Going from Freelancer to Full Time

I made the transition from freelancer to full time employee almost a year ago. Here are a few pieces of advice I've picked up along the way.

Here's where you can find me:

Blog - https://sarastrives.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sarastrives/

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Me, Myself, and You podcast.

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My name is Sara and I'm your host and I am glad to have you here today today.

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I wanted to talk a little bit about that transition from freelancing to working full-time.

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I made that transition almost a year ago now is maybe a little less end of November of 2019 and I will say it's definitely a

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unique experience since I was only working in the office for about four months before covet happened before all of the chaos.

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So I just kind of wanted to talk about where that was tough and kind of how to adjust and how I adjusted and how to make that

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work because it's definitely different going from freelancing and being in charge of your own schedule and your own everything

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to working for somebody else.

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So I think the biggest thing for me that was hard with going from freelancing to working full-time with the schedule and I think

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that the same for a lot of Freelancers and the appeal of freelancing is the schedule when you're when you're freelancing you

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very much can function on whatever schedule you want to function on for me.

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I still worked pretty typical like work days.

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I would say I worked Monday through Friday usually and didn't work like super weird hours, but I would say I probably had

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shorter days.

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I didn't necessarily wake up and work every day Monday through Friday.

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It kind of depended on the day.

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I would just kind of adjust and change as I needed and it really just buried quite a bit within certain restrictions, I guess

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for me personally.

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I found it better to have somewhat set working hours so that I wasn't losing my mind but there's definitely a change with that

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when you go from freelancing to full-time, you know, you're not working for yourself.

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You're most likely working in an office.

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So you have set hours and even if you're not working in an office, you probably have fairly set hours and you're answering to

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somebody else for your hours worked and your schedule and you're not able to just like drop everything if you're having for me

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if you're having a bad mental health day or whatever.

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You can't just not work that day.

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It's definitely different in that aspect.

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That's something I really liked about freelancing was being able to take a day off if I just woke up and was having a really

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hard.

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Time I could just take the day or you know, if I wanted to focus on something else there was that I really had a lot of control

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and you kind of lose some of that aspect with a full-time job.

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So in terms of adjusting to that, I think it's really important to kind of basically rebuild your routine.

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Your routine is going to look a lot different when you start working full time and going into the office and you know being on a

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schedule where you probably have more meetings with people more set meetings more clear hours that sort of thing.

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So it's important to kind of rebuild your routine in general from your morning to your evening and everything's kind of going to

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evolve a little bit and maybe it's figuring out which pieces you get to keep and where they go and that sort of thing.

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It's just overall changing things up in that aspect not thinking that you can still function on the similar routine, you know,

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it's going to be different.

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It's you know, you might you'll have to get up and get ready for the day in a way that you might not have before might.

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More accelerated or you know, you don't necessarily, you know, sometimes I didn't like completely get ready before I started

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working for the day when I was freelancing that sort of stuff learning to set boundaries as a full-time employee is a big piece

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that has been something that I've struggled with more because it was it being a full-time employee.

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It's kind of that feeling of feeling like, oh they own me because I have a salary but that's not necessarily entirely true.

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Ooh, you know you generally have somewhat set.

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Okay, you're expected to work X number of hours a week something along those lines and you're able to kind of you have to set

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those boundaries in your hours, especially if you're working from home and working full-time.

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That's where it gets tough.

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And I know that's been tough during this quarantine thing super fun, but setting set ours is very helpful.

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Try not to respond to emails that 11 o'clock at night.

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It took that people don't expect you to respond.

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Melts at 11 o'clock at night regularly, you know it set those expectations and then always seek out the positives.

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I know that it can be really easy to start missing that freelance life that like freedom and all of that.

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But remember the positives of having a full-time job for me.

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It's been having really awesome co-workers.

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I really love my team and of course consistent income is always a perk of having a full-time salary.

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Salary job.

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So yeah, I guess that's kind of it as far as transitioning freelancing to full-time.

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So hopefully you found this episode at least a little interesting maybe a little helpful.

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If you're doing something similar definitely would love to have you subscribe follow this podcast.

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You can find me on Instagram at @sarastrives.

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Yeah.

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I think that's it.

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So I will talk at you again soon.