Focused - 9: The Feedback Episode

Episode Date: November 15, 2016

In a wide-ranging episode, David and Jason answer your letters and tweets.

David Sparks and Jason Snell spent their careers working for the establishment. Then one day, they'd had enough. Now, they are independent workers, learning what it takes to succeed in the 21st century. They are free agents. Welcome back to Free Agents, a podcast about being an independent worker in a digital age. I'm Jason Snell, and I'm joined as always by my fellow host, Mr. David Sparks. Hi, David. Hello, Jason. This is a special episode for us.

This is our first feedback episode where we're going to read emails that people sent to us and maybe even react to people who are listening to us recording this live on the Relay FM live stream. And some people are in the chat room, namely Kathy and Doug, at least for now. So, we'll do some more of these in the future. If you missed out on this one, just follow our Twitter account and we'll try to announce that we're doing these on future podcasts as well. If you missed this one live, you can always send us email because most of the show is going to be email that we're doing these on future podcasts as well. If you missed this one live, you can always send us email because most of the show is going to be email that we've gotten.

And thank you for all the email. We're going through it. There is a lot of questions and ideas that came in. Yeah, absolutely. So if you need to reach us, you can always go to relay.fm slash freeagents and there's an email link there or you can just email us freeagents,

one word, at intertext, I-N-T-E-R-T-E-X-T dot com. That's my domain. I set it up. It goes to me and David, and it's fine. And, of course, you can tweet at us at freeagentsfm. That's our Twitter account. That's how you can be on the next feedback show. You know, as a meta feedback, I just wanted to thank everyone for all of the nice words.

We've had so much positive feedback. This is a new show. Jason rarely starts new podcasts. I'm an old hand at it. Once a month. The last one I started was 2009, so whatever. But everybody's been really supportive, and I'm really happy and very excited to be doing this show. So it looks like it's got legs.

You're stuck with us for a while, gang. Yeah. The feedback has been fantastic and we appreciate it. And we've heard from a lot of people saying, I'm not even a free agent or I'm not thinking of it, but I have this other circumstance in my life and we'll get some of these letters in a little bit.

And that was applicable to what I do, even though I'm not quite what we were initially maybe intending. And I love that. That's really cool, too. So thanks to everybody. It's a new show. We're still finding our way. This is episode nine. So we've got a long way to go. But we appreciate all the nice words so far. So the first feedback we had was from Matt. And he asked about tools for capturing ideas. He said, hey, thanks for putting together the show. Do either of you have suggestions on resources and tools, digital, of course, for getting an idea out of my head and into some kind of malleable system?

That's a good question. I mean, we talked about that briefly. For me, I use mind mapping a lot. So I have an app called MindNode. And there's a lot of good mind mapping apps, so get whatever one you like. But I like MindNode because it's simple and easy and it syncs across all devices. And I really believe in that idea that your subconscious mind solves a lot of problems for you. So having MindNode in my pocket on my phone or my iPad or my Mac at any time makes it really easy for me to capture ideas and just kind of build things that way. How do you do that, Jason? I got to say, this is one of those cases, there's an episode

of Upgrade that maybe I'll put in the show notes where I talked to Mike Hurley about my personal filing system, my personal organizational system. And that's a joke because I don't have one. my personal organizational system. And that's a joke because I don't have one. And I do have one, but it's not one that anybody who really focuses on productivity would consider appropriate at all. So my answer for this is very similar, which is I use my phone like you would a notepad. If you're one of those people who carries around a notepad and writes things down in it, when things strike you, I do that on my phone. I use notes actually, or reminders depending if I have a story idea, I'm walking around and I think, oh, that's a story I should write for my Mac world column or for six colors or whatever. I just, I have a story list, a list in reminders and I just write it in there enough that I can jog my memory about what that idea was.

If I'm working on something that's a little more detailed and I want to collect things somewhere, I will open notes and write down a few lines of it. I've got notes about things that I want to happen in my novel or ideas for new novels or ideas for new podcasts or whatever. Those all generally go into notes. And then that means that when I'm at my desk, they're there too. If I'm writing a story, something that's got some complexity in terms of the outline, I got to say I'm old school there too. I will open a text file in BBEdit and I will just start putting things down in order in the file. And then that is usually the file I write in and that stuff just stays at the bottom. And as I'm writing the, you know, the prose comes out

and that stuff gets gobbled up when I, when I cover it. So I'm not using a system. A system might be for this, just like for my to-do in general, a system might actually serve me better. Although I've tried in the past and I've always sort of failed to stick with them. There may be one out there that's for me, but I always think spending more time working on my system is more time that I'm not working on my work. And so it's always very hard for me to commit to spending more time on organizational stuff. Yeah, I think that's one of the slippery slopes for the independent worker is figuring out where it makes time to spend time on infrastructure and when it makes sense to just start cranking widgets.

And I think where they say water finds its own level, for the type of work you do, the system you have works fine. You don't need a super complicated system. the system you have works fine you don't need a super complicated system um for my for the legal side of my stuff if i miss deadlines you know stuff really falls off the wheels and the wheels fall off things you know my business is fairly deadline oriented too though i just i mean for me i put those on a calendar honestly i put my deadlines on a calendar there are events on a calendar that say this thing is due and i see it there. And that's, this is when Mike laughs at me. Mike Hurley laughs and says, are you kidding? Is that your system? But that is my system, honestly. But are you missing deadlines? No. Okay. So it's working.

