Socializing for freelancers

Becoming a freelancer can become quite a monotonous life specially if you happen to be loaded with work. And this monotony is quite hard at the transition period. And especially hard if your time also happen to be fully booked.

I am lucky that my transition to freelancing has been quite successful that I managed to find work which fully booked my time. But it also meant that I was glued to the computer all by myself most of the time without much social / professional interactions. As all my clients are overseas and my interaction with them has been limited to emails/IM’s and at best, VOIP over Skype.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m on an extended vacation. Since I am living on the out skirts of Colombo and most of my friends are working in the city, it is very impractical for me to go out to meet them as that will require me sacrificing a good part of my afternoon in travelling for the occasion. Such meet-ups are also restricted by one of my assignments as I am required to be online in the evenings for a couple of hours for meetings.

So what is it that I can do to keep my social aspect in vogue while I build my freelance career?

Luckily in Sri Lanka we keep in touch with our extended families and they are quite involved in our lives. Therefore we interact with our parents, brothers and sisters and cousins very often. And our families have some function or other that brings the families together quite often. This certainly helps.

But this is hardly any professional networking as most of my extended family are in fields other than IT. Therefore, I feel the need to get involved in industry associations. One of the easiest and the best options for me are the .NET User Group in Sri Lanka. These guys arrange a meet-up once a month with a discussion on a up and coming technology topic. This participation will help me update my knowledge as well as to network. This network will also directly help me in identifying potential technical resources that I can collaborate on future projects while I build my network of collaborators.

Other than that I am not aware of many industry associations that I would like to participate in. Most of them are business chambers which at this point of time seem like an overkill for my time investment. If anyone knows of any associations or industry groups that I can be a part of, I would certainly like to hear.

Also, social life should not be limited to professional networking. Therefore I am going to make a concentrated effort to keep in touch with my friends and past colleagues, whose company I enjoyed. Also, I am thinking about investing time in an activity that I would enjoy, or a hobby. Preferably some sports/fitness activity or a social activity such as dancing. I am keen on a sport activity as being a freelancer gives me very little physical exercise while working from home and I badly need to shed some extra pounds.

Technorati Tags: Freelancing,Social Life,Networking

Full time freelancing off to a great start

I was planning on updating this blog on a more regular basis now that I am a full time entrepreneur/freelancer. But due to a heavy workload, a little bit beyond what I can cope up with at the moment, that had to be put on back burner for a week.

Getting back to the topic, as I mentioned in my last post, I was converting to a full time freelancer/entrepreneur from the beginning of this month. I hung up my boots as a paid employee on the 31st of March, handed over all the company equipment that were in my possession, gave up all the corporate benefits that I enjoyed (really? Were there any?) and stepped out to the uncertain world of freelancing.

Luckily I had a project lined up, which was a short term one month project for a client/friend in UK. They were already pushing me to start it ASAP, so I knew that there were not going to be any work less days for me. I was going from one project for my employer to another project for my own boss! Then there was another prospect that was hanging by a rope because the client and I could not seem to find a convenient time to discuss the project. I only had half a hope pinned on that.

So I started on the project A and at the same time started to chase the project hanging on a rope. For my luck that too worked out. I had attempted to secure that project as it had mentioned that was a part time project which required only 20 hours a week. So I started it at that. But just three days into it, the client informed me that he may have 40 hours a week worth of work for me. This put me in a little dilemma as I wanted to work on a freelance gig for only half my time and wanted to dedicate the rest of the time towards building my business.

But I opted to take up the offer as this client is also looking for a off shore team to carry on his work. He has no intention of building a team in the USA but wants to work exclusively with outsourced developers. If I play all my cards right, this should open up an opportunity for me to convert this client from being a personal client of mine to a client of my company, where the company can set up an offshore team for him. With this idea in mind, I agreed to take up the additional workload.

So in a nutshell, my freelance career has had a very good start as far as the assignments are considered. Now I am concentrating on completing my project A and the tasks for my second client and am not even looking at any other opportunities out there. When I was in the planning stages I was hoping to spend about 10% of my time in actively marketing/bidding on projects and was considering expanding my search beyond oDesk to my professional network, other freelancing/job sites like eLance.com etc. But so far, I have not had the need to explore these other avenues.

To be honest I think I will need to focus more on being productive at home and learn to manage the distractions. Being with the kids the whole day has its share of distractions and it is very easy to drop the work and do something else. I feel as if I am on leave from work and this naturally brings in a lethargy. But I am slowly trying to develop a rhythm and working pattern to overcome this I am on leave mood. And I will keep those strategies I adopt to become productive as a freelancer recorded on this blog.