Let me set the scene for you: yesterday I went to the dentist. I knew in advance that I was going to have a tooth pulled (the kind word they use these days is “extracted”). The tooth has been giving me problems for months – infections, fillings and it was also out of alignment and giving me jaw ache. So upon agreement with the dentist we decided to yank it out.
In my naivety, I assumed it would be an easy thing to deal with and that work would carry on as normal. However I got back last night, very numb, which very quickly turned into being very sore. You, see the extraction wasn’t straight forward, basically because my tooth wasn’t straight either. The curved root meant many minutes of pulling and pushing and other horrible levering-type actions…
Cue a difficult night when my mouth was aching, I hardly slept and I still haven’t been able to eat or drink. But here I am sat at my desk, ready for the day ahead.
The fact is that if you are self-employed you need to accept that you do not get days off for illness, unless you plan them in advance. If I had worked harder yesterday I could have had some of my work completed ahead of time. But the nature of illness is that it often turns up unexpectedly.
Luckily I have a good relationship with my clients, so the odd day off here or there is acceptable, but I always need to make up that work at a later date. A week off due to an illness is out of the question.
Of course you don’t get paid if you cannot work and this is a good motivating factor to get you back into the hotseat. One of the things which people don’t realise about self-employment is that you must be prepared to lose money from time to time.
If I take a holiday, I do not get holiday pay. But I work harder to earn more in the weeks leading up to my holiday and I work harder in the weeks after to make up the extra money which was inevitably spent.
You can take out insurances to cover illness or a lack of work, but these will usually only kick in after around six weeks. It is sensible to build up a buffer or an income which ticks over when you cannot work. This should be a priority in your first year. There will be lean times and you need to be prepared for them.
Or you can do what I do and drag yourself to your computer screen every day, regardless. My clients don’t need to know that I am ill, they just need to see the work hitting their inbox. It is my job to provide that level of consistency.
Oh, the joys of freelance writing!