So, so really it comes down to, you know, make it as simple as you can, but not so simple that it doesn't work. And if you find that, then, then roll with it. If it starts breaking, then start looking for something else. But thanks Matt for that, then roll with it. If it starts breaking, then start looking for something else. But thanks, Matt, for writing in. Yeah, absolutely. That was good stuff. And I don't know if we helped at all, but there it is. Let's go to, so Todd wrote in, I think this came on Twitter, and Todd said, I love the cast, love the show. I don't quite get the spy theme though. I think referring to the theme song, which is by Christopher Breen, who has written many a podcast theme song over the years, my old colleague from Macworld who works at Apple now. And he wrote that sort of at our request. We said it was sort of like 60 spy theme. it was sort of like 60 spy theme honestly i mean correct me if i'm wrong here david the idea was just we thought free agents was a fun name because it does say who we are as we're out there the idea of a free agent somebody who is able to act on their own accord and from that though there's

also the word agent which has this sort of secret agent connotation and we thought about sunglasses and a hat and then and then frank made the podcast logo which is sunglasses and a hat. And then Frank made the podcast logo, which is sunglasses and a hat. And then Chris did the spy-inflected music. And we had Matt Alexander read that intro that's at the beginning of every episode. So, it all just sort of went together as a motif because we were looking for a motif. But I think that's as far as it goes. We're not actually spies. Deny everything, David.

Yeah. If I told you, I'd have to kill you. That's right. But I also think there's another level to it. When you are often getting ready to leave the big company, there is an element of spy involved. You really don't want them to know a whole lot of what you're up to because then you're not being loyal to them. And sometimes that causes all sorts of trouble for you as covered in fittingly enough episode 007 which was about very much that same thing about maybe not needing to tell people what you're up to because they some

people will take it badly if you are working on things that are not your job like planning to leave your job they don't like that. I think also part of it is just, I'm of the age, I grew up with James Bond movies. That was a big deal. There weren't that many action movies when I grew up, you know? And so I have a warm place in my heart for those things. And so I just kind of get a lot of joy out of the spy theme. Yeah, it's fun. I'm very happy with it i love matt's uh thing we went back and forth a little bit on the uh on the the dialogue for matt um honestly my inspiration in writing that was the in the opening narration for the odd couple remember oscar madison was

our uh felix was it felix under was asked to remove himself from his place of residence. That request came from his wife with nowhere else to go. He found himself at the apartment of his childhood friend, Oscar Madison. And I liked that, the idea of like these two guys went out on their own, not about their wives throwing them out, but something like that. And Matt gave it his best British secret agent accent, and it's fun. And that's all. I never knew that inspiration. Thanks for sharing that. And Matt gave it his best British secret agent accent and it's fun. And that's all. I never knew that inspiration. Thanks for sharing that. I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid, let me tell you. So anyway, thanks Todd for,

I hope that explains what we were doing. It's just a dumb kind of fun thing that we, we needed a theme and that was our theme. Matt wrote in with a great question. In fact, I think this will get its own show at some point. He said, I'd like to hear a show about benefits. What do you guys do about health insurance, retirement, and things like that? I know you're family men, so how do you keep your independence while taking care of your family? That was one of my biggest fears leaving because I had health insurance. I didn't have many benefits in my old job, but health insurance was one of them.

And that's super expensive. And I actually waited. That was one of the things I was thinking, well, maybe I should stay because I have health insurance. But now these days, as we record this, health insurance is available to people, even small independent workers. We'll go into it in great detail, but there are options out there for you. For all of these things, there are options. I truly believe that what we're talking about on the show is going to become more prevalent over the future years. And it seems like every day there's new products coming out in terms of insurance and retirement benefits and things like that. So there's a lot of good options for you out there. for you out there. There's a lot to talk about here because then there's the question of like, do you choose something with a lot of, with not very many co-pays or do you choose something with a big deductible? And it's all about financial planning and we should talk about that. But the short version is, yeah, I have health insurance for my entire family that I pay a lot of money for. My business pays a lot of money for and it's my one of my benefits of my

business. And it's Yeah, it's a it's a big cost. And then retirement same way we will do a show about all these things. But I am I am doing retirement plan and I'm doing health benefits. And it was a huge point of stress for me to in terms of leaving. But in the end, I felt like there was a path forward that I'm not sure I felt that we had a couple of years ago, but that I feel like we have now. That was one of my turning points, because I was really stressed about it. At one point, my wife said, you know what, screw it. If there's a big problem with insurance, I'll go get a job somewhere that has insurance for the family. It's like she took that weight off of me with that off. She never had to, but it really helped me,

which maybe is another show about support from significant others. That'll be our super touchy-feely episode. Yes, it will be. I'll just record it in a warm blanket. That's right. We'll both be under blankets hiding from the world. So Marcus wrote in and said, you might want to talk about the consequences and possibilities of closing a business. We had a family business that collapsed due to one of the principals getting

