How to overcome freelancing ennui

FREELANCING HAS SEVERAL pitfalls at the best of times. "Self-discipline" has a nice, faintly glamorous sound to it when you say it out loud to yourself, but practising it at home is another matter.

Time is often unmanageable, and unless you're one of God's blessed children you'll find that periods of excess work will be instantly followed by phases where there will be almost nothing to do. People will take you for granted. Everyone "" from work-assigners to friends "" will assume that you are gainfully unemployed.

It gets much worse in summer though. The days seem longer than they are, and one thing your freelancing privileges won't help you with is immediate restoration of electricity when the local transformer goes kaput or there's a scheduled power cut.

No one at the Electricity Board office is likely to be impressed when you tell them you're working out of home; they'll just think you're a wastrel and laugh, or offer you a job.

If your job is the kind where you have to travel quite a bit during the day, things are more bearable. But staying at home for long stretches is both morbid and more distracting than one realises. So make sure to keep some options open.

It's useful to have at least one retainership arrangement in hand, whereby it's possible to drop in to office anytime during the day without embittered former colleagues calling for security to escort you out the door.

If this isn't possible, try to make use of the many options available in most cities these days "" it's quite easy, for instance, to pick up your laptop and head out to a nearby cafe (preferably one that's located atop a bookstore, since you won't look out of place there). You'll be surprised how fast the day goes by when you spend it sipping endless cups of cappuccinos and typing away lazily. (That you have a laptop is a given; no freelancer can hope to survive without one.)

Use your free time well. When there's a long dry spell on, it makes sense to plan ahead "" perhaps even anticipate some of the deadlines you'll have to meet in future and do some of the work in advance.

However, this sounds much easier than it is, so if you can't manage it use your free time productively by taking an impromptu holiday. You may never get another opportunity.

If you're staying with family, tear down one of your room walls and construct a separate entrance for yourself. Don't put yourself in one of those situations where you step out of your room for a bottle of water and find yourself in direct view of beaming relatives.

This is vital because one of the great facts of freelancing is that visiting relatives/family friends NEVER understand that you aren't free to sit about and grin at them.

When you're freelancing, the weekend-weekday divide disappears. Every day can be a Sunday. (More realistically, every weekend might turn out to be a Monday.) Depending on your deadlines, the way you schedule your assignments and your other plans for the week, it's theoretically possible to spend most of Saturday and Sunday working and then take it easy on Monday and Tuesday.

But that's theoretically. In practice, this is what happens: an atavistic voice in your brain whispers, "It's Monday afternoon, how can you not be working?!" Even if you've stay up till past 3 AM writing, your reptile brain will rebel against the idea of even a short afternoon nap to compensate for lack of night sleep.

Be prepared for all these things and deal with them one painful day at a time. Also be prepared for friends to regularly call up and say "Oh sorry, were you sleeping? I keep forgetting that you no longer work."