I’ve mentioned before that “always expect the unexpected” is good advice for freelancers. Both in the upbeat sense (be ready for unplanned opportunities) and the negative (be ready for setbacks you don’t see coming).
Though reflecting on the kind of unexpectedness that cropped up the past week or two makes me wonder how good that advice really is.
I can expect the unexpected in the sense of knowing it’s going to happen eventually. The car needs to be taken in. One of us gets sick. Contractors have to work on the house. We need extra cash for something. But knowing that, what do I do?
Some things I can do, sure. Build up savings. Give myself more time than I think I’ll need to finish a project (if I’d based the deadline for my time-travel book on when I initially thought I’d be done I’d be in deep shit by now). If I have a deadline, get more work done up front.
But this can’t be a cure-all. For one thing, getting ahead simply becomes the new normal. If I save up and then have to spend down (as I did when Demand Media was off-line last year), I never do this with a sense of “Well, this is what I saved all the money for, so relax!” I hate seeing my emergency reserves go down. Same with time: if I’m two weeks ahead, I want to stay two weeks ahead—if I lose time so I’m only one week ahead, I feel like I’m a week behind.
And in the short-term, day-to-day, week-to-week, expecting the unexpected doesn’t help. It’s the whole statistics vs. individuals thing: I can predict that I’ll lose time and miss days over the next six months, but I can’t predict specifically that next Tuesday I’ll be doing X so I’d better put in extra work Sunday. And just putting in extra time every week to stay ahead doesn’t work for me at all—I tried that when I was younger, and usually wound up burning out and doing nothing for a while (writing, of course, wasn’t my day job back then so I could afford it).
In the end, all I can really do is accept that problems will arise and roll with them.
