In the modern office environment, there is a strong tendency to becoming a “free person”, especially among IT specialists and creative professions. As a rule, this free person leaves his old life, starts to work for himself and now doesn’t depend on anyone and lives how he wants. However, there are also some pitfalls. Let’s take a look at them.

1. Social protection

Now you can count solely on yourself: you don’t get medical insurance from work, paid sick leaves, paid vacations, pension accruals and many other benefits that office workers of big companies get. When you’re young, you don’t think much about all those things, but with time they become more important.

2. Freedom is only a semblance

Your expectations about the freedom of freelancers can be too high. You don’t need to rush to work to make it at 8 am, sure. However, you get irregular working hours with that. You are happy that you won’t see your annoying boss anymore, but you get ten demanding and equally annoying clients instead. It is possible that your old office life will seem very comfortable after that.

3. Separating work from personal life

Now you cannot close an office door and forget about work till tomorrow. You wouldn’t turn off your phone or stop checking your e-mail because there can be an important order or a call from client. Now your personal life can be interrupted quite often. 

4. You do everyone’s job

If you worked in a big company where one department doesn’t know what the others do, now you’ll have to become all those departments yourself. If you have an online store, for example, you’ll have to be a loader, a courier, an application branch, a call center, etc. 

5. Uncertainty

Yes, working for a big company, you may feel like another brick in the wall. However, this “wall” has its famous name, authority, prestige, etc. Working for yourself, you may spend a lot of time to build a name and reputation.

6. Forget about vacation

You surely can go somewhere. However, you will constantly be disturbed by your clients and their deadlines. Even lying under the sun, you may not be able to relax and have fun.

7. Loneliness

In many articles about office life, people like to write about the bosses-tyrants and colleagues-dolts. However, there are many opposite cases when you have a great team, a wise boss, great corporate parties and team-building meetings. Now you work alone and you don’t have someone to talk to while working. Be ready to feel lonely sometimes.

8. The attitude of other people

For many people, the word “freelancer” is close to the word “unemployed”. All normal people get up in the morning and go to work while you drink coffee and turn on your computer. You can face a lack of understanding from your family and friends.

9. Instability

You don’t know when you can get a week off, you cannot always plan your day and you don’t have strict working hours, your income is different every time. Are you sure you want such kind of freedom?

About the Author:

Jana Rookard is a full time writer and content manager at the essay writing service Essay Jedii. She love to write and to be creative.