Flexible work schedule preserves family time | Apr 29th 2006
By Jacqueline Dooley
For the Poughkeepsie Journal
Are self-employed people happier than the traditionally employed?
I asked a good friend and colleague of mine this very question.
Stacie Wheeley is the owner and sole employee of One Search Marketing, a search marketing firm based in Maryland. I met Stacie when I was consulting part time for the company she was working for as a full-time, salaried employee. Stacie and I became friends without ever meeting face-to-face. Part of the reason we bonded was we both became pregnant at exactly the same time.
Stacie returned to work after five months maternity leave, but she was very unhappy with the amount of time she was away from her baby and the lack of flexibility her job offered. It’s one thing to drag yourself into work when you’re sick, it’s quite another to leave a sick baby with a sitter or family member. Stacie ultimately made the decision to leave her job of five years and start her own business.
Lately, we’ve been working together on a project that’s been keeping us both up at night, and working late on weekends. It pays very well, the work is steady and the job could be fairly longterm, but the trade-off is high. We’ve had very little flexibility with our time because the project has been all-encompassing.
Consequently, we’ve had less time to spend on other clients, business development (for our own companies) and, most importantly, with our families. It kind of feels like a ‘‘real’’ job.
It appears the work may be drying up, at last, and when I mentioned this to Stacie, she breathed a sigh of relief. Her response was, ‘‘I’m glad. This job has shown me what I want out of work.’’
I asked her what she meant by that and she explained she’d had to take a day off to take her 2-year-old to the doctor. After the doctor, they went to get ice cream. She loved taking time out to spend with her daughter, and the contrast of spending the day with her child after two months of a very grueling work schedule made her assess how she wanted to approach working in the future.
Downsizing
She has decided to work on smaller, less secure jobs so she can spend more time with her daughter. This is ultimately what she wants out of work — flexibility, independence and the power to make choices about her day-to-day schedule.
This is also what I want out of work. I realized this in February, when I quit a full-time, salaried job to rejoin the ranks of the self-employed. My employer allowed me to work out of my home four days a week, but I was required to travel into Manhattan (from New Paltz) once a week. This meant that one day a week I would not see my kids at all. I’d leave before they woke up and get home after they went to sleep. It took me eight months to realize how unhappy this made me, but when it finally hit me, I knew I had to change the situation.
Self-employment, for me (and Stacie), means freedom. Freedom to choose clients we want to work with and projects that are meaningful to us, freedom to start and end the day when we want and, most of all, freedom to hang out with our kids — without apology.
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This article was published in the Poughkeepsie Journal on Saturday, April 29th, 2006.