One of my hopes for 2025, my second year of self-employment, was that work would come to me more easily. With a year of clients under my belt, I thought I could take my foot off the exhausting self-promotion pedal and sit back and relax as the work flooded my inbox.
Yes, we’re only two months into the year, but so far, it’s not going so well.
I finished my last project over a month ago, and despite pretty consistent efforts, I haven't had any work since.
The six months prior were busy, so I know financially I’ll be okay without work for a little while, but it doesn’t stop it from being uncomfortable.
It would be smart to use this time to rest. I’m aware that when (if?) work gets busy again, I’ll regret not having done just that.
But it’s hard to rest if you have no idea when you’ll next have money coming in. I’ve lost count of the number of days I’ve woken up and told myself I’d have a day off, only to find myself refreshing LinkedIn moments later.
Maybe I’m being impatient and expecting things to get easy too quickly. Maybe it takes much longer than a year to have a queue of clients knocking at your door… or maybe that never happens. Maybe maintaining a freelance career requires constant effort.
But the thing is, I don’t know if the benefits of freelancing outweigh the drawbacks if I have to sustain this level of effort to make it work.
Maybe it’s just because winter is long and it’s zapped my energy — but the last month has left me wondering if freelancing is truly working or if something needs to change.
And I know things can change very quickly. One email, and I could land a big project, and suddenly my outlook would totally shift. But that’s part of the problem too — there isn’t much autonomy in waiting for someone to offer up a golden ticket to work.
When I really think about it, in many ways, freelancing hasn’t provided as much autonomy as I’d imagined.
I’d imagined being able to work when I wanted — down to the hours in a day, days in a week, and weeks in the year. Maybe that was unrealistic… but it hasn’t worked out like that. My working patterns are much more dictated to me by the projects on offer and the hours, days, and weeks of the year they require me to work.
It got me thinking about how I could switch up my approach to have a steadier stream of work and more autonomy in my working patterns.
One idea I’ve been considering is to design a service I sell to companies, one which I would charge for the outcome (not a day rate). The hope is this would both generate work and give me more control over how and when I complete it. But finding interested clients would likely involve a lot of promotional efforts…So maybe it doesn’t solve the problem completely, but it is something I want to experiment with.
I guess that’s what this last year has been all about — experimenting. Trying things out, assessing how well they’re working, and switching them up when they’re not. And that’s part of the beauty of being self-employed — being able to design things so they work for you.
I’ll let you know how my experiments go.
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Hi Hannah, came across your newsletter from Sophie, I've been a freelancer for nearly 9 years and now and again the freelance markets dips in and out. Jan to March is normally the worse time in the year and it picks up again when the new April kicks in due to the company's budget and tax year. Also, look into other areas such as creating content, courses etc.
I'm with you on this. Without having something lined up all of our mental resource goes onto finding the next opportunity - it's a fight or flight instinct when it comes to securing Income to pay the bills, which is hardly conducive for creative thinking, planning or rest!
It's helped me to think about multiple revenue streams to provide more sustainable income - it requires more upfront planning and some financial commitment but it's possible. I believe the work and demand is out there.