Track Changes

I deeply miss being in an office. I don’t miss the early starts and the commuting. But I miss the background chat, the gentle ribbing, and sharing the highs and lows in real-time. Not over a Slack message where nuance is lost. Endless wondering “is that comment passive aggressive or just plain aggressive”?

I freelanced for a year and a half after I left the hyper-aggressive startup. In truth, I needed a break. Freelancing allowed me to work a few hours on the same salary. I was lucky, I’m not denying it, the freelance gig I picked up was a monthly retainer, about 10 hours a week.

Two years out from the experience I realise how rare those gigs are.

But I wasn’t a very good freelancer. Despite years of telling myself and others I was “self-motivated” I found out I was a terrible employee. I couldn’t get myself to do the work. I tried all sorts of tricks and hacks to fool myself into finding more projects. I rented an office. I went to a coffee shop every day. I reduced my salary. None of it worked.

The only thing I was able to stick at was writing. Once a week, I wrote an industry newsletter. I hired an editor and set myself a routine. And it worked, I could write one 1,500 word essay a week.

Kris Abdelmessih writes, “writing gave me a clue that I could demonstrate value outside of a niche profession”. Writing has always been this tool for me too. Every job and opportunity in the last few years has come about because I’ve written. It’s too grand to say I wrote myself into those jobs. Although it’s a nice poetic flourish that would look good on LinkedIn.

But writing the UX Writer Jobs newsletter led me to leaving the hyper-growth startup and freelancing with UX Content Collective. The View newsletter led to working at the London Interdisciplinary School and reconnected me with a couple of ex-General Assembly colleagues at Emeritus.

Writing leads to confidence. Visual evidence I can do the work by showing I understand the work. It’s all an engine. Writing is an asset I own, which informs the day-job but also gives me something the day-job can’t. A space to explore ideas I find interesting and a space where I don’t need to make money. I can let these posts about nothing lead to nothing.

Will AI end this whole approach? Maybe, very possible it does. But I will keep doing this even when it does. It gives me something I can’t find in AI.

I’m not sure I would go back to freelancing. The year and a half I spent on my own was very revealing.

Want to take today off? Sure, go ahead. I don’t care. It’s your life. And I treated selling the work like I’d already done the work. Selling a project idea to a client was a massive dopamine boost. But it then meant I had to do the work. And I didn’t want to do the work.

It turns out I need the social motivation of someone telling me what to do.

Inspired and riffed on by Kris’ reflections at Moontower.