The Freelance Lie I Believed About “Freedom”
No one will ever know.
That’s what I told myself the first time I took a vacation as a freelancer.
I was so excited to travel, not tell clients, and work on the side. Fresh off quitting my corporate job, I loved the idea that
I didn’t have to “request vacation days” anymore. I could travel anywhere, keep my laptop nearby, and still make money.
Freedom, right?
Instead, I was up until 1 or 2am every night, trying to catch up on the work that clients had given to me.
So the next time I traveled with my husband, I thought giving transparency to clients might help solve that problem. I told my clients I would be away and that responses might be slower.
But the same thing happened again.
If clients knew I was working, they continued to send the same amount of work.
And I realized…I was not cut out for working while on vacation. I wanted to completely unplug and worry about work when I get back.
In this day and age, unplugging is something often talked about but not practiced enough. We all have email, text, social media and WhatsApp on our phones to keep us in constant communication with clients, even when traveling internationally.
Yet unplugging is one of the best things you can do for your freelance business. Unplugging on vacation (or even outside of a vacation) gives your brain a break from the addictive nature of our work. It allows us to be more creative, generating ideas to propel our business forward.
Yet…we still want to be paid, right? One of the downsides of freelancing is that if you are not working, you are not getting paid. Gone are the days of Paid Time Off (PTO) in the corporate world.
On the one hand, we are no longer limited by vacation time. We can take our laptop anywhere in the world and work while enjoying other cultures and places.
But on the other hand, unplugging is a lot harder when you don’t have an employer paying you for taking time off.
How do we reconcile this?
Switch from hourly to packages. When I was charging hourly and intent on unplugging, vacations killed me. I would have so much to catch up on when I got back, that I was working overtime…without getting paid for overtime.
Price your packages higher than your typical hourly earnings. This allows for buffer, which then allows you to reduce your rate for your time off.
For instance, if hourly work typically brings in about $1,100/month, aim for packages around $1,500–$1,800/month. Divide your monthly fee by the number of working days in the month to determine a daily rate. Example: $1,800 ÷ 22 working days = ~$82/day.If you unplug for 5 days, subtract $410 from the monthly fee.Your client pays $1,390, and you still earn $290 more than your average month on an hourly rate. This allows you to unplug completely, while also being fair to your client in payment.
One thing to note on this - if you decide to completely unplug and charge a lesser rate, the client must take over your duties while you are gone and unplug. They are reserving your time and expertise, even if the work happens later. (A client helped me realize this! He was always saving the work and asked me why I do the daily rate subtraction method…he was the one that said I can still be paid the same rate every month as long as he doesn’t have to handle the work. Eureka! Cha-ching!)
Subcontract the work while you are out. I have done this before, but the subcontractor must be very good at what they do. Sure, they can’t do every single thing you do, but they must be pretty proficient to take over while you are unplugging and shouldn’t need to ask you a lot of questions. This means training them/testing them before they come onboard. I usually pay temporary subs an hourly rate and still charge the client the same monthly rate.
I’m fresh off the plane, coming back from a vacation to Italy. I turned off notifications from my email and kept my phone on airplane mode for photos. I still received texts, but my clients didn’t get in touch with me at all. I had prepared them all beforehand and have firm guidelines in my contracts that allow me to unplug. I canceled my coaching call, which I rarely do, but made sure I did a bonus training the week before.
This allowed me to create that spark of creativity that I so badly need sometimes. It gave me a time to think, generate new ideas, and sometimes - not think about my freelance and coaching business at all.
Unplugging and vacationing can go hand-in-hand. You have to be strategic and set firm boundaries.
Freelancing is supposed to give you freedom. But freedom doesn’t come from working on a vacation at midnight.
It comes from building a business that can run without you for a little while.
If you’re struggling to remove hourly rates from your freelance business, my free training will help you get onto packages seamlessly: https://profitpathway.kirimohan.com/profit-pathway
This post was originally written for Substack. In order to get the latest updates on how to build a stable freelance business, please subscribe.
