I'm currently unemployed and thinking about doing this for a while too. Living by yourself and working outside of your apartment can get you too isolated at times.
This is very true, even for someone in a relationship and bringing in steady income. I freelanced all of 2005 and had both, yet some of my fondest memories come from working at a cheese shop the second half of the year. I figured it'd get me out of the house and I'd learn more about something I already loved, what I didn't expect is that I also made some great new friends and also had a renewed fire for my way-opposite-of-retail web gigs. The first half was lonely as hell!
On a related note, I remember seeing an old HN thread about a guy that got rich from some startup and then worked at McDonald's for a year to reboot his perspective, taking notes the whole way. Anyone remember this one?
On a personal note, I'm going back to fulltime work in the next few weeks after freelancing from home since Nov and now that I'm committed to joining another team, one of my regrets is that I didn't take more personal time for myself away from the computer, but I also think that the time passed by so quickly because I'd have weeknight conversations with my wife to look forward to while toiling away.
This is a great article and I considered doing this last summer when we were trying to get the mobile app company going. I can particularly relate with 'creative' freelancers who feel the effects of social isolation.
Here's another approach and something I did during my college years: take a job working part-time with your apartment. Not only will you get paid but usually a substantial rent deduction too. Around Austin TX there are a ton of "collegiate" complexes who love working with students, I lived for free for two years (saved $14k). And, you end up meeting people in your area.
I've thought about quitting my real job and doing this. I won't now, because it's more useful to me in terms of leveraging to open the door to other opportunities. But if you're already a hacker anyway and you have a team or things you're working on, it totally makes sense.
If you're just an "idea" person and don't really have it fleshed out, but want to devote more time to your idea, it's just not quite as good an idea I don't think.
For a freelancer, or for a person doing a bootstap startup, a job that only requires one day a week is wonderful. It provides a baseline of income, hopefully a decent bit of social interaction, and one consideration for a serial entrepreneur or freelancer, is that it provides a way for you to accumulate social security disability benefits. One of the biggest downsides of being a freelancer is that a safety net is either non-existent or much more expensive.
Eight hours a week at retail clerk wages may not seem like much, but I think one of the things YC has shown is that it doesn't take much money to do some pretty awesome things.
I'd be interested to know if anyone here has experience or advice on "sustance" type jobs that provide ramen and rent while not taking up so much time that you can't work on your main project. I'm not looking for such a thing now, since freelancing is more than paying the bills at the moment, but things can change quickly.
As a former freelance consultant, I can tell you that it gets very lonely and disorienting. It's like being unemployed. I often had no idea what day of the week it was.
I sympathize with the author. Her one day a week retail job allows her to get much more work done in her freelance gig. If I ever went back to freelancing, I would seriously consider getting a "normal" job one day a week to keep me grounded.
you say that you didn't know what day of the week it was as if it was a bug and not a feature. what better metric of freedom is there than the fact that you are no longer subject to the whims of other people's schedules? And to the point where you don't even have to know what day it is. What is the week but an arbitrary way of keeping track of working time?
