On Motivation and Flow for Freelancers
First published on Jun 27, 2010 by Simon Foust
As a freelancer, I’ve learned that there are moments of extreme productivity that I have to seize. Often, they hit me unexpectedly.
After I left my final job of “working for someone else” I had an expectation fully ingrained in me. The expectation is that a man works from about 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon. Or if it isn’t those exact hours, certainly it’s at least 8-hours a day. You put in your 40 to 60 hours a week, because it’s your duty. That’s what a man does. And you do that for 50-years or so, and then you can sit in a recliner and watch TV for the next 10 or 20 years until you die.
Well, how bout NO, Scott, mkay?[1] That’s the kind of depressing pointlessness that I remember recognizing at a very early age. Still, it took me about a year as a full-time freelancer to realize that I’m not punching a clock. Obviously, meeting deadlines and getting things done are among the more important things for earning a good reputation.
However, you don’t have to sit at a desk every day from 8 to 5 and partake in monotonous busy-work in order to be “productive”. That might make you feel productive in the short term, but it will quickly stifle creativity, happiness and satisfaction. I’ve learned that I need to be okay with having days where I do “nothing” in the way of “work”, and that the key is figuring out how to put myself in the way of inspiration.
While reading Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us[2], I learned that psychologists have studied and named the state of mind that I’m talking about in this article. It’s called simply, “flow”[3]. Drive helped me understand myself a little more. It’s full of examples and experiments of people “in flow”, and as you read more about this, and experience it yourself, you’ll begin to figure out how to sort of set yourself up to find those moments of flow. I highly recommend this book to freelancers – and actually to anyone interested in learning more about how we are motivated, and what kind of motivation works in certain situations.
And freelancers, just by way of encouragement to those of you who may be experiencing that, “Ok, what do I do when I don’t feel like doing anything” funk, just know that you’re not always going to wake up feeling like you’re going to concur the world, and you have to be ok with that.[4]
Endnotes
