Let’s look at common ideas about freelancing and think about whether everything in them corresponds to reality:
1. You can work as much as you want. You can even rest for whole days.
My answer: Yeah, you can rest. But no one pays a freelancer for vacation. No work = no money. The rest is at your own expense. Therefore, you should work not as much as you want, but as much as you need, so that your family does not need anything 
. Freelancing is good because there is no “ceiling” for earnings. Everything depends only on you. But even if you have earned a lot of money and decided to take a month or two off, you need to remember that this is your business, and if you do not maintain regular business relations with clients, after this long vacation, you will have to start everything again almost from scratch. The same applies to sick leave: no one pays for sick leave for a freelancer. So the common saying in the West, “freelancers don’t get sick,” is not far from the truth.
2. You can work wherever you want.
My answer: It is true. It all depends on the noise level and the number of distractions you are used to. I am used to working from home. When my daughter was younger, we would go to the nearest entertainment center. She would have fun in the children’s corner there, and I would work in a cafe with free wifi nearby. Some freelancers decided to take a bolder step and moved to other countries where life is cheaper and winters are not so harsh. Sometimes you want to do the same, but where to find, for example, a good school for a child in these countries is a question. In general, there are no absolute advantages in life; you always have to sacrifice something.
3. You can get up whenever you want. You can sleep as much as you want.
My answer: ideally, yes, that’s right. But in reality, you get up when your child needs to go to kindergarten/school, when you need to see your husband off to work. I like to get up at 6 – 6:30 to work for at least an hour in complete silence while everyone at home is sleeping. This is the best time to work. When the deadline for an order is approaching, you get up early to finish and check everything. You don’t want to blush in front of the client for some little things you didn’t notice the day before. The same goes for sleep. Sometimes I sit from 6 am until 12 am, practically without getting up. Lately has happened relatively rarely, only if I miscalculated something when I agreed on the deadline for the order. But it does happen. In general, I would say this: for a freelancer, it is not the standard working hours from 8 or 9 am to 5 or 6 pm that are important, but the deadlines for submitting orders. No matter what time you get up or go to bed, you have to submit the work on time, and the result of the work must always be excellent, or at least good.
In general, freelancing, like any other business, has its pros and cons. We will talk about them a little later, because you can’t describe everything in one article.
