-life balance. From September 2018 to March 2019, I was working a 9-5 job and then coming home to a second job each evening.
Now that I’m working for myself, I have found that habit hard to break. It’s easy to let work fill all of my time. I work all day and then, because the projects are things I’m excited about and want to get more into, I work in the evenings as well. I have also been taking too much on.
I am very grateful that I have been flush with work since I went fully self-employed. But I’ve definitely been operating with a lack or scarcity mindset. I haven’t wanted to turn any work down ‘just in case’. And when one client was very delayed in paying me, and another didn’t pay me as much as I’d expected due to my own administrative errors, I was glad I had taken on too much. Going forward, it makes it hard to take on less.
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I’ve made some changes to the way I work to help keep myself going crazy. But what I haven’t done is taken on less work. In fact, I seem to have taken on more. This image from Amber Rae sums up exactly the situation I seem to find myself in time and again: I have some free time, and then I get bored so I take on loads of work. Then I enjoy it for a bit, but soon feel overwhelmed, and need to let something go again.
June was meant to be really quiet, but then I got a new client and got accepted on to a course I applied for a few months ago. Then I signed up for a free email-based challenge. So. Here we are again! It’s all good stuff but, sheesh. There’s quite a lot of it!
Later on this month, I’ll be doing my six month review, looking back at how the first half of the year has gone, and what I want to change or introduce going forward. Figuring out how to claim back some more time for myself without lowering my income level is going to be somewhat of a priority for me over the next quarter!
Anyone else caught up in this cycle? What do you do to break out of it?
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