However, it isn’t all rainbows and unicorns. There are a number of downsides associated with freelancing, which is why I’ve made the decision to go back to a full-time corporate job as a community manager. I’ll still be a web worker, collaborating with people around the world online, but I’ll be doing it as a full-time employee.

Turning Hobbies Into Paying Gigs

When I began freelancing, I was excited that I could turn things that I was passionate about and doing for fun as hobbies into something that people would pay me to do. I could do fun work and earn money! This worked for me for quite a while, and maybe it continues to work for some people over long periods of time. For me, those things that I used to do for fun all became work, and they became less fun as they started to feel like work. I also realized that I really didn’t have hobbies anymore, and I was just spending all of my time working, which left me burned out, tired and grouchy.

Pressure

On a related note, I used to enjoy speaking at conferences, blogging and attending events when I used to do them mostly out of a passion for the topic, and because they were fun. As a freelancer, these became business development opportunities. I started feeling a big weight on my shoulders and pressure to speak or write only about topics that were directly related to my consulting practice so that I could use them to get more business. Attending events shifted from hanging out with my friends and meeting new people with interesting ideas to meeting people who might need my consulting services. All of these activities became less fun as a freelancer.

Logistics

Anyone who has ever freelanced full-time knows that the logistics can be complex, painful, time consuming and sometimes expensive. Taxes are much more complicated and time consuming even when you have an accountant do them for you because there are so many things you need to track. Independent health care plans are expensive and not nearly as good as when you get them through your employer. Retirement savings is also more difficult, and you can’t save nearly as much in an IRA as you can with a corporate 401k, especially since most employers match at least a portion of your contribution. I can be very detail-oriented when I need to be, so I was able to manage all of the logistics without any big issues, but it was just one more thing that I didn’t enjoy doing.

Could I have made changes in my working style to make all of this manageable and still be happy while maintaining my sanity at the same time? Maybe. For now, the best choice for me was to go back to working for a company. I’ll still continue blogging and playing with cool technologies, but I’ll go back to doing this evenings and weekends in the hope that they start to feel less like work and more like hobbies again. If not, I’ll just have to find some new hobbies. Bridge, anyone?

What is your least favorite part of freelancing, and how do you overcome the dark side of freelancing?

Photo by Flickr user weeta, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

On the surface, it can seem like a good way to cut down on goofing off, but the reality is that many people use these sites to get information and, increasingly, to communicate with customers. While this can be a problem for some employees, it can cause a devastating productivity issue for those of us who do most of our work online.

I worked for a company a couple of years ago that blocked IM. We could use IM within the company to communicate with other employees, but it was blocked for any IM outside of the firewall. I like using IM for getting quick answers and checking in with people. While this may not sound like much, it was a big inconvenience for me because I worked with many consultants, contractors and customers who were not employees of the company. It didn’t take me long to find a way to bypass the corporate policy by using a new and nearly unknown web-based IM client. For me, the goal was to get more done as efficiently as possible, despite the obstacles.

When spending time working remotely and telecommuting, these social tools can be a great way to keep up with co-workers and colleagues. I often use Twitter to get answers to tough problems or find information that I need to do my job, since I can’t just drop into the office of another employee who might have the answer. Blocking social web sites only makes it more difficult for many employees to get their work completed efficiently. Let’s face it, those employees who are spending four hours a day goofing off on Facebook will find another way to spend their time goofing off, and the real solution is to deal with the problem employees, not to use broad policies to deal with a few isolated performance issues. Many employees will simply see this as a challenge to be overcome by finding interesting technical solutions to circumvent the technology used to block the web sites.

How have similar company policies impacted your productivity on the job, and did you find ways to get around those policies?

In describing the company and product’s history, Walker and Khalil indicated a corporate culture that was very much based around the notion of web working. While this isn’t completely unheard of for a large corporate, web working is a style that’s more closely associated with freelancers, startups and smaller organisations.

Khalil pointed me to a post on the company’s blog that discusses some of the cultural and technological adjustments the organisation has made as it needed to manage offices in Sydney and San Francisco:

• Internal communication is oriented around the Confluence wiki product: bringing together product management, HR, marketing, business metrics, template emails and PR.
• Task and project management, such as customer requests and bug reports, are tracked and managed using the company’s own JIRA product.
• Email is discouraged as a collaboration tool, being displaced by Confluence and JIRA, but still employed for 1-to-1 and “broadcast” communication.
• Lightweight tools such as Flickr and, notably, Delicious bring other collaboration and knowledge-sharing capabilities.

Interestingly, the company’s internal and external blog authors number around 160: an extraordinarily high figure for a 200-person company, with 80 percent of its staff publishing and sharing their work.

Also at the Web 2.0 Expo, I ran into Rodrigo Vaca, Zoho’s director of marketing, responsible for leading efforts to promote the popular web-based office suite.

Like Atlassian, Zoho’s  solution to geographically distributed staff in many different timezones is to employ its own products and services as a component of the company’s culture. More so perhaps, with a thousand staff in offices from India and the U.S. to Japan and China, the web-based foundation of the company is critical. Vaca related how even the company’s COO works from home in order to minimize time wasted in physically commuting.

What both Atlassian and Zoho’s utilization of web working indicate is that it’s a working pattern that’s very much suited to large, mainstream, multinational organization – something we discussed a while back in Telecommuting Trends and our coverage of the emergence of Smart Work Centres.

Read more about Atlassian’s web worker culture and tools in An Insiders Look: Part 1 of 2 on how we (Atlassian) collaborate.

After you set up an account with FairSoftware, you can create as many projects as you like. Each project has participants, and you assign shares to them to indicate their share of the profits. There are mechanisms for share vesting and voting on proposals, as well as payroll and sales tracking – the idea is that you form your team, you build your product, and you sell it via FairSoftware: you can have a purchase button on your own site, but all sales must go through FairSoftware, who take a cut (9.9%) of each sale to cover their expenses and profits.

There are certainly attractive points to this proposition, especially if you want to only build software instead of building a company at the same time. Having someone else handle the details of sales, credit cards, tax reporting, and splitting the money can free you to focus on your core skills of design and development.

The whole structure is governed by the Software Bill of Rights, a legal contract that you enter into with the other project participants. This is where things get a bit iffy for me: this is 3700 words of legalese which, like any other legal agreement, I would urge you to get professional advice on before signing. One thing to note is that the agreement is explicitly opposed to open source projects. Another is that there is a mechanism for throwing people out, which might give some pause (though it’s always a good idea to be explicit about how a contract can be ended). On the plus side, the contract is also explicit about how a project can get out to another legal entity entirely.

All in all, I like the idea of outsourcing some of the e-commerce and tracking functions for a small startup, particularly one that’s just throwing something against the wall to see if it sticks. But I’m less sanguine about the prospect of using a one-size-fits-all contract to manage these functions.