A place where you can find a cebu freelance web designer, freelance drupal developer,
outsource web design services here in Cebu, Philippines.

 

5 Ways to Regain Your Creative Joy

One of the most difficult parts of freelancing is the tendency of the freelancer to eventually lose joy for the work. You may have come, like me, from a gig that paid well but didn’t fully capitalize on your talents. You decided to start working as a freelancer in order to make money doing what you love. That’s what this is all about, right? Following your passions?

The struggle comes when, as with anything, the shine fades. But you have it extra tough as freelancers because you’re left without any of the protective structure of a formal work environment. This isn’t a salary position. You can’t have a bad day, get nothing done, and make your boss happy by doing twice as much the next day. An off day for you means no billable hours.

What happened? Wasn’t this supposed to be a wild ride toward financial freedom and fame for being an expert in your chosen field? For creatives, especially those who make their living by framing and finishing ideas, the grind of freelance work can slowly rip the joy out of the creative process.

How can you get the joy back? Whether you’ve been freelancing for years or are just starting out, I think you’ll find value in the following tips:

1. Simplify your process

Get back to the basics of your craft. Take away the client-focused “big picture” mentality and focus on the details how you get things done.

  • For the web designer, try giving up designing in-browser and spend a week with a notebook and pen. Steep yourself in the world around you and get a feel for the way your design sensibility has developed since you first started. You might even learn something new about yourself as take a break from the big screen.
  • For the copywriter, try to spend as much time away from your computer as possible. Perhaps limit yourself to an hour per day of online time. Sure, you won’t be able to fall back on your lightning quick typing skills to get projects out the door at the last minute. But that frenetic pace is part of what’s taken your joy. The idea is to dig down to the process that made you fall in love with your work to begin with. Surely you didn’t start freelancing because you hated what you do!
  • For the consultant, try distilling your initial interview process into fewer than 5 questions and spend most of your time listening without trying to prepare an immediate response. It’s tempting to get sucked into constant rapid-fire interactions, especially because they seem so “professional.” Slowing things down and allowing for more robust answers will give you more room for deeper insights and, possibly, a reminder as to why you started doing this in the first place.

2. Change your location

If you can afford to spend the next month working from a villa in Rome, do it! The rest of us will have to content ourselves with working from a different coffee shop or switching coworking spaces. The point of changing your location is to alter the subliminal influences of a place that gain power over time. When you look at your current workspace, do you see a place where numerous late nights and frustrated phone calls take place? Do you sit in your office chair and get that feeling in the back of your mind that you’ve plopped yourself into more of the same old thing?

Dig your way free of the suffocating weight of your current environment and try working in a space that feels “new.”

3. Resurrect an old passion

Perhaps you once played in a band, took pottery classes, or went rock climbing back in the days when you didn’t have clients scheduled back to back? The freelancer’s workday is a blend of work and life like no other. You can use this to your advantage and push joy back into your work by adding joy in another part of your day.

For a creative, improvement in one area will necessarily help with the rest. Picking up that guitar again will hone your sense of rhythm as a copywriter. Taking pottery classes might cure you of your fixation on grunge web designs. Rock climbing and most other physical activities will give you a boost by reducing stress and increasing your stamina.

4. Set short-term goals

Remember when you were a dreamer? Now your work has extended its gnarled tendrils into every part of your life and you’ve stopped dreaming. I don’t have a quick and easy solution to bring your dreams back but I’ve found setting short-term goals to be a powerful way of helping me think more about my future.

When you think about your future, you’ll begin to consider possibilities and hopes that you may have forgotten. Setting short-term goals and reaching them will help you regain joy in your work by reaffirming your ability to use this work you’ve chosen to change your life for the better. For example, you may have dreamed that freelancing would allow you to be debt-free but life is complicated and you’re back scrambling to make minimum payments on your credit cards. A short-term goal in this case would involve paying one of your cards down by an additional $300 this month. Once you’ve planned and achieved that goal, you’ll have confirmation that you can indeed reduce your debt as a freelancer. Nice!

5. Get professional training

Join a professional society, start a professional club in your area, or sign up for classes related to your field. Why? Because iron sharpens iron and the freelancer who knows she has an edge in her field is the least likely one to frown at the idea of doing more good work.

Professional training will also give you another reason to get out of the house and talk to people. Until we start using James Cameron’s expression technology to move the eyebrows on our avatars, we’ll only find the true joy of companionship within range where deodorant matters.

What about you? Have you lost your joy for your craft and later regained it? If so, how did you do it and what can you share to help us find your success? Thanks for sharing!

Get more tips and creative inspiration from Seth Simonds at his blog or hit him up for a follow on Twitter.


Back to top
571rht21