Category: Freelancing

Get out of the house
Freelancing

Feeling stressed? You should get out more

Stress is an everyday feature of work, whether you’re freelance / self-employed or an employee of another business.

Prolonged stress is exhausting. It messes with your sleep and it messes with your thought-processes. As a result, you make more mistakes and feel increasingly out of control leading, of course, to even greater stress.

If you work from home, those feelings can sometimes be compounded by being alone – either through an explicit feeling of loneliness or, more insidiously, through having no colleagues to vent, laugh or commiserate with.

What to do?

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Stress and freelancing
Freelancing

Freelancing, stress and Stoicism

We freelancers are a happy lot, but that doesn’t mean it’s a stress-free lifestyle. The corollary of freedom and flexibility is inevitable uncertainty. Sometimes it feels as if you’re always stressing about either time or money. How can Stoicism help?

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Creative worker
Freelancing

Motivating and managing creatives – @HarvardBiz

How do you get the best out of the creative people in your team?

If you’re engaging freelance talent, sovereign professionals, for their fresh ideas, how can you avoid choking off that talent? And, if that’s why people hire you, what should you look for in a new gig? What are the warning signs that mean this project may be less rewarding than you anticipated?

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Blockchain and the gig economy
Freelancing

Freelancing, blockchain and the gig economy

How can blockchain help build a better gig economy?

This article on Blocktribune looks at potential contributions, including:

The social web serves a wealth of information about freelancers and potential employers – but this may be inaccurate, making hiring risky. A blockchain-based platform consisting of immutable records, validated work histories and employer reviews will serve as an incentive for participants to deliver work of assured quality, adhere to deadlines and keep promises.

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New Freelancer, Sovereign Professional
Freelancing

The New Freelancers – @BCG

The BCG Henderson Institute has an interesting report into the gig economy; The New Freelancers: Tapping Talent in the Gig Economy.

The freelancer / sovereign professional perspective

Looking at both low-paid and high-paid freelancers in 11 countries, the report throws up some important findings, including:

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Freelancing and Brexit
Freelancing

Freelancing and Brexit – @davidhowell

On Forbes.com, David Howell has some thoughts on what Brexit might mean for sovereign professionals in the post-Brexit landscape.

The key is to understand your precise needs. If you are a business, ask yourself what skills your enterprise needs today and how these could change over the next five years. Freelancers due to their flexible working practices can enable your business to tap into the skills it needs perhaps just for short periods of time. Not having the cost and time associated with hiring full-time staff, could be a way forward for your enterprise to create the dynamic workforce you need to weather the Brexit storm.

Read the full article, here.Read the full article, here.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Freelancing

Gig economy vs. talent economy?

I’ve never been wholly comfortable with “gig economy” as an umbrella term. Too often it’s hijacked by those who want to paint independent workers as a new type of oppressed; in need of rescue from uncaring capitalism.

The reality is far from that, as successive research has shown. Independent working is most often a freely made choice.

Here’s an interesting article from Jon Younger on Forbes.com. Talking generally about adoption of the freelance economy model (is it as explosively disruptive as the hype suggests?), Younger makes an important distinction between types of freelance work:

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Freelancing

Uncertainty – the freelance / gig economy destiny

Are freelancers and independents preparing for the future?

You just can’t trust the future. That’s certainly been clear over the last couple of years. We seem to be contemplating the previously unthinkable, every day.

An accidental No Deal Brexit in the UK? A prolonged government shutdown in the US? Those things could be hard on a freelancer, contractor or other independents.

Traditional employment offers an illusion. Maybe that’s part of the deal: the regular pay cheque implies continuity, that the future is someone else’s concern. But, if you work for yourself, the future comes into sharper focus. Self-employment requires a more active engagement with tomorrow.

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