One word!
Most of the documents I work on (translate, proof or otherwise edit) are urgent and crucial for someone somewhere (or for their boss, anyway). My clients only see their own work, of course, and are free to imagine that only their document matters, only from my end everything is always urgent and I have to make some decisons based on a complex formula mixing client relations, text length, concentration ability, ultimate urgency, total cost, other pre-printing steps, etc.
Now I’ve known something about myself for a few years: I need to have slightly too much to do. Not overwhelmingly too much, but just enough so that it can’t possibly fit in a day or a week. That’s when I perform my best, and everything gets done. Good to know, moving on.
I’ve been working on my own for over two years now, and I’ve made a new realization: the type of stress I hated (and admittedly did not deal well with) in an office setting was precisely the stress brought on by other people. Granted, I knew some of this, because I was surprised at first to notice that financial insecurity did not make me as stressed out as a downtown office job (which I, all in all, liked!). It’s not that anyone was voluntarily adding pressure to my plate, but simply that stressed-out people… stress me out! I’m quite permeable to the moods around me, a dangerous quality for an office drone. The crucial difference now is one word: NO. I am allowed to say no. No, this cannot be done. No, this will be done in this order, or not by me. I can add work to my docket, and see how much stress it will generate. If it’s too much (and this is usually not linked to the document, but to external factors, deadlines, etc.), I can refuse.
Oh, I’m not evil. I keep my clients happy (in part because I love most of my clients, and I choose them to be individuals or businesses that I consider to be doing good in the world, in part because it’s good business, in part because really, deep down, I’m a very decent person). But what makes the difference between stuck-in-an-office me and happy-at-home-me is the power to control my boundaries. To say it when something is not acceptable. To say “I will not work under these conditions”, mean it and stick to it. It’s easy to explain, it sounds simple, but for me it is priceless.