dementia. The result was a bankruptcy. After the dust settled, I restarted out of the ruins. I've learned the only thing, the only final thing in life is death. With life, there's hope and a way to turn it around, even if it's by the skin of your teeth. I thought this was a really great letter. Neither of us has really experienced something like this in terms of closing a business. So, I don't know whether we'll be able to address this or not. But I really like Marcus's message here, which is he felt like kind of his business was over with a bankruptcy. And in the end, I found it pretty inspirational that he says, you know, as long as you're alive, you're kicking and you're able to turn it around and make it work, like he said, by the skin of your teeth. That is a very common experience. I mean, as a business lawyer, I have

many clients that have gone through multiple failures before they found the right thing. And there's a personality trait where you just keep peddling. You don't stop. And if something fails, there may be a discussion there to have. Maybe we'll bring somebody in that's been through this a few times. Let us know if you're one of those people. But I think it takes a recognition to know when to abandon ship or when to keep fighting and what you do with that. I definitely think there's a show in that. So let's keep that one in mind. And thanks for Marcus for sharing a very nice email. We heard from Jacob. He said, I'm a different kind of make your own schedule worker. I'm a pastor and the job that faces many of the same challenges you discuss on the show.

On top of that, I'm taking a year off to take care of my newborn son and launch a blog, which puts me firmly in the startup freelance world. I would love to hear more on the show about unplugging, disconnecting from work, taking breaks. It's interesting to me because the Mac Power users, we have a massive following from preachers. There's a lot of folks out there. And we've heard from Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, you name it. There's a lot of folks out there that it's almost like an indie mentality out there with a lot of these preachers. So, Jacob, you're not alone.

And unplugging, to me, is one of the biggest challenges. How are you dealing with that, Jason? It's really hard. There's definitely a whole show or more than one to do about it. And we've got some other letters that touch on this, too, that are coming up. It's a constant challenge. I try to balance it. One of the nice things about working at home is that I can kind of work when I need to and not work when I need to not work. And, you know, it's a constant challenge of making myself present for my family when they're around, but it's also being aware of my needs and taking breaks is an important one too. That I have those moments where it's the

middle of the day and by all rights, I should be working and I don't feel up to it. Like I'm not feeling well and giving myself permission to take a break, giving myself permission to lie down for an hour because I'm not feeling great. And that's a challenge, right? Because my bed's right there. It's not far away. I could just go get under the covers and sleep the day away. So I have to give myself permission to do that if I feel like, no, no, no, it's okay. And that's hard because then I've got a little internal boss, basically, who's telling me to get back to work. Yeah, it is funny how you escape one jail and then you build a bigger jail for yourself. That is not an uncommon experience.

I think we're all struggling with that. That's one of the reasons why I like doing this show, because there's a constant balance of family time versus me time versus work time. And for me, it's between the two different businesses. And I'm not going to claim to have it all figured out, but that never stopped me before from talking about it. So just, I think part of the situation is awareness. If you're not aware that you're not taking into consideration when your downtime and disconnect time is, then you really are headed for a crash.

Yeah, much more on this. This is like a little sampler episode where we're getting ideas. We're going to talk about some stuff more. It's fun. This episode of The Free Agents is brought to you by SaneBox. Use SaneBox to clean up your inbox in minutes. Sign up for a two-week free trial and get a $20 credit at SaneBox.com slash free agents. When you're trying to run your own shop, one of the things that can crush you is email. Jason and I even did an episode on it. You need to pay attention to email,

but you also can't let it take over your life. You need to be making money. You need to be cranking widgets. And that's what SaneBox helps me do. SaneBox pre-sorts my email for me before it hits my inbox. So when I look in my email accounts, I see the inbox has a few items in it, and then the other items are sorted into other boxes like news items or things that can wait until later. The beauty of this is I always see the most important email first and I don't get bogged

down with everything else. I cannot understate the value of this service. This one feature alone is enough for SaneBox to earn its keep in my email system, but there's a lot more you can also do with SaneBox. SaneBox has the ability to defer email. For instance, I have a defer box in my legal folder called Monday. And if an email comes in and I want to put it off until the following Monday, I just drag it into that box and it disappears. The following Monday morning, it shows up ready for me to deal with it. You don't have to use just days of the week, though. You could say defer it two days or three hours or a month, whatever. There's also a service through SaneBox

called SaneReminders. When I blind copy an email to oneweekatsanebox.com, if the person I sent that email to doesn't reply to me in one week, SaneBox sends me a reminder. This is really great, like when I'm sending a client a new retainer agreement or sending a proposal to another lawyer. I no longer have to track whether or not I get a response because if I don't, SaneBox will remind me. There's also the SaneBlack hole that allows me to get junk mail out of my life forever. It's like magic. But that's not all. There's even more powerful features once you start using this service. Because SaneBox is server-based, it can work on top of any email system that you're currently using.

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Check it out today and get your email finally under control. That's SaneBox.com slash freeagents. So David wrote in, not you. There's another one? Another one. Who told me that? Another David. So just a comment.

