The Freelancer Dream
Well, we really can be dumb, can’t we? Freelancers, I mean. We sat at our cubicles or in traffic fantasizing about working from home.
Work in our PJs. Make a new cup of coffee whenever we want. SpEnD mOrE tImE wItH tHe KiDs!
Right…
It’s a fun fantasy. Cubicles suck. Office politics suck. Traffic sucks. What better to get us through the day than a mental escape from the tedium of office life?
Challenge Accepted
Then it happens. We take the leap. We quit our day jobs, set up our nice little home office, and snuggle up in our PJs with a cup of coffee and our laptop.
Time to get to work. Time to (in my case) let the words flow into the hot mic.
I’ve got my manuscript up. I’m in the groove. I’ve reached a particularly tense moment in my copy. The mood is everything. I open my mouth to speak my next line. And then…
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! The sweet, sweet sounds of a heavy-footed toddler running away from her mother (who is also a freelancer, like me).
Aaaaaaaw. So cute. So…
Disrupting.
This isn’t what we signed up for. Why the heck did we think we’d be able to meld home and work life like this?
Silly Voice Actor! Working From Home Is For... Not You.
This was our predicament. And as it turns out, we weren’t alone.
Freelancer Facebook groups and forums across the internet are filled with complaints about everything from trying to stay focused to dealing with the intrusions of little ones needing to be fed and entertained. (I mean, what’s with that?)
As it turns out, a good friend of mine was having the same struggles.
She’s a copywriter and nutrition expert who, like us, just had a baby. And she’s a freelancer. Our little tikes were born only three weeks apart.
Imagine our relief when we met for coffee one day and we had the exact same complaints about our wonderful new lives as parents/freelancers.
Her story might as well have been our own.
We had worn out the goodwill of our parents and in-laws. They needed to get back to their own lives too.
What would we do?
What's A Freelancer To Do?
I noticed my friend calling out to her friends on Facebook looking for a coworking space that offered childcare. We had a nanny for our two kids, but could only afford her for half-days, four days a week.
Let me tell you, that’s not a lot of time to get to work. As soon as you start getting some traction, it’s time to take the kids back.
And for a voice actor like me, that’s even worse. I need quiet to record.
This setup wasn’t working out too well. My wife has a lot of conference calls with her home office. And my friend’s kid wasn’t fond of a computer being between them.
We were all at our wits ends trying to make this work. So we came up with a plan.
With Our Powers Combined...
Now, I need to preface this next part by saying that our situation won’t necessarily be like yours.
We don’t live and work in the states. We live in a rural area just outside of Guatemala City. Cost of living and services here is way lower than it is in the states.
We have a three story home overlooking the beautiful Guatemala scenery.
Just look outside on a clear day, and you can see lush jungles, majestic volcanoes, and a lake that looks like a beautiful sheet of crystal in the distance.
The thing is, this home is WAY too big for us. We’re just two adults, a toddler, and a fourteen-month-old.
We realized that if Guatemala wouldn’t provide coworking spaces with childcare, a recording studio, and a quiet space to hold video conferences ( I know right? What’s up with that?), we would just have to create our own.
We pooled our resources to be able to offer the nanny (and a helper) enough to watch all three kids for the full day, four days a week. So now we have a fully functional coworking space here in the mountains.
We have nutrition and content writing on the third floor, graphic and web design on the second, and a recording studio on the first.
It’s awesome. But the ability to get work done wasn’t even the biggest benefit.
What we discovered about this setup was the most unexpected part of our little experiment.
Is Anyone Out There?
By now, you all know how freeing it can be to take control of your own career. But there is an unintended consequence when we finally cut the cord and stop going into the office each day.
I’m talking of course about the social aspect of working in an office. People. Idle chit chat and watercooler talk.
You don’t realize how much you’ll miss it until you leave it all behind.
And by the way, sitting in a padded room and talking to yourself for hours on end really has a way of amplifying this problem.
But now when my friend comes in for the day, we get to catch up over coffee in the morning. The three of us get to sit down and use my dining room as a cafeteria and talk at lunch. We get to do the things that really make us feel like humans and break up the isolation we place ourselves in.
It gives us a way to take our minds off of work so that when we get back to it, we’re refreshed and ready to tackle the afternoon’s opportunities.
THAT has really been the game-changer for us. All of us.
"The Bottom Line" Or "How We Got Our Happy Ending"
Our journey to perfecting the freelance lifestyle is far from over. There is still a lot for the three of us to learn.
There will be a lot more stumbling blocks in our future. But we are relieved to have been able to increase our productivity and bring back some of the positive aspects of office life that we unintentionally threw out with the proverbial bathwater.
It doesn’t hurt that we can go hang with our little ones whenever we’re missing them either.
After all, the whole reason we did this was to live the life we wanted to live.
