Self-employed people and their work ethics are shocking! Is it lack of competition or just a mind set of being their own boss in our culture that makes a self employed skilled resources have the attitude of doing you a favor by providing you paid services!? As far as I have seen the IT Professionals be it, freelancers or regular employees, they lack a decent amount of ethics (most of them) and it is not their fault as the education system they come from doesn’t build up their ethics but merely some technical skills. In the local market, clients should spend some time in building the relations with the everyday labor such as tailors etc.

Self-employed people could mean freelancers. Freelancers behave that way with the fear of underselling for not being pompous enough. Like every business, It all comes down to who they’re dealing with - there are always good and bad. If you’re offering the right incentives - monetary, work quality and professionally, you should definitely be able to find really good freelancers. Many people have a collection of valuable skills. But to be self employed you need to have a particular matrix of skills that not everyone has. It is a tough job to govern yourself. You need to be able to produce something of value to someone. You need to be able to promote yourself. You need to be able to manage money. You need to be able to navigate the changes in the market. You might be lucky and fall into self-employment without having to really get involved in some of these. Maybe an ex-employer knows you and is happy to feed you a steady stream of small contracts while always paying reliably. But if that doesn’t happen, you have to feel reasonably able to do all of 1-4 before you can confidently choose self-employment.

Self-employed person could also be some Entrepreneur single handedly at the helm of affairs of his or her startup. Entrepreneurs do it because effectively they can guage themselves by the living success of their startup. There are good chances they could replicate previous results and expectedly with the kind of resources you’d provide they aim to outperform. Yet most people work as employees, and the minority is self employed. The general work ethics of people around could still be pathetic. Freelancers usually don’t feel bound to follow professionalism protocols because they are not in a professional environments but that doesnt mean one compromises on basic worth ethics and make it a chase either.

How do self-employed people “work whenever they want?”

The main reason people decide to start a freelancing career is because of the many advantages they can get as self employed professionals. One of them is the ability to work whenever you want to work. Any good freelancer should feel bounded by all kinds of professional protocols, because they’re playing the long term game. If they’re being unprofessional, they’ll never be able retain good clients let alone sustain a freelance career.

As a self employed professional, you have complete control over your time. Since you don’t have a boss, like you would at a regular day job, you get to decide how many hours a day you work. If you want to work only 3 hours a day, you can absolutely do that. You also decide at what time you start working everyday. You can wake up at 11 am and nobody will tell you nothing. And if you wake up one day and feel like doing nothing, you can just relax and do absolutely nothing, and nobody will tell you anything. This is great, right?

Well, having that time flexibility is great. It really is. However, abusing of this advantage will get you into lots of trouble. Remember that somebody is paying you to do a job. You have to deliver results. If you don’t, you won’t get paid, you will lose credibility and clients. So, use your ability to decide your time wisely. Work as hard as if you were at a regular day job. This way you will finish your projects on time, you will keep satisfied clients and you will earn more money.

The right way to use this great advantage (the ability to decide when you work and when not), is when you have an emergency, or when you want to take some nice vacations. Then you can take a few days or even a few weeks off, knowing that besides yourself, nobody has the power to make you change that decision.

Believe it or not, a lot of freelancers (self-employed people) fail to meet their daily working hours. And that is a huge problem that can stop you from really getting the most out of your freelancing career. The best thing you can do is to create a working schedule, and most importantly, to follow it. Assign a daily working goal, let’s say 8 to 10 hours a day. And make sure you meet those hours. That way you will be able to work on different projects and make a good amount of money every week.

How do self employed people and freelancers find work?