Life of a freelancer is not what it seems. Personally, I blame sitcoms and movies for making a freelancer’s life seem so glamorous – loads of money, fancy apartments and what-not. In reality, it is nothing like that; and this I say from an experience of a good three years.

Family ties

If you are a freelancer, and live with your parents, the biggest problem with the arrangement is that they will never take your work seriously. That, my friend, is the root of all your freelancing woes, because according to them, your work is “not even work.” My parents still feel that I am sitting at home, wasting time, while the rest of the world “works hard”. Unfortunately, even the pay isn’t good enough to convince them; but more of that later. The funniest (albeit sad) thing about working from home is dealing with your parents’ subconscious denial. There have been times when I have been communicating with clients on Skype and my dad would simply turn up and ask me to run some random, non-urgent errand. At such times, I usually ask my client to hold on, and inform my dad that I am on a call – fair enough. However, when your dad keeps coming back after every few minutes, it’s hard to find the humour in it.

Things get worse when extended family members show up, just when you are trying to meet a deadline. First, you must go and greet them. Then, you have to field questions on why you can’t sit with them because you have work. That explanation is followed by a brief interview about your work, which ends with unfunny (read: uninformed) jokes about how a freelancer’s job is not really a job. At times like these, I wish I could just weld my door shut and not let anyone in. However, if your room is unfortunately positioned right next to the lounge, you are bound to run into them. Add to that, your parents constantly knocking on your door or calling you on your phone, asking you to come out and meet some second or third cousin you barely know. Voila! You have landed yourself in a perfectly awkward and frustrating family reunion of sorts. The fact that far-off relatives are so full of intrigue about the money you make, yet believe that you are still a good-for-nothing sitting-at-home son (or daughter) is both amusing and insulting. More than often, on such occasions you just wish you could dig a hole to China in order to have some peace.

Discipline despairs

There is a reason companies ban social networks like Twitter and Facebook at work; they are a black hole when it comes to time. If all organisations allowed their employees to spend as much time as they’d like on Facebook and Twitter, there would be no productivity at all.

Freelancers, on the other hand, have a free reign. For them there is no such restriction. You can tweet and use Facebook as much as you want. However, when you are busy tweeting away or are frantically trying to keep up with City Ville, you need to accept that you will never be able to make that looming deadline. Freelancers need have an almost-unnatural level of discipline when it comes to work. However, practically speaking, most of us start our work at the last minute and hyperventilate to the finish line.

Free (ab)use

I prefer seeking foreign clients via freelancing websites because, in my personal experience, I have found them to be more disciplined when assigning a project, and more reliable when it comes to paying. It is not easy working with local clients. Let’s just say that they do complete justice to the word ‘slave-drivers’; often forgetting that freelancers are normal people, trying to produce humanly-impossible-to-achieve quality of work at dirt-low prices (read: peanuts).

That being said, even if I do settle for a local client, there is always something that goes wrong. For starters, a local client somehow thinks he has the right to harass you day and night, and takes you for granted as if that is his life-purpose. I have had clients call me at wee hours of the morning, or late at night, to ask me about trivial things that could have been sorted out via e-mail. Then, they ask me the same thing on two other voice-calling forums – Google Talk and Skype. Fortunately, common sense prevails and I turn off my phone off – or appear offline.

Show me the money

I think the biggest problem associated with freelancing is that you almost never get paid on time. No matter how good your work is, or how good you are with deadlines, clients never seem to process your invoice on time. I have had clients whom I had to constantly keep updated with the progress of work, via phone and e-mail. But when it came to paying up, they took their own sweet time. As luck would have it, I am still waiting for one of my clients to pay me for the months of May, June and July; and despite all my reminders, the money is a no-show. I guess they think that we have some Swiss bank account with unlimited stash, or that we freelance as a hobby. And I think to myself, if only that were true!

As published in the October 2011 issue of Spider magazine.