8 in 5...

So now I'm a freelancer. It's 20:27 and I've just 'called it a night'. I am working solid right up until some mates arrive for the weekend, and even then I may sneak in an hour or three when they're sleeping. I have never worked so hard and so furiously in all my life. And yet, tonight when I go to bed, I can sleep a little easier knowing that I've put in a good hard days work, and have really earned my money. Sure I still wake up wondering what the fuck I'm doing and just how I'm going to find the fifteen odd thousand a month I need to survive.

That's a lot of money! But at the same time it isn't. And yet it is. And this is possibly the one quandary I now find myself in. This is purely a mathematical one, but I find the figures are not balancing. In the past they would have, in fact in the past it wouldn't even have been a maths equation. I am of course referring to the dilemma of the 'low paying day rate'. I am billing myself out at the modest rate of R1800 per day. Maybe a little higher if I can see there is room for it, and maybe a little less if it's long term stuff. My lecturing is the cheapest I'll go which is half that after tax. But it's easy work, and I love lecturing.

So when I'm offered an opportunity to work on a computer game to develop material it would, in the past, have been an easy answer. I would have done it without thinking. Now however there are two big minuses to that one big plus of novelty/coolness/awesomenessness. The first minus is that the date rate is roughly what I earn at Damelin after tax. So once tax is deducted from that, it's even less. Again in the past, I wouldn't have thought for a moment about it. The second problem is that because the rate is so low, I can't be collaborative. Initially - to get the job I hired a second animator and we worked on the gig together. It was awesome, and the end result was much better than I could have done on my own.

Now couple that to the fact that should I land a job from someone else on a freelance basis, I get to charge my full rate (or more) the problem grows. How then am I to choose between agreeing to take a job that in four days of work, generates roughly what two days of normal work generate? Do I let it run purely on figures? Do I coldly turn down the work? Or do I soldier on, generating material and blindly praying for no jobs to come in? The old saying: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, is a constantly pecking at my head (for which I feel vaguely heterosexual with all this talk of birds and bushes...)

And this leads me to my next point: How much do you feel justifies your time? Working for myself my personal time is now totally at the mercy of 'the next job'. I don't mind the work, I actually enjoy it. It's a nice neat little puzzle that I can usually solve (unlike my forms of relaxation which is an interesting point). But at what point does one say: Hey my free time is worth XYZ and I'm not going to take a smaller job just so I can make money...

I wish humans came with different power levels so we could see: Happiness, Tenseness, neutralness, anger, boredom, frustration... This would be awesome and would solve a lot of problems. I wonder if we could genetically breed humans with little radioactive level indicators on their arms or something... Just imagine that old expression: read you like a book. OK so it would be: Read you like a nuclear power stations stats read out... but the point is there I think.

I will say this however, I have never felt more satisfied than I have working for myself. Truly setting up meetings, planning events, and then making them happen. And then - and this to me is the key - getting paid for it. Properly paid. None of this bullshit R90 and hour crap that full time offers. (Just wait until the end of the month this blog will be replaced with a whiney 'were's my paycheck' blog.)

So how much is your free time worth to you, and what kind of job satisfaction are you really realizing?

Or to be blunt: Are you truly paid enough to do the shit you do?