Transitioning to a Freelance Workstyle: Part 1

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When you are used to working in a corporate environment, you derive huge comfort from others holding you accountable for what you do. There is a whole set of external interventions that keep you on track. People working for you demand your attention. The people you work for demand your attention. Clients and suppliers demand your attention. There’s a whole set of activities that keep you moving on.

In addition, you have a natural community at work, and for most of you who are social animals, just having that day-to-day interaction with colleagues, suppliers, and clients is an important part of your lifestyle.

Recreating Accountability and Community

When you step out as a Portfolio Executive, it becomes very important to recreate many of the valuable things you’ve benefited from in a corporate workstyle.

It may be for you, but the transition is natural, easy, and straightforward. You find it easy to create your pattern of work. You find it easy to initiate your interactions with other people. You find it easy to build relationships beyond your former environment, and you find it easy to balance what you’re doing at work with what you’re doing at home.

But for most of you, the transition is much more substantial than expected. I’d strongly encourage you to plan some things as you make this transition so that alongside all the changes in finding different work with different people in different ways, you’ve also started to put the things that will enable you to live in this new environment.

I suggest you review the following:

Working from home

The first thing is that, as an independent person, you will primarily be working from home.? With the lockdown, many of us have had the experience of working from home. I went through a cycle of always being on: my phone and computer went on at 7 a.m. I was in back-to-back Zoom sessions until 8 p.m. ?I began to realise this was unsustainable. Because I didn’t have to travel, I lost the change of pace and environment from the commute.? Because Zoom meant that every meeting could be back-to-back, so I didn’t have a natural break between sessions. I rarely had a proper lunch break because it was relatively easy for me to snack.

After about 9 months of this kind of work style, it became clear that it didn’t suit me. Yes, I loved the interaction. Yes, I loved keeping up a high level of productivity. But I couldn’t thrive unless I had breaks, moved around and had a variety of activities. I tried to be very intentional about having a break at lunchtime, ensuring my day ended at 6 p.m. and creating gaps between meetings.

But you can easily swing to the other extreme. Because there’s no longer a compelling reason to start at 8 o’clock or 9 o’clock or 10 a.m., you are tempted to have a slow, flexible start, and you can realise that it’s almost lunchtime and you haven’t got stuck into anything productive.

Taking Control

I encourage you to be very intentional about recognising what part of the day you are most effective for different tasks. This will require experimenting and practice because you’re creating a new kind of rhythm outside the constraints of your previous corporate life.

Your freedom of working when and where you want also gives you responsibility for creating the intention for the work style you want.

So, some of you are incredibly productive between 6 a.m. and 11 a.m. when you want to do intensive, focused work. For others of you, the time until 11 a.m. is better used doing domestic chores, walking the dogs, and going to the gym so that a leisurely slow start will mean that when you sit down at

11 a.m., you are ready to do your very best work.

I have Portfolio Executives I’m working with whose natural rhythm is to do bits and pieces, perhaps from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. They can get stuck between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. to be highly productive with detailed work. They take a break with the family between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m., and they’re ready to do another 2 or 3 hours of highly productive work between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Find your natural rhythm.? Use the freedom of the Portfolio Executive Workstyle to build that rhythm. Choose when to engage with your family and clients to manage yourself in a rhythm that plays to the chronological strengths with the new freedom that has released you from the constraints of a corporate lifestyle. Experiment, reflect and revise your schedule with clear intent to maximise the benefits for you and your family.

The biggest risk is that you get caught up in a bit of this and a bit of that, and you never create the space to do the focused work you need. You never get to grips with the highly productive and efficient thinking and delivery work that will make you successful.

Identify the kinds of activities to be done

The second thing is to start to build clarity about the kinds of work activities you must do.? Recognise those you will enjoy and those that just must be done. Those can be done when you’ve got low energy and require high energy.? Start to recognise which kinds of activities energise you and which kinds of activity drain you.

In the early days, you probably can’t avoid those draining activities, but plan them for times of low energy so that you’re freeing up your high-energy times to do the most valuable work. Schedule the ‘drainers’ as early things to delegate to others.

Let me give you some concrete examples:

Bookkeeping, for me, is draining. It’s low energy. Submitting my expenses, keeping my accounts up to date, doing the VAT and tax.? I hated doing it, so I decided to delegate this to a bookkeeper very early.? But I still do all my sales invoices. Why? It’s not a huge amount of work. It keeps me in touch with the revenue side of the business. ?I can check what’s going on with clients. Importantly, helping somebody else to do it is almost as much work as generating the sales invoices myself.

I set aside 60-90 minutes of high productivity time, typically starting at 7 a.m., to get all my sales invoices out as drafts. Then, there’s a low-energy activity, which is checking and sending them, that I will do when I’ve got little energy as a fill-in task when I’m feeling a bit tired and can just do something that doesn’t require a lot of thought.

Similarly, there are tasks that for me, I need to be on top of my game. I need to be in a high-energy mode to create new content and write new articles. Therefore, I will choose a time when I’m in a good place to get the content done.? But the temptation is to think I need a whole afternoon or a 2-hour slot to do anything useful. These two or four-hour slots get squeezed out by all the itty-bitty stuff. I never get around to that high-value-added activity.

I’ve realised that by breaking this task down into different activities supporting a completed task, I can do something productive in a relatively small time slot that builds the whole thing. If I’m writing an article, there’s the creative piece to generate the initial idea. ?I can dictate an initial draft in 5-10 minutes for a 1,000-word article. The transcription I delegate. The editing is relatively low energy, but I can do it as a fill-in task when I’ve got some spare time. To edit a 1,000-word article takes 10-15 minutes. ?It’s a small, fill-in task. Once I get on a roll, I can spend 60-90 minutes in one go and edit a whole series of articles productively. But I would never get started if I waited for an opportunity to spend 90 minutes.

Similarly, on the business development side, I love having conversations with potential clients. But the process of arranging the meetings is energy-draining. So, when I’m in a low-energy state, I fill that stuff in as rote, and then I schedule it very early on as a task to delegate.

What I’m trying to do is build a pattern of working where I do the low-energy, draining tasks at a low-energy time so they don’t impact my best-quality work. I plan to delegate these draining tasks to somebody else.

If there are things that you find you’re never quite getting around to, then note them, recognise those are probably draining tasks for you rather than stimulating and then put them into low energy times, just get them done, and plan to delegate them to others when you can afford to.?