Until now, I am still surprised at myself how I was able to survive working alone at home for one and half years as a freelance IT professional with a work minima of 16 hours and maxima of 18 hours per day, including weekends and holidays. For my new readers who don’t know me yet or what I do, and for my avid readers as well, I’ve updated my “about page” for you to keep abreast with my life’s journey.

The past six months of work had been rough and very emotional for me – and very productive. You can easily tell that if you have read my posts prior to this. Before I mainly post about computers and all geeky stuffs that I do, then it shifted to a more personal theme that I liked, anyway.  Although I don’t regret and I consider my choice to work freelance and many hours as a good thing, I never imagined it could turn out very dramatic and lonely — at the same time rewarding.

Work Statistics

For the record, here’s my working statistics as freelance IT professional and a detailed comparison of the amount and time of work if I pursued a regular, 8-hour routine office work.

Daily	My Freelance Work	Regular Office Work
Work Hours	16 to 18 hours per day	8 hours

Weekly	My Freelance Work	Regular Office Work
Number of Days	7 days a week, including holidays and weekends	5 days a week

Monthly	My Freelance Work	Regular Office Work
Days Off Per Month	2-3 days during paydays	8 days during weekends
Total Number of Days	27-28 days, excluding holidays	20 days, excluding holidays

Yearly	My Freelance Work	Regular Office Work
Total Number of Months	12 months	12 months
Total Number of Days	324-336 days, excluding holidays	240 days, excluding holidays

Approximate Total Rendered Work For 1 1/2 Calendar Years

Here, we are going to calculate the total amount of hours I spent for one and a half years of my freelance work at home and compare it with the amount of hours working in an office. Using the data on the tables above, we get:

1.5 Years  or 18 Months Performance	My Freelance Work	Regular Office Work
Work Hours	Minimum: 18 months x 27 days / month x 16 hours / day = 7,776 MINIMUM HOURS Maximum: 18 months x 28 days / month x 18 hours / day = 9,072 MAXIMUM HOURS	18 months x 20 days / month x 8 hours / day = 2,880 HOURS

Now, the exciting question to solve is this: How many years would I have been working if my total amount of my freelance work would be translated to regular office work hours? Well, let’s solve that, shall we.

1.5 Years  or 18 Months Performance	My Freelance Work	Regular Office Work (Baseline)
Number of Working Days	Minimum:  7,776 HOURS  divided by 8 hours = 972 working days Maximum: 9,072 HOURS divided by 8 hours = 1,134 working days	2,880 HOURS  divided by 8 hours =  360 working days
Number of Months	Minimum: 972 DAYS divided by 20 days = 48.6 months Maximum: 1,134 DAYS divided by 20 days = 56.7 months	360 days divided by 20 days = 18 months
Number of Years	Minimum: 48.6 months divided by 12 months = 4.05 YEARS Maximum: 56.7 months divided by 12 months = 4.725 YEARS	18 months divided by 12 months = 1.5 YEARS

Conclusion: WOW, my 1.5 years freelance work = 4.05  – 4.725 YEARS!

That’s a lot! I can’t believe it. By the way, just to be clear, my boss have urged me to work for only 8 hours (he did NOT abuse) since the very beginning but I ended up doing more hours because our business is relatively new and there’s more work involved to make it stand by itself. There are other reasons as well.

How Was The Freelance Work?

For one and a half years, I’ve been consistently dutiful and diligent with my work. It’s one of my innate attitudes as a person who values being objective a lot, without sacrificing any quality that makes me a human being. That being said, I worked with my brain and heart – and they never failed me to accomplish things professionally and personally talking.

Working as freelance IT professional has been very challenging so far, especially for me whose major boss resides in Canada, and who occasionally works for other people as well from Europe and United States. So far, I’m lucky that I found very supportive and friendly employers. It takes luck to find one sometimes.

However, if you plan to venture as a freelance IT professional, I suggest that you consider these possible good and bad consequences:

• Get better pay. This is true in many ways but not always the case. It depends a lot of who your employer is and how much money they are willing to pay you. If you love being freelance because you earn more money than what you usually get locally, your boss will love you even more as he only pays you 5% to 15% of the actual pay you should be getting in his place.
• More freedom. In my case I work as a web developer most of the time, so all I need is a laptop and an Internet connection to do my work. If you work as a freelance, you can go virtually anywhere in the world as long as at the end of day you have something to show to your boss what you’ve accomplished.
• Prone to loneliness. Though you have the choice to resolve this by spending some time with people around you, the same choice sometimes fail as you can never know when your friends or family members will be available for mutual interaction. What I did to alleviate this was that I searched hard to find good online friends living from other time zones – which I luckily found. They accompany me everyday and makes loneliness easy to bear.
• Greater risk of losing your job. Being a freelance worker carries a burden of increased responsibilities with your job. Late completion of task or failure to comply with agreements can cost you your job in an instant. The worst thing when you lose your freelance job is that you don’t have a fallback.
• Get less welfare. You can’t assume your boss will express compassion to you when you are in distress. Despite your noble efforts to respect your obligation as a freelance worker, your boss will just see you as a money-faced person — just like him. Your boss will feel very professional by doing this – yet sorely very inhuman. In the freelance world, this kind of boss is quite common. If you are lucky to find a compassionate boss who treats you personally in a way that can disprove this, you are lucky indeed!

The list is long if I have to elaborate everything based on my experience, actually. I have worked hard to build trust from the very beginning which mainly emanated from being consistent with timely accomplishments and successfully upholding mutual agreements. If you want to be a freelance IT professional just like me, be consistent in bringing good things – it earns trust.

By the way, I’d like to inform you all some good news: I finally got a bed! Well, 1/2 of it yet since I need to buy the bed frame yet to complete it.

 

Still, yay! That breaks my record of 21 years sleeping on the floor.

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