Many of the tools you were suggesting for the newly independent entrepreneur also apply to the newly retired employee. Finding new contacts, ways to do things, and even spaces to engage in the tasks one wants to accomplish all match the needs of many retired folks. like David. And again, we've heard this a lot that although we're sort of focused on our journey in leaving the nest and setting out on our own, it's really cool to hear that other people are finding ways to apply this stuff in all sorts of different ways. And I've definitely heard from several retired people saying that this is a good fit for their's a good fit for, for their issues too. One of the most interesting thing about this show is the number of people who are not newly independent free agents are thinking about it, who are getting good stuff out of the show. That,

that makes me happy. It warms the cockles of my heart, the cockles, the cockles and muscles. Uh, Hannes wrote, uh, in episode four,

you hit on something that is especially important for me as a free agent. Not only do you have to choose from the various alternatives like working at home or the office or where you meet clients, but you have the freedom to reject a project because you want to work less for a couple of weeks or enjoy more time with your family or can choose to take on even more projects and overwork because you feel energetic and want to get a little more money. A lot of my work is similar to the work that I did as an employed consultant, but it is the kind of freedom that really makes this a difference for me.

I get a job offer as a manager sometimes. I look at these offers, but so far it hasn't worked out because I couldn't accept the loss of autonomy. Yeah, that is a big piece of it for me. Yeah. Yeah. It's always a challenge that you have to balance. Do I say no to a job because you're turning away money, but that's something you need to do. You can't say yes to everything. We said that, I think, in our first episode. And then there's also that other thing, which is like, yeah, I do want to take this on because I want the money or I have a little more time in my schedule. And being able

to regulate yourself like that instead of having the job regulated for you. And I agree with that. I'm not sure that was my prime motivator. I think I wanted to try some different stuff that my job didn't allow me to do. But I've certainly seen, I feel the benefit of being able to self-regulate a little bit what work I take and what work I don't. Yeah, I don't honestly know if I could go back. Even if somebody said, oh, we're going to double your income if you just come, you know, work at this place where you put a suit on every day and go to our meetings. It would be really hard for me. That autonomy thing for me is huge. And I think it's, in some degree, a personal failing that I just, there's something inside me that makes it really difficult for me to obey at this point.

Yeah, going back to the kind of core reasons that we left what we were doing, like, if I was primarily motivated by money, I would still have my old job probably because it paid pretty well and I hated it. But if the goal is make as much money as possible, even if you're miserable and you hate your job, I suppose I wouldn't have been as miserable because I would have been focused on the money and it wouldn't matter that I wasn't doing things that were fulfilling. But when I left that, that's still the case, right? Like you said, if somebody comes to you and offers you a ridiculous amount of money, but it's for a job where you're putting on a suit every day and commuting an hour each

way, I don't think, no matter, I was going to joke and say how much is a ridiculous amount of money, but I'm not sure that would have to be a truly ridiculous amount of money for me to do that, because it's just not what I want to do. I have other motivations. Like, money is important. I want my family to be secure, but it's not the only decision, you know, it's not the only thing factoring into my decision, or I wouldn't be here. Yeah. And I think I don't want to come off as judgy. I know a lot of people who have jobs in big or even small companies are super happy with it. And it's a great way for them to make a living. And they do get that, you know, golden watch someday and have their retirement and it's just fine for them. I, that this isn't the answer for everyone as

we've said on the show. And, um, but, but at this point in my life, the autonomy, like this, this listener is, is a big deal. So Richard wrote in and he said, um,

I've got a little bit of freelance writing off and on, and I'd like to step up my game and maybe make a decent side hustle. Would either of you be able to give me some guidance about how to get my name and words out there? I, people ask me this all the time because you know, the Mac Sparky thing kind of came out of a vacuum. I had no intention of when I started it, even making any money on it. Um, I think my advice Richard would be, I think in this world you need an audience more than you need money at the beginning and be willing to give things away. You know, make it really good and just put it out there.

And the Internet has a weird way of finding quality. If you put quality stuff out there, people will find you and then start making connections with people that you really respect that are doing similar things. Because most people want to help people out. I mean, I do a series at Mac Sparky, these home screen pages. And the reason I do it largely is because I find people that have interesting content and I just want to point my audience at them. And it's a great way to do it because people love to see what they have on their home screen. So, you know, there's a lot of people out there that want to help you. So from my vantage point, make really good content, give it away so some

you know people can find you and then make connections with people that are doing similar things yeah you have anything to add to that it's um same thing it's really hard because how do you get how do you get your name out there and the answer is i think yeah you make things and you put them out in the world you you when people always ask me like how do you get your name out there? And the answer is, I think, yeah, you make things and you put them out in the world. When people always ask me, like, how do you get started as a writer? What I always said was, you know, find, you can just start your own blog and that act of writing it may teach you how to do it better you may discover that you don't know what you're doing and you'll get better at it and then uh you know then you've got some things that you could show to people and say look i would like to write for you and there are places you can write that will try you out and you have to approach them and kind of be fearless and say that but you got you got to get started and you got to write

regularly and you gotta um you don't need to write under anyone else's shingle, but you've got to, you've got to work at it and just keep putting it out there. And then there's luck involved. There's talent involved and there's luck involved. And that's just, and that's the truth of it. Um, and the, the media right now is such a strange business to be in that, that there's no really good roadmap here, especially if you just want to be a freelancer to be in that, that there's no really good roadmap here, especially if you just want to be a freelancer, I would say find a, find a subject that you want to specialize in and get really good at it.

