June 2014 30x500 Hot Seats!

Exercise #1 - Painstorming!

15 minutes of Safari note-taking on this thread: http://bit.ly/30x500-boot-exercise2

Ben:

- New Freelancer

- Constantly fretting about non bill paying time

- Asking about how many hours paid work people do

- Too much time spent responding to skype/chat/gmail etc

- "Don't even get time to do dishes"

- Need to bring my hours back

- Wary of employing too many people

- Got to bill for the non-work stuff

- Bill bucket for maintenance (fixed cost that rolls over)

- Give clients a sense of their obligations

- "If I'm adding value then you get charged"

- Track time down to the second

- Actually finding out what the client wants takes time *on their dime!*

- Not motivated to sit in a chair all day - picked the wrong career

- I can't stand to look at the screen for another minute

- Work is infrequent and short notice

- Prefer having free time - like to work 5-6 hours

- careful not to angst myself into over-working - always impacts the

quality of the work

- Lots of discipline needed to keep rates up

- Priorities: 1 work, 2 finding client, 3 fun stuff??

- Not enough work

** Themes

- Work life balance

- No time!

- Stress over working time

- Conflict over what to charge for

- Don't know whether to charge hourly/monthly etc

Mihael:

- too much non billable hours

- finding clients

- managing others

- writing proposals

- answering calls / skype / gchat

- too much context switching - big loss

- growing pains - getting everything in place

- juggling between clients

- what does the client want?

- too much working (10 - 12 hours per day) to bill 5 - 6 hours

- infrequent workload

- short deadlines

- work until done

​​Exercise #1 - Painstorming!