What happens when the freelancer takes a sickie? Bugger all.
This has been my life this past week. Sick and bed-ridden. While I won’t bore you with the details of my illness (nothing interesting I assure you), what is interesting for me is the impact it has on work and business.
Impact of sickness = MISSED DEADLINES + FRUSTRATION.
I’m not a typical freelancer, I don’t work completely by myself, but rather oversee a team of people who all work together on various contracts to do the work of Iscariot Media. However, most of the team members do only one or two specific tasks, with me doing the rest of it. And most of that work (my work) isn’t written in a list somewhere, it’s in my head. So when I get sick or am not able to do the work, it just doesn’t get done. At all.
Unfortunately, no one has built an app yet that can download my brain to retrieve the to-do list.
So as I’m laying there, unable to move, I’m growling myself for allowing my brain to store the entire to do list. It’s no bloody different to having all your data backed up on a single external drive. (Oh crap. That’s me too!!)
So what am I going to do about it?
Well I’m challenging myself this year to write up projects as if I did have a staff member taking care of it. By doing that, it at least gives me the choice to engage another person to take over a role should I need it.
How am I going to do that? Absolutely no idea.
Image: Beside the Hawesbury River at sunset, January 2015.