And so that people will want to use you as a freelancer covering those issues. And that that's one way to do it. Like, um, Stephen Aquino got, uh, really,

uh, made a name for himself writing about accessibility issues and iOS. And he's written things for I'm more, and he wrote something for Six Colors, and he's been all over the place. And Apple gives him briefings now about iPhones, and he writes reviews of iPhones from an accessibility perspective. And that was an example of somebody who had a real interest in a subject. It was a specific area where he could have expertise that not everybody was specializing in. And that helped him make a name for himself and made other people notice. So whatever, whether it's technology or something else, I think having a focus,

something that you're really good at that is going to not be something everybody can do would be a big help too. Yeah, and underlying the Stephen story is he has a passion for that subject. Exactly. You really have to bring that to bear you can't do it clinically it's just not going to work yeah so elliot wrote us and he wrote us a very long letter but i'm gonna i'm gonna summarize because this is pretty it's pretty great um we asked for experiences about working from home and he says i live in london in a small one-bed apartment with no space for a dedicated workspace. Okay. That's amazing. And my wife lives and works there too. Double amazing. We've been juggling

this for a few years and have got good enough at making it work. So how does Elliot do it? How does Elliot and Mrs. Elliot will say do it? He didn't list her name. So folding exam desk that tidies away. I'll put some links in the show notes because he sent some links in and I can move it around the apartment when I do work from home. So a folding exam desk and a folding laptop stand for when he feels like using a standing desk. Closier Bluetooth headphones to keep out distractions. They can also serve as a wearable do not disturb sign. Treating the small annoyances as they should be. They don't matter and having a puzzle solving attitude to frustrations some can be reduced or fixed by being inventive and flexible

washing machine noisy and distracting put on the headphones move to a different room or get a sound absorbing mat for the washing machine to stand on that's interesting squeeze in some exercise in the day to break it up even 10 minutes of yoga or a seven minute workout with coaching from apps i find helps work at a different coffee shop or two every day for a couple of hours i'm fortunate there's five or more coffee shops within a 15-minute walk. That's the advantage of being in London, but even I have a couple within 15 minutes of me. Unlimited 4G Wi-Fi hotspot with good coverage as part of my phone plan for out-of-office work. This helps me feel more secure as I'm not using maybe unsafe or slow coffee shop Wi-Fi.

Keeping perspective and comparing things to how they could be far worse. For example, I sometimes get frustrated at the 10 minutes it takes to set up the folding desk workspace in the bedroom, but I'm comparing that 15 minutes to a mythical zero minute getting ready for work time. I feel better when I remember to compare those 10 minutes to the old commute. 10 minutes setting up the work area beats a one hour commute every time. And the biggest thing is to have a very understanding, flexible, and tolerant partner and being extremely grateful for them. So I hope this helps. Thank you, Elliot.

That was pretty great and kind of inspirational. He and his wife both are making a workspace in a place that has no room for a workspace. And they're making it work, which is awesome. Yeah, a couple things I got out of that. has no room for a workspace and they're making it work, which is awesome. Yeah. A couple of things I got out of that. One was getting out of, if you work from home, getting out to the coffee shop once in a while or something like that.

Especially if it's claustrophobic and you're like, you know, this is an enclosed space, right? So he, he gets out for an hour or two. Yeah. Another one that people,

people always talk about Starbucks, but a public library is not a bad place either to stop and work for a while. And those are everywhere. And I'm going to make a note, too, when we talk about the supportive spouse show. Because one of the things when I started, and I was telling people I'm going to be working from home as much, if not more, than I'm in an office. Everyone said it'll never work. You and your wife will drive each other crazy. So I've got a year and a half in on that, and you've got some time in on that too.

I want to talk about that when the time comes. All right. Do you want to share about Bonnie? Yeah. Yeah. Bonnie says she works from home, working in an office, after years of working in an office. And she still works for a company, eight plus years. But the web work she does allows her to work anywhere and that has an internet connection so i go back

to my home in san diego where i live with one son and his family and um from maine where she spends the summers and she brought her laptop back and forth she has a docking station she works during the day while everyone at work is logged off. And when they all came home, she gets to know her grandchildren that way. You know, it's a win-win. Remote workers, not just indie workers, can learn a lot from your show, too. So I will never go back to having a commute. You're right about the time, the money, and the energy wasted with a commute. You know, that's kind of an interesting point.

You know, we were talking about pulling the ripcord and getting out of the company. One of the things we've never raised is if you're not happy, is it possible to get some of the benefits of being indie? That is, you know, the autonomy and working from home combined with the benefits of working for the company with the insurance and those types of things. That is something you should be considering. You know, if you're looking down that road, you know, look at your situation. with the insurance and those types of things. That is something you should be considering. If you're looking down that road, look at your situation. Not all companies are friendly to this. Mine wouldn't have been.

