2008, The Year of Freelancing and Twitter

I am a bit late with the 2008 yearly reviews but this one will be shorter than last year’s. As 2008 has been a very big year for me I wanted to blog about it for pos­ter­ity and this post will focus on basi­cally 2 things. I’ll prob­a­bly post more about spe­cific dis­cov­er­ies (soft­ware, sites, etc) later but for now…

Freelanc­ing

As every­one who reads this blog or fol­lows me on Twitter knows, I quit a 20 years job last August to pur­sue my career as a Web design pro­fes­sional. It’s some­thing I’d been doing for over 12 years any­way, slowly build­ing up my skill set and client base. Once I felt ready, the deci­sion to dive into the great free­lanc­ing unknown was sur­pris­ingly easy and I’ve never been hap­pier in my life!

My work and my rela­tion­ships with my clients make my job the most reward­ing thing I’ve ever done. Music used to be the cen­ter of my life and had been for more years than I care to know… but since I decided to move on from it in 2000; I’d been miss­ing that intan­gi­ble but very strong sense of pur­pose in my life. That strong sense of pur­pose is back now and is dri­ving me to try and become bet­ter at what I do every day. It had been a long time since I felt that way, like I’m really mak­ing a dif­fer­ence for the bet­ter in my clients’ lives. It’s a fan­tas­tic feel­ing but with it also comes a great sense of responsibility.

However, not every­thing in my new career is easy every day. I have to learn to deal with new kinds of stress like the lack of a steady weekly pay check. I have not lacked any money in the last 5 months and new projects keep com­ing to me but I’ve cer­tainly wor­ried about it more than I used to. Budgeting is the key that keeps my finan­cial life sane.

The other major issue that I’m fac­ing in my free­lanc­ing career is related to the other side of the work­ing alone coin. On one hand, I love work­ing from home in peace and mak­ing my own sched­ule but some days I really miss the social inter­ac­tion of work­ing in a “real” office… 

Twit­ter

I’ve actu­ally stated using Twitter last June before I started free­lanc­ing full time. Like I explained in my pre­vi­ous 2 posts on the issue (here and here), I’d resisted it for a long time and didn’t see the value at first. I’ll talk later about more tech­ni­cal aspects of Twitter like desk­top clients and the like but for now, I’ll con­cen­trate on the social aspects.

I have tried other social sites but Twitter is the only one I’m really stick­ing with for a cou­ple rea­sons. The first is that it became a “pres­ence” in my life. Unlike many peo­ple I am not afraid of soli­tude but, work­ing alone day in and day out can become bor­ing and lonely. I usu­ally keep TweetDeck run­ning on my lap­top at my side while I work on my desk­top. So when I need to take a short men­tal break, I stop my timer and check out what’s being talked about in my stream. I may shoot off a few replies, tease some of my friends or quickly follow-​up on an inter­est­ing topic.

Other times, I may stum­ble upon a tech­ni­cal issue or have an idea I’d like to bounce off some­one else. I just tweet about it and within min­utes and some­times sec­onds; I get use­ful answers and move on with my work. In short, in the last 5 months, Twitter has become an invalu­able resource for me on many lev­els. Despite some of the tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties the ser­vice runs into at times (fail whale!), to me it is the most suc­cess­ful social media ser­vice I’ve come across so far and I couldn’t go without.

In short, 2008 has been a very big year for me and 2009 is start­ing great as well. I’m learn­ing all about faith. Faith in myself but mostly faith in life and its abil­ity to bring me what I want and need. I wouldn’t have it any other way. For the first time in my life, I feel truly free…