The Most Important Skill for the Self-Employed

Good morning adventurers!

By the time you read this, I will have packed up my life for three weeks and made my way to Virginia, where I’ll be nannying for my niece while her mother returns to work and her father suffers through a multi-week business trip. It’s the sort of thing I would never have been able to do with a 9-to-5, and it’s making me so grateful for this freelance adventure I’m living.

But, of course, it comes with its challenges.

Anytime we change our schedules or commitments, it’s easy to let work be the thing that slides.

Not in a huge, dramatic way, of course. If you employ yourself, not working is never really an option. But it’s easy, without really realizing it, to let yourself fall behind.

To not look for new work.

To not keep up with your side projects, no matter how much you care about them.

To do the bare minimum, and tell yourself you’ll catch up later.

Which is why I’ve come to realize that the most important skill I have in this freelance adventure — and the most important skill for anyone who is self-employed — is something I haven’t really thought about much before.

It’s not my writing talent, or my creativity, or my people skills, though those are all important.

It’s not my willingness to learn, or how easy I find talking on the phone, or my bravery in cold-contacting clients, though those are all essential.

In fact, it’s so simple it may surprise you.

The most important skill I have in my self-employment journey is discipline.

Let me tell you a little story.

In the past few weeks, I’ve created a new schedule for myself. It involves getting up in the morning and, before anything else, writing. (Okay, I make my tea first, but after that  I write.) I write 1000 words of fiction and a blog post before I do anything else. Before I check my email, or look at my to-do list, or read the news, or get my breakfast.

1000 words of fiction for myself and a blog post, either for a client or for one of my own sites.

For the first week of following this new schedule, I was excited. 1000 words sometimes turned into 1200 or 1500. One blog post often became two. I was getting so much done! I was so productive! I’d crossed off two big items of my to-do list before I’d even put on pants!

The second week, I was super  grumpy about it. I hadn’t even put on pants yet, and I was going to make myself write 1000 words of fiction and a blog post? What was I thinking?

But I did it. I told myself that it would be worth it in the long run, that once it was a habit, rather than something I forced myself to do, it would be easy to sit down and do that every morning. I didn’t allow myself even one day off, because I knew one day would turn into two, then three, then maybe none at all.

The third week, it started to get easier. I was still a little grumpy, but I was getting back in the swing of things. My morning writing had just become something that I did. There wasn’t much of a choice about it.

By week four, I was on a roll. I still was careful not to allow myself a day off, because a newly formed habit is easy to break. But my hard work had paid off — 1000 words of fiction and a blog post were just the natural course of my morning. And best of all, having started off productive first thing in the morning, it was much easier to keep working through the rest of the day, to continue crossing things of my to-do list.

None of that would have happened if I hadn’t disciplined myself to do it. If I hadn’t decided to make the habit and determined to see it through, no matter how much I wanted to let myself slip a little.

When you work for yourself, it can be far too easy to cut yourself a lot of slack.

That side project doesn’t have a deadline, so you put it off when you’re tired.

You don’t have a boss watching you work, so you procrastinate on client work until the day before it’s due.

You get caught up in your daily to-do list, so you forget to work ahead and look for new clients.

And sometimes, those things happen, whether you want them to or not. Life gets in the way, as I’ve found plenty of times this year.

But when you’re freelance, you never get ahead without discipline.

You can’t grow your business, bring on new work, see your passion projects through, without discipline.

My new morning writing habit is proving invaluable to working while nannying. After my niece has been fed in the morning, her mom puts her back to sleep. And me? I write. By the time my niece wakes back up, I already have 1000 words of fiction (0r 1200, or 1500) written, plus a blog post (or two). And because I started my morning working, when she falls asleep in the afternoon, it’s easy to pull out my computer and start work again.

Discipline is hard, especially when there’s only you to enforce it. But if you’re self-employed, you can’t get anywhere without it. 

What about you?

Has your freelance adventure taught you to be disciplined? Or do you still struggle with keeping yourself on track?