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Traded a steady retainer for project work, stress went down fast
I was juggling one big retainer that ate my whole week, so I switched to three smaller project gigs and set strict scope limits. Last Tuesday I finished by 3 PM instead of 9 PM and actually cooked dinner. Has anyone else found that trading predictable income for shorter tasks helps your headspace?
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shane1701mo ago
Wait, how are three project gigs less stress than one retainer? That part does not add up for me. One client means one set of emails, one schedule, one person bugging you. Three clients means three times the back and forth, three sets of deadlines, and three people who all think their thing is the urgent one. I ran that way for a couple years and the money looked fine on paper but the juggling wore me down more than any single steady job ever did. The part that actually saved your Tuesday was probably the strict scope limits, not the switch from retainer to project work. Scope limits are the real fix. You could have kept the retainer and just drawn harder lines around it and gotten the same 3 PM finish.
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