Thursday, January 20, 2011

I'm back!

I truly never meant to not blog this long.  Actually it was a goal of mine to blog twice a week every week this year and the second week in, BAM I got an awful cold.  Which led me to realize that the best tissues are in really ugly packages and that the medicines that I pick, I associate by color (red=for coughing, orange=for congestion, purple=tastes good but isn't really that effective...) which makes for a bit of a hard time when trying to get someone to pick you up the right medicine from the store.  The cold is mostly gone and I believe that I'll be adjusting that resolution to be blogging twice a week for 50/52 of the weeks of the year.  Let's get real.  Stuff happens.

Which is what today's post is about.  Stuff happens.  Life gets in the way sometime.  With freelancing, its not as easy to have a fluke as a normal day job (which btw I was fortunate enough to have some paid time off to cover the time I was off for my cold).  In all honesty, Sunday was the first time I thought in a week.  I'm sure you're going "What does that mean?!"  Well I'll tell you.  The Sunday before this past one, I was very groggy after waking up from a nap which either means that I A. overslept or B. am getting a cold.  Of course I didn't realize this until Monday when I started making my "I'm sick" face at people, getting told I looked awful and all around felt like that.  In fact that's what my loving boyfriend (we'll call him T.) started calling me and asking lovely things like "How is Death doing today?"  But I digress.

As a freelancer, when life gets in the way there's only so many options that you have when things come up.  You can be honest with the client and say that you really can't do your job due to X, you can lie to them, or you can just hope that they don't notice something is wrong.

I had a fantastic teacher in college who made it clear that it was important to follow through with your clients and meet deadlines no matter what and that the only time she hadn't met one was when she was in the hospital and she had another designer finish the project.  That my friends is the type of work ethic I would love to be known for.

I'm not there yet though.  That might not be the best thing to admit, but I pride myself in being honest about my work.  Its hard for me to manage school, full time work and freelance work.  I have this theory that only 75% of your life can go correctly at a time, the other 25% slips over time.  For example, if your love life rocks, your work rocks and you're balancing all your relationships well...it might be hard to manage getting to the gym because you're spending all your time balancing everything else.  The same certainly applies to me.  I'll admit that I'm playing catch up on some schoolwork that I had loosened my timeline on to make time for freelance work.  It will be a lot easier once I only have work and freelancing but right now I feel like a bit of a circus doing all this juggling.  So when a client asked last month if I had time to work on a project the next week I said no.  I explained I didn't have any openings until mid-January but if he got in a pinch, I recommended a few freelance bidding sites.  Why?  I guess I wanted to be honest and even though I was hoping he wouldn't jump to a bidding site (which he didn't) when life gets in your way and you have a client, you need to not through a rock in their way too.

So yeah, here's my first post of the week, which means that I need to either do one tomorrow or Saturday to hit my goal.  I've totally got this!

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