Home worker can learn from venting to spouse | Jan 27th 2007
By Jacqueline Dooley
Last Tuesday, I spent 10 minutes angrily telling my husband about a project that really annoyed me. It was around 4 p.m. and I hadn’t had a break all day. I’d meant to run downstairs and quickly have something to eat, when I caught him in the kitchen and started explaining a problem I was having with a client.
Somehow the explaining turned into complaining and after five minutes I realized I was talking very loudly. At one point, I paused for breath and my husband said (very diplomatically), “It feels like you’re yelling at me.”
He was absolutely right, not that it stopped me. So why was I yelling at him about a work-related problem he had nothing to do with? Because there was no one else to yell at.
Work follows me around like a cloud when I’m at home. This is an obvious pitfall of being self-employed. The fact that I have no colleagues, supervisors or peers to vent to on a regular basis is part of that pitfall. I have several cyber colleagues I regularly e-mail and chat with, but typing out your frustrations in a chat window doesn’t feel nearly as cathartic as yelling, cursing and waving your arms around.
Admittedly, this sort of behavior is very nonproductive no matter where you do it. When I worked full time at an agency, a key pitfall was wasting too much time chatting (in person) with colleagues, or venting, or gossiping or complaining.
I really tried to avoid getting too caught up in all that negativity in the spirit of maintaining my sanity, but I have to admit it was good to be able to talk/complain/vent to people who understood exactly what was causing my angst. Now the opportunity to gripe at the water cooler is gone, I sure do miss it.
The good thing about unloading my stress on my husband (good for me, not for him) is that since he’s not as close to my work problems as I am, he can be a lot more objective. He was able to point out some of the reasons I was so frustrated — reasons which bring me to the next pitfall.
Unrealistic expectations
The reason I was venting was because I felt very overwhelmed due to a relentless series of deadlines that seemed to mysteriously crop up. My husband pointed out there was nothing mysterious about it. The deadlines all hit me at once because of unrealistic expectations, both mine and my client’s.
It’s my responsibility to set realistic expectations about what I can and cannot do, and it’s the client’s responsibility to accept that. Accepting I’m not a full-time employee and therefore can’t handle the workload of one can be difficult for me and my clients.
Which brings me to another huge pitfall of working as a remote freelancer — bandwidth. The longer I freelance for an agency, the more they begin to regard me as they would an internal employee. From the agency’s perspective that means I’m always available, and can get things done immediately when asked. But from my perspective that may not be possible, because I work for five agencies, all of which have deadlines and priorities.
So it comes back to me, and setting expectations, which can be a problem if I do it wrong. This is what led to that episode of venting on my unsuspecting husband, dragging both of us into that first huge pitfall of working from home. Even so, I felt much better afterwards.
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This article was published in the Poughkeepsie Journal on Saturday, January 27th, 2007.