When I moved down to Eastbourne 6 or so years ago, I had the opportunity to work for myself. The Freedom to choose how I spend my time and the Freedom to choose whether I do work for others and if I do, who those people are.
As I've mentioned before, my current level of Freedom is questionable following the birth of my first and then second child and as a result of being a full-time father, I haven't had the appetite nor opportunity to do any "real" work with grown-up companies.
On Tuesday though, this changed.
I travelled back to my home town of Reading to meet a potential new client. A friend of mine had started a new job and thought of me when looking for some help in developing a new website. Whilst I was initially called about just supporting an old man with some coding, their needs were far more wide ranging and we discussed a wide variety of topics.
Whilst I'm not sure I'll be able to work with the old man, primarily due to him not having a clue about web development but being responsible for their IT, I'm excited about the stages prior to that in researching and creating a good site structure and Information Architecture. Initially, by working on their customer segments and creating some Personas.
I thought that it might be quite cool in future posts to provide a bit more detail into what I'm doing - without disclosing anything confidential or making the client identifiable.
The best thing from my point of view though is the flexibility (and dare I say it, Freedom) that this opportunity offers me. My friend knows what my situation at home is. He knows that child care consumes a huge amount of my time and whilst I can (nearly) always answer the phone for a call, my working hours will be fairly random and often unsociable - especially as it's now the school holidays.
So I've committed to 1 day per week (spread across whenever I feel like doing something) which we'll monitor for the next couple of months. My hope is that this becomes a permanent retainer and whilst I have fears about how the site will be coded, for the money and freedom that I'm getting, I think that I can cope and keep my mouth shut.
The big downside though is that whereas previously, I've been spend any free time that I have on Zombie Apocalypse, my priority now has to be real work that earns me real money. So as those of you involved have almost certainly noticed, progress has slowed down somewhat. Hopefully I'll find a way of juggling everything although with the football season starting in a couple of weeks...….
Maybe I should make a little progress now... after I've opened another beer...