I don't think yours would have been really either, or just the way yours worked out. We have a lot. So at Macworld, we had a lot of remote people. We had a couple people in Portland. We had a couple people in the Bay Area. We had people on the East Coast. And it was actually pretty great. And then there were managers at the company who hated it and wanted everybody to be, they especially hated people working from home who also would

come into the office. So we had 100% remote workers. And then we had some people who would work at home a day or two a week. And that's sort of a different issue. But if you're 100% remote, I thought those people were great. But I'm a wild person in that I had at several points thought to myself that we should maybe not have an office and that everybody should just be a remote worker because virtual offices and using the internet is, I think, where it's going. I think that's where we're gonna get because real estate is expensive and i'm not sure companies need to spend money on it in many cases and you'd be better off with spending money giving people a co-working facility allowance or something like that and letting them choose to use that or just work out of a cafe and i feel like that's where

we're going in the 21st century. So I appreciate what Bonnie wrote in about it's yet another kind of category of people we hadn't really anticipated when we started the show, but that I think is, it's true. You know, if you're, if you're especially making your own hours to a certain extent, but you're also managing your time and figuring out how to set out a workspace for yourself, even if there is an office somewhere and you're just not in it. Yeah. And a distinction point between Bonnie and Jason, which stands out for me is, I mean, Jason wanted to do different things. I mean, part of this journey for you was to try some things that weren't possible working for the big company, whereas it sounds like Bonnie's pretty

happy with the work she's getting. And if you're in that situation, that may be a good solution for you. Yeah. I probably could have gone to the bosses and said, look, here's what I want. I and and that's if you're in that situation that may be a good solution for you yeah i probably could have gone to the bosses and said look here's what i want i want to change my job you can pay me less money i want to uh i want to work at home and just write for you and they might have gone for that but i didn't want to do that it's like i didn't want to do that i wanted to try something new so it was a little more than that. But I had, I employed so many people who are 100% remote workers, even though we had an in-office workforce. Macworld at one point was more than half remote people.

And it was great. It was great. It's not for everybody. And everybody we had as a remote person was basically somebody we'd worked with for quite a while before we made them a full-time remote person. Either they were in the office and then they moved or they were a freelancer for us. And then we made them a full-time remote person, either they were in the office and then they moved or they were a freelancer for us and then we made them a remote employee. But because, you know, again,

not everybody's cut out to do this. So we wanted some level of comfort with them. But- Well, and I think part of it is you're a fairly enlightened boss on that. I think there's some places where- Like I said, I'm the wacky one, right? I think a lot of places don't trust people to work at home. i'm the wacky one right i don't i think a lot

of places don't trust people to work at home if i can't see you i don't believe you're working for me i people are like that i don't like those people but and if you want to go that direction you've got to produce i mean no no doubt and to that extent our show is kind of helpful for those folks because a lot of the issues we discuss here are how do you produce well yeah if you're if you're not visible in the office appearing to do work, which I think is a thing that happens, right? You're present and nobody knows if you're actually working on things, but you're present. Then a lot of questions disappear because you're visible. And if you're invisible, then the only thing they have to go on is your work. So you've got to come through.

There's no doubt about it. All right. Okay, David. There david david who is not you i i checked it's also still not you david wrote in and said i would like to hear you talk about methods to schedule unschedulable things unschedulable scheduling the unschedulable that's a tough request he says i'm a web programmer working from home i've worked in companies before i even had my own company with friends but solo scheduling the unschedulable. That's a tough request. He says, I'm a web programmer working from home. I've worked in companies before I even had my own company with friends, but solo life worked better for me for some reason. So I made the move to work solo last year. The problem is, I feel like programming something often takes more time than expected, and sometimes less. I've had the feedback to always schedule more than what you think initially, but it feels scammy to

put more time in the estimate for not work hours. And it actually looks bad if you stumble onto a client that somewhat knows a little bit about how much time the task is supposed to take. I always run out of time and end up having a bottleneck. As much as I can explain the situation to the client, in the end, they're not satisfied because the predefined delays are never respected. What would be the solution? How do you schedule something that requires an undefined amount of time? A couple ideas. One is, can you turn it into a flat fee kind of thing? It may not work for the type of work you're doing, but if you can, then you don't have to be responsible to them for hours. And it takes hours out of the equation. So they feel like they're getting value for services and they don't need to know how much time. And if your price is a little high, if it equates to the higher number of hours, then so be it.

It just takes hours out of the discussion. And I think that works really well for some businesses. It doesn't work for others. Another is to break it into components. A lot of people do what they, you know, I'm putting my lawyer hat on for a minute. They do what they call master services agreements and or an MSA. And they'll say, OK, you're going to be my client. You're going to agree that, you know, we have certain terms of how you pay me and what I do.

But then we have little scopes of work. And maybe the first thing I do is an assessment for you. Or then if you're doing web development, I'm going to do your e-commerce platform or whatever. And you break it into smaller pieces. With the smaller pieces, it's a lot easier to get an accurate estimate and do things on a more tight budget. And then you may find you don't need to add additional components later or you need bigger components later, but it removes that whole delta between what I initially thought we needed and what actually happened.

If you can break into smaller pieces, that would help. Yeah, there's no good answer to this, but my thoughts are similar. I think, I mean, delays, one of the things is I think you need to imagine when, I always under-promise and over-del deliver. That's the bottom line. So, if you're thinking of a task and it could be done in a week, but if there are problems in your history, in your experience as a professional, occasionally it balloons and it takes a month. I think you have to say that. I think you have to say, this might take a month. I'm hoping it will take less time, but it might take a month. I think you need to make that clear. And then in terms of work, the question is just, are you being treated

fairly? Are you charging by the hour or are you charging by the project? Charging by the project is better. They know what the value is of the project. And then you need to figure out if that's, if it balloons into something that's way more than you thought, if you are going to be hung out to dry, if you charged a certain amount and you need to protect yourself that way too. So communication and letting the client understand that, yeah, that this is variable. We're not sure how it's going to go and under promising and overivering. I mean, I don't think anybody's going to complain if you do it in a week. And I know you feel like, sometimes you feel like, well, I told you it would take a month. It only took a week, but I'm charging you the full amount. It feels like you're ripping them off. You could also view that in a different way, which is,

