Part Timer Goes Full

Three months ago, in October, I quit my regular salaried job and became a full-time freelance developer. My son was born in July and I took significant time off of work. During that time I started aggressively pursuing work for Kestrel Computer. I made a rookie mistake of worrying about not having a regular paycheck and said yes to every project I could. I ended up working much longer hours and harder than I had ever worked for my previous employer with just barely more pay. The reduced pay was due in large part to me GROSSLY under estimating my time to complete projects. When you are used to stealing time in evenings & weekends to do freelance work and then see entire weeks of possible work time in front of you, I think it is natural to assume you could do exponentially more work that ever before.

However, even with the large amount of family & interaction with my newborn son that I missed out on, I knew I would rather be doing full time custom development work than working for my previous employer.

I had always bristled at any sales targets, quotas, or billable work targets in previous jobs. I am not primarily motivated by money and such things generally struck me as something “dirty” & un-pure. I am mostly motivated by the challenge of solving problems and by food . However, now there is a direct correlation between my billable hours and food on our table. Suddenly tracking, targeting, and making goals for billable hours/work no longer seems cheap & tawdry but rather vital & important. To ensure that I am accountable, my wife is helping set my billable work goals & tracking them. To motivate us, if I hit my billable work goals every week in the month, we get a date night. With a 6 month old & a 4 year old, that’s pretty good motivation.

I’ve promised myself that in the new year I would also be contributing more regularly (at least once a week) with my blog. The future post will be more technical than personal. I’ve gotten the opportunity to work on some interesting things and would like to share them with the community.