Week 2 Goals: Sign up on Freelance Site (Goal #57) & Unassisted Pull-Up (Goal #1)

Two weeks into the New Year and I have been ultra-productive with my goals! This week I completed two from my 60-until-60 list: Signing up on Freelance Sites (Goal #57) and doing an Unassisted Pull-up (Goal #1)

Signing up on Freelance Sites

I LOVE all the extra time I have now that I don't have to commute or spend 9 hours a day in an office. I'd been afraid of getting bored or lonely once I stopped working, but it's actually the opposite! 

WHY, then, do I have a goal to sign up for freelance work?  Should this be a priority? A very annoying and loud voice in my head is screaming: STOP WORKING!

But it's kind of in my DNA.  It feels weird and uncomfortable not to work. I'm even 'working' every day on all these goals and loving it, because they give me purpose, keep me challenged, and help me grow.  I love being an agile coach, and I don't want to give it up completely.  I just want to limit the work to part-time work that I can do from anywhere.  My user story is refined to:

Sign up on freelance sites so that I can be made aware of short-term, part-time, freelance, or remote opportunities that I'd enjoy.

There is an awesome set of resources available for people looking for remote or freelance jobs, especially in IT. I'd been meaning to sign up on some of these sites and this week I did.

As evidence that I completed this goal, below is a screenshot of one of the sites I signed up on noting that I was "Available for Work!"

Besides signing up on a couple of job sites, I also contacted some of the groups I've worked with in the past. Last week I had a two interviews and a proposal I submitted for an article was accepted. I also got asked to write some blog posts and to do some coaching. So tomorrow, I will be back to work, but totally in control of my time!

What worked well:

• Discovering how many resources were available for freelance, part-time, and remote work. It made me feel more secure that there were a lot of avenues for finding work outside of the traditional 8-5 office job.
• I found some interesting opportunities through some of these sites. 

What could be better:

• Contacting people directly (as I did) worked better for getting freelance work than the freelance sites and it also cuts out the middle man. The freelance sites are OK, but they do take a cut and the pay is typically lower than what I get when working directly with a client.  Also, I would advise caution on some of these sites. I'm not sure if they're all reputable and sometimes I do get weird spammy auto-generated calls about suspicious 'job opportunities.'

Doing an Unassisted Pull-up

I already posted my 'demo' video on Facebook! 

What worked well:

• Since Lifetime Fitness is down the street, it's been easy for me to get in the habit of going and working out on the machines almost every day.
• I was surprised that I was able to do a pull-up after less than a month of working out on the pull-up machine. I'm hoping to be able to do a lot more by the end of the year.
• I notice a big difference in my strength, muscle mass, and body fat since going regularly to the gym! Percent Body Fat went from down from 31.6 to 23.3!
  

Could be better:

• My form doesn't look that great on that pull-up. I probably shouldn't be swinging around so much.

Comment time!

Writing these blog posts are only going to be fun if I get some comments, so I'm asking again for some feedback or comments either here on the blog or on Facebook!

Tell me what goals you're working on. How many pull-ups can you do? What experiences have you had with freelance work? Or just say, 'hi' (and tell me who you are!)