Working part-time as a freelance translator #1

This article is the first in a series on “Working part-time as a freelance translator”, in which I’ll share my experience of moving from an 8-hour working day to a 4-hour one.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been undergoing the experience of working part-time. Before discussing the benefits of this decision and the strategies I’ve implemented to reach my goal, I’d like to take a moment to identify the factors which led me to take this decision:

Insight into the value of time and money

 While I was reading Tim Ferriss’ thought-provoking book, The 4 Hour Work Week (for those interested, Tim Ferriss’ website also contains most of the principles he presents in the book), I realized that spending 8 to 10 hours translating texts was not, in fact, what I really wanted to do. First of all, because it meant that I didn’t have enough time to devote to other projects and activities and, secondly, I realized that I was actually working for the sake of working. In short, my relation to time and money wasn’t very healthy and it could even be said that I was some kind of workaholic. Please don’t misinterpret my words:  I truly love translation, it’s simply that I’d like my enthusiasm for this activity to remain intact and not be spoiled by some kind of overdose. There are also many other things I want to do and to be before I retire!

I’ll come back to the time/money relation in a future article.

 Is my job really healthy?

The second factor which urged me to give part-time work a try was made up of the following two questions:

Is working 10 hours a day at the computer and running from deadline to deadline good for me?

Am I really enjoying it?

The answer was a double “No”. Spending so much time at the computer has certainly had negative consequences, not only for my health, but also for my social life and probably on the quality of my work as well (is it possible to keep working at full steam for 10 hours, day in, day out and still maintain one’s best standards?). At some point, I also realized that I was no longer enjoying translation as much as I used to.

So I decided it was time to act and to take my life in hand again.

In the series of articles on this topic, I’ll be explaining how I managed to move from 8/10 hours a day to 4 hours by applying a few simple principles.

Don’t hesitate to share your own experiences of working as a freelance translator here!