look how fast I did it. So, you know, you're paying for fast work and it turns out that this was faster. I don't know. I mean, or you, or you just make it hourly with a cap and say, I'm, I'm going to, this is my hourly rate and I promise that I'll not charge you more than this. But if it's easy, then you'll, you'll pay me less. There are lots of different ways to do it. It's sort of what you're comfortable with in terms of, you you know what the job is and what your possibilities are. Yeah, hourly saying not to exceed. Like, I'm going to charge you hourly,

but it won't exceed X. And that X can either be an integer with the word hours after it or dollars. Another thing I do with people, because a lot of the work I, you know, people will call me as a lawyer and say, hey, this contract, we really want to get it back to them right away. And so it's suddenly a rush.

I was just telling you before we started recording, I had like three of those in the last couple of days. So my life has been upside down. What I tell people usually say, I'm going to try and get it to you by Thursday, but under no circumstances, will I get it to you later than Sunday? And people like that, you know, so they know that if I get it to them early, they know that I pulled it off. But if not, I've got kind of a backup date. And whenever I make that promise, I put it in my weapon of choice is OmniFocus. So I put a due date in OmniFocus, say the due date would be Sunday, like I have to get it done by Sunday. And when Sunday shows up, if that thing turns red, because I haven't finished it, I send an email to the client and say, you know what? Things got a little wacky for me. I'm going to

get to you within the next couple of days. I'm sorry. And they love that because it's that constant communication. All right. Thank you to David who isn't David. And next up is Max. Yeah, Max wrote in. He says, as a self-employed loan worker, having the opportunity to listen to other self-employed people talk honestly about their working lives and how much they cope with obstacles and guidance is not only fascinating and educational, but reassuring. Yes, we're all in this together, Max. He says, Jason, you mentioned the implications of accepting social offers. I think you were talking about lunch when you had planned to be working and how uprooting you can be for your physical and mental schedule. It'd be interesting to hear how you guys manage the irrational fear of socializing rather than working, i.e. being

human versus making money. I'm in my seventh year of being self-employed and financially I'm in a great place, but the fear of not working is still something that bugs me daily. Do you guys suffer from this? I'm not somebody who craves money or material things, but the fear of not working is still something that bugs me daily. Do you guys suffer from this? I'm not somebody who craves money or material things, but having spare money in the bank for a free agent is not only sensible, but incredibly important. Yeah, I know exactly what Max is talking about. I actually know the lunch in particular that I talked about here. And it was an incredibly useful lunch lunch and I still think about it. But sometimes it's just my wife is home at lunch.

She's got a long lunch and we go out to lunch or something. And sometimes it's not meeting with somebody who's a friend who's giving me advice or something like that. I'd say yes, I do suffer from it. And how do I manage it? I try to manage it by having like a, like a,

so there's the boss in my head that's always telling me back to work you, back to work you. And I hope I have like an HR manager or like some kind of guru in my head who says, who says you need to be a well-rounded person. Your work isn't the only thing that you do in life. You need to, you need to give yourself permission to do things that are not just work all the time and try to build up a framework of that. Look, if somebody wants to go out and do a two-hour lunch with you every day, you got to say no, right? But if it happens once every four months or something or once every month,

then you just have to keep perspective on it. And it's the same about things like getting out of the house, walking the dog, which I do, stuff like that, that you need to make time for that and give yourself permission to that too. You need to look at the big picture, I think up front, because when you're in the moment and you're working, it's very hard to step away. But if you think to yourself, no, you're going to go out for a walk with the dog every day. And I haven't done this for the last couple of weeks and I feel bad and the dog is mad at me. But if you give yourself permission upfront that every day you're going to do this, then yeah, you might realize you have a lot of work. But one of the things on your mental list for the day is got to get out of the house

with the dog or whatever. And that serves the long-term goal too, of staying healthy and sane. So you can keep making money. Like 15 minutes before we started recording today, I usually try to like focus on prep, show prep and the phone rang and it was the office phone. You know, I have like a separate line for my business and I'm like, you know, is it red? It feels like it feels like it. So i'm like you know is it red is it like yeah it feels like it it feels like it so i'm like okay i'll take it and it was a neighbor of an attorney i worked for years ago who's getting to ready write her own book she says i'd love to buy you lunch and get some advice for someone from someone who's self-published and like that's the last thing i have time for right now right you know and but i got thinking all the things that person, that neighbor of hers did for

me as I was getting started. I'm like, I have to do this. So I scheduled it. I scheduled it in three weeks. And one of the things I've done, you know, this is an evolving process for me. I tried the Mike Hurley thing where you have the week where you're outside and the week where you're inside. That doesn't work with the way my life is.

I need to be available every week to meet people, but I'm trying desperately now to cram it all into Wednesdays. That's what I'm doing these days. Yesterday, I was in the car all day to meet. And Wednesday's the day I don't make any money, but I'm driving around meeting with clients, meeting people. So I try and schedule and just jam Wednesday full. And if I could just get it all in one day. Well, and that's big picture too. You're not making any money that day, but you're meeting with clients, right? So you're doing part. You are.

