Do I actually want to be a freelancer? 🤔

Is it possible that I would be a lot happier if I worked a salaried job five days a week?

I have always been a big proponent of co-working spaces. Strike up a conversation about freelancing with me and I’ll start gushing about all the benefits of working from a shared space with others and how I hate to work from home in the first five minutes.

I regularly switch co-working spaces because, well, I can and because it’s really important to me that I feel good in the space where I spend almost all my working time.

Co-working spaces, for me, are the solution to the thing I hate most about freelancing – the inherent isolation.

An experience I recently had, however, made me realise that co-working spaces might not be what I actually need.

Earlier this year, I spent a few months working for a client on-site. I spent two days a week working in a small office together with one or two other people, depending on who was in.

I’ve said before that I fantasise daily about being an employee. Well, let me tell you, the reality lived up to the fantasy.

On a practical level, I was given all the tools I needed to do my best work. A giant screen, a comfortable desk chair, a pristine mouse pad that I took out of its plastic wrap.

Sure, I have all of those things at my co-working space too. But I had to arrange for each of those things to be there myself.

Ready for more?

A coffee machine with a cappuccino and white coffee option (I don’t know what that is but that’s hardly the point). A water dispenser. A SodaStream. The electric water kettle even had a limescale catcher.  (It was still full of limescale but, again, not the point).

When I wasn’t able to print out a document, I was told to send an email to the IT department and they sorted everything out for me.

On a more emotional level, the experience made me realise how much I relish being part of a team, though I have been telling myself otherwise for years. When some work thing did not go as planned, I wasn’t on me to bend over backwards to get it fixed. I would jump into firefighter mode only to be told: Don’t worry about this. I’ll handle it tomorrow.

To not be the only one responsible for the successful delivery of an assignment; to be able to share that responsibility with others … it felt completely alien to me at first. And then it just started to feel pretty damn good.

The ability to deliberate with my temporary co-workers and to not have to make every decision on my own was also something I came to really appreciate. The power of combining multiple minds, with everyone coming at an issue from different angles – it’s something you just don’t get when you always work on your own.

In fact, I enjoyed it all so much that I started to ask myself a question that I have asked myself many times before. Do I really want to be a freelancer? Is it possible that I would a lot happier if I were working a salaried job five days a week?

But then I try to think about the *actual* reality of working five days a week for the same company, with the same colleagues, in the same office, for months on end, and I’m not so sure anymore.

Because that’s not what I want either. I love my independence, the wide range of assignments I’m able to work on, and my financial freedom. I would, however, like to work with others and feel part of a team more. And no co-working space is going to fix that for me. 

No-one in my co-working space is working on the same assignments as me. Nobody is going to tell me at the end of the day: Don’t worry, you go home. I’ll take care of this tomorrow. And though a co-working space can provide some sense of community, it won’t offer me that feeling of being part of a team.   

I’m not sure yet what I’ll do with this realisation. Perhaps I’ll start looking around for a salaried gig that I can do a few hours a week, though my availability is so limited that that seems altogether unrealistic.

Perhaps the answer is to look outside of my chosen industry and take a shift job in a coffee place. (JK, I used to work in the service industry and customers are THE worst). Or maybe I’ll look for a steady, weekly volunteering opportunity.

The point is: I’ve realised that I, a diehard freelancer, relish some aspects of working in a salaried capacity. Now I have to do something with that information.

Do you have any suggestions for next steps? And if this is something you’ve also struggled with, what did you do about it?

Linda