Self-employment Week: 65
“So you get paid a fixed amount at the end of the month?”
“Yeah”
“Kinda like an employee then?”
“Yeah I guess so”
I had just started some contract work with a non-profit that I was really excited about when I had this conversation with a friend.
They were paying me a fixed amount every month. I also had to offer a month’s notice if I wanted to stop doing the work, I had a supervisor, and there was an unsaid expectation to be available 5 days a week.
None of these characteristics sound terrible on their own.
But you put them together & it sounded like my worst fear.
It sounded like I was an employee.
Technically, being an employee is a legal concept.
An employee barters their skills, knowledge, experience, and contribution in exchange for compensation from an employer.
But it’s also a feeling.
One that we fight hard as hell to not return to once we go self-employed,
I’m the last person to tell anyone to be an employee.
But you can decide how much of an employee you’re okay being.
There are different ways to structure a relationship between a party that is availing services/value by offering monetary compensation & the party that is offering value.
One of those is an employer-employee relationship.
This one usually involves the employer having a complete say in most (all) terms. Time, money, risk, physical presence & scope.
There might be a few aspects of this you like and a few that you don’t.
Working for yourself means you have access to a buffet of conditions that you can pick & choose from.
I’ve done 1:1 consulting work wherein I set all the terms. What my rate is, what the project timeline looks like, what time we have our calls, what deliverables I send over, what tools we’ll use, how we communicate, or if we do at all.
I’ve done one-off freelance work where someone needs a set number of things from me, they have a non-negotiable budget, a hard deadline & a preference on how the project gets managed.
I’m also doing long-term freelance work wherein I’ve been working with the same company for over a year, along with other freelancers who have also been there for a long time.
We have weekly scrums, we use Slack, I have a company email, I work in my client’s timezone, I know exactly how much I’m going to make in any given month & I feel certain that work will come my way 3 months from now.
I know what you’re thinking.
But what I also have is:
Complete say on which days I work, opportunities to regularly increase or decrease my scope of work (& income), decline any meeting (no questions asked) & whatever else I want to change about the way I work.
I have control over things that matter to me.
You might think that the 1:1 consulting work where I set all my terms was the best way I have made money. Because it’s what we imagine working for ourselves looks like. Being a solopreneur, being our own boss.
But I hated it & I don’t do it anymore.
I didn’t have anyone holding me accountable, it was completely on me to be proactive & make all the decisions & it was also very lonely.
I believe that we are all beholden to some amount of rules. No matter what we do.
You can be a lawyer who owns your own firm but still have to come into the office to oversee your associates.
You can be a Youtuber that hired a team & now has to do performance reviews.
You can be a coach/course creator that offered weekly live sessions to students which requires you to be in a quiet place with access to a good internet connection at the same time every single week.
You can be a graphic designer that constantly has work because your client can’t take a break from posting on social media.
Be a solopreneur, entrepreneur, freelancer, contractor, independent consultant, or whatever else it is we’re calling ourselves these days, there will be things that you do that will make you feel like an employee.
But the difference is that you aren’t one & it’s just a few things.
Not all parts of being an employee are bad. Just the fact that you can’t do anything to change the parts you don’t like is what’s bad.
If you keep trying to make your work look like the complete opposite of being an employee, you may never achieve that.
You get to decide what your rules are going to be. Being answerable to no one & nothing as the only way to be happy is a false promise people have made to sell you a course.
I spent a lot of time thinking that anything less than absolute freedom from everything, no one ever getting to tell me when & what I do, and having no accountability or structure was what self-employed work was supposed to be like.
And if I didn’t have it, I have to be working towards it.
I am so grateful that I let that idea go a long time ago. I don’t know if I would have ever reached it. I don’t know if anyone has.
But I have ‘enough’.
The feeling of being an employee to me is a feeling of not having control.
It’s not a feeling of only being paid at the end of the month.
Or having a weekly standup.
Or having to notify people that I’ll be unavailable.
Or the feeling of having real deadlines.
So, I let those things go.
Never stop writing, please.