And I think that is, when I talk about taking a step back, that's the other thing you see when you take a step back, which is the big picture, which is you cannot literally be every hour that you're working is 100% efficiency billing people. Because that's not how business works, right? You have to go meet the clients and you have to do lots of things that are not directly at this moment, I'm doing something that's making me money, but they're still all part of your overhead, your own personal business overhead. And if you include in that taking breaks because you need to be more productive and you need to take breaks in order to focus better when you come back, that's part of the

overhead. And you just have to accept that, that those are all part of the, the, the greater hole, even though you might miss it, if you I mean, you really if you can't see the forest for the trees, if you're just so focused on like, I can't do that because like meeting with clients, right? Meeting with clients is very important to your business, even if it's on your day where you don't make money. Yeah. I kind of have a hallelujah moment here listening to you. Part of this is, you know, when you're independent, you have to make those decisions. You have to be the big boy or the big girl and make those decisions for yourself. You know, you have to decide that and, and putting it off when you work for somebody else,

you let somebody else, you offloaded that decision. But it is a big deal. And that's why I think so many people are writing us about these types of questions, because you have to address that. You have no choice. Yeah, I mean, that's what I said. You got your HR person as well as your boss in your head.

It's like you do have to internalize all those roles. The role of the person who's saying, get back to work you, and the role of the person who's saying, you can't work yourself to death. And you have to be that person. And that's really hard. That is part of it. And I think that's what independent workers struggle with maybe the most is that that being your own manager like not just on the i'm going to turn in my my work on time but i'm going to give myself permission to have a have i see the big picture and have a a full life and not just be um rowing the ship all day until

you die you want to talk about mark that was one of my favorite emails of the month from mark right this is so this is our our last letter that we got. And it's from Mark, who says, for me, the decisive factor in being able to become a free agent was location, location, location. Once I became willing to make the sacrifice to sell my home and car and move from Oakland to a sandy beach town in Costa Rica, my cost of living dropped 80%. And that made everything possible. I wouldn't have been able to transition to being a free agent while staying in the Bay Area. Boy, I hear that and still pay my bills. The first 18 months were rough in terms of income. But now after five years, I developed a

few modest passive income sources and work about 12 hours a week, mainly on short term online freelance jobs back in the US. The rest of my time is spent on non monetary passion projects. Traveling around Central America, I've met hundreds of individuals and families from North America and Europe doing something similar. Fast internet and 4G is almost ubiquitous now, and productivity and communications apps making online work a lot easier. I'm shocked more people don't do it, and I don't miss bridge traffic one bit. What I took away, not everybody is going to move to Costa Rica. That takes, to leave your country and go somewhere else is, it takes a lot of guts. That's a pretty scary move to have. But I think there is this other aspect to it. And uprooting your life is always

difficult. But I have to admit, one of the things that my wife and I talked about when I left my job was that at some point, probably when the kids are out of school, we have the option to go someplace that costs less, and that the economics are very different in that situation. If we need to, we can sell our house and move somewhere where the cost of living is way less, whether it's Costa Rica or, you know, just inland in California. But there are lots of options or Arizona or, you know, Oregon or whatever. There are lots of different places. Almost every place in the United States is cheaper than where I live and probably most places cheaper than where you live too. So I love the idea of the internet and fast available broadband being available so that somebody like Mark can move to the sandy beach town in Costa Rica and kind of live the dream. It's pretty amazing.

Yeah. And it never occurred to me to go to a different country. That's why I like this email so much. But yeah, maybe that is part of it, and we never discussed it. But that is something to consider. And I'm sure there's people listening that have also pulled this off. One of the things I got out of all of these emails, we didn't cover them all, but there was some great feedback in Twitter and even in the chat room right now.

There's a real community around this free agent thing, and there's a lot of people trying to figure it out. And we're going to come back to you on that. I've got some ideas. Jason and I are going to talk about some ways to help kind of pull people together on this. Well, we did our first feedback show, Jason. That's it.

That's a lot of letters. That's like all the letters we got. And I appreciate it. But you can send more. We will do more of these. Our's like all the letters we got and I appreciate it, but you know, you can, you can send more. We will do more of these. Our plan is to mix these in along with the interview episodes every so often and answer questions and read your feedback. And also you can listen live. We'll warn you that those episodes are coming and you can listen live and interact with us in the chat room. We've got some great people in there now. Kathy has been talking

a lot about, she's talking about clients and the expectation from clients, which was pretty cool. They're talking right now, there's a conversation going on about the differences between husbands and wives who are independent workers. And I hadn't really thought about that, but that's an interesting point. If there are differences in terms of, but isn't that just society, societal differences? Maybe so, but we have to deal with society. So there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in the chat room, and I hope we'll have some more of that the next time we do one of these, too. Will do. So in the meantime, if you want to get a hold of us, we are on Twitter as FreeAgentsFM.

Where else can they reach us, Jason? You can go to Relay.fm slash FreeAgents, and there's an email link there. Or you can just email us FreeAgents, one word, at intertext.com. But that link is on the FreeAgents page at Relay. And those are the best ways to reach us. And I am Jay Snell on Twitter, and David is Max Sparky on Twitter. We'll see you all in two weeks. Bye, everybody.