I think I promised one year ago to keep you up to date on how the freelancer life was treating me, but as often happens, when things got busy the blog was the first to suffer.
In case you’re new to the blog, I left my job as a translator in a translation/localization agency almost exactly a year ago and started a business. So, to cut the long story short, things have been busy ever since, and I think this first anniversary is a good time to reflect on how things have gone and where I should head next.
I probably said this a year ago, but I didn’t expect to start working full-time from day one. I thought I would have a lot of spare time and my plan was to do all kinds of things I like, trying to build my business little by little. Having said that, I’m not complaining about getting my business off the ground so easily. Now that things are running smoothly, I could just settle for what I’ve managed to achieve and keep working like I’ve done for the past year – but I tried settling for ten years in my previous job and I know that I couldn’t be happy if I did. I just seem to change things and learn new skills from time to time to keep motivated.
So, what next?
Basically, there are two things that I want to do during the next year: I want to grow my business (who wouldn’t) and I want to work on projects I actually like. This past year I have already reached the limit of what one person can do, and I found that a lot of the work I’ve done has been tedious and not something I am really passionate about or want to continue doing.
In regards to my first goal, it is clear increasing revenue by putting in more hours is not humanly possible. Besides, I’m not the kind of person who would break his neck for a few extra cents. I’m also not willing to start hiring people to expand my business, and I’m not even sure how that would play out anyway.
So, there are two things I can do:
- Find work that pays more.
- Find additional income.
Luckily don’t have to choose, so I’m currently working on both. This also ties in with the second goal I’ve set for the following year – to find customers with whom I will be happy to work and/or find other work that I enjoy. During the past year I have had to postpone a lot of other projects that I would’ve wanted to work on, such as photography, that would not necessarily pay the bills. (I’m also assuming that photographs and travel stories are the main reason you are reading this blog.) The thing is, I’m not that enthusiastic about making more money if it means doing more of the things I abhor, and I realize that the only way to do what I need to be doing now is to cut down the amount of client work and focus more of my time on my personal projects.
One of the ideas that I’ve had for a long time but I always brushed of was making videos. I started shooting video years ago with my first digital camera that had any kind of video function, but apart from a few travel videos that I posted on YouTube years ago, I’ve never really done anything with them. If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I relocated from Central Finland to the city of Turku on the southwestern coast of Finland a couple of months ago. This gave me the impetus to start to document my life and the places I visit here. No need to worry, though – this is still going to be mainly a travel and photography blog. However, making these videos gives me a good opportunity to learn more about filming and editing. Anyway, here’s the first video. Let me know what you think about it!
