The Strange Exhaustion of Waiting as a Freelancer

When you spend most of your time waiting between tasks, the waiting becomes the work.

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

Time is the essence of our lives. Societies and cultures are built on shared agreements about time management. Most people inherit a structure for time: work in the morning, rest at night, repeat tomorrow. Even stressful jobs carry a hidden certainty — the day already has a shape.

This social agreement not only improves productivity and health but also reduces downtime associated with unstructured timelines. If there’s an order to things, there’s certainty. Certainty brings clarity. Clarity is the assurance that you get to live for another day without troubles.

But what happens when you step out of this system? When all the foundations you lived with suddenly don’t apply to you anymore? I found out the hard way when I decided to freelance.

Freelance and the Art of Waiting

As a freelancer, I do not have a mandated schedule. I work when I have a gig, practice my skills when I don’t, and try to rest in the meantime. This approach comes with its perks — I always felt more comfortable in autonomous situations, so planning my own schedule keeps me motivated and more productive. 

I also appreciate the diversity of opportunities and businesses to work on, from copywriting and video advertising to localization and SaaS content writing. They allow me to explore new areas and sharpen my skills more than in a regular job. However, they come at the cost of a structured workload — some weeks are busy, while others are much sparser. 

This makes most of my days centered around waiting. 

Waiting for a new gig.

Waiting for feedback.

Waiting for payment.

Repeat all over again.

All the while trying to sneak in other elements of life in between, including rest when I feel worthy of it.

Added up, those waiting times become a chore in their own right. One without structure or guidance, and where all my anxieties try to scream louder than the other.

Time Management Without Structure

When it comes to time perception, it often feels like a roller coaster to me. 

Moments of waiting are the build-up to the top. They’re long, unsettling, and filled with dread. The anxiety keeps rising as I get closer to the peak. During this time, I regret every single moment of my life.

When I reach the top, I finally catch a glimpse of the gig waiting for me. I hardly have time to consider the opportunity before I start working, plunging down the tracks. I take in the excitement and adrenaline of the ups and downs.  Once it’s over, even though I feel tired, I already crave another ride.

Those emotions are what make freelancing fascinating, but it also carries its share of struggles. The uncertainty of work is an important one for me. The time between gigs usually leads to intense emotions such as self-doubt and distress. 

The more distressed I become while waiting, the slower time seems to move. And when I’m working, I feel a subconscious guilt about all the time wasted waiting. 

It makes me want to make up for the time lost, grinding harder like a car racer who has to push the extra mile after their pit stop drags on. I eventually finish the race, but by running on fumes and with worn-out tires. 

Running on fear is a powerful fuel, but a highly combustible one. Without guardrails, you'll crash and burn before you can complete the lap.

The Uncertainty Behind the Waiting

When you struggle with time management, everything feels high-stakes. It happens not only between gigs but also during the waiting time for an assignment. From writing a sentence to billing, the outcome feels consequential every single time. 

As soon as I send an email with a new draft, a spiral of questions swirls in my inbox — Did I send the answer to the right address? What if that turn of phrase makes them uneasy? When should I follow up? 

What should be a productive time turns into minutes spent refreshing, waiting for a hypothetical termination-of-services response that never comes.

That uncertainty is my kryptonite. The more I wait for an answer, the worse the scenarios get in my head. I imagine the client tearing apart every single sentence of my draft, ready to deliver harsh criticism of my entire existence through that single piece of work. Of course, none of that ever happens. 

Longer waiting periods are often the result of a busy schedule. A to-do list that needs to be checked off before I can get to my work. Or simply a delay that’s beyond the client’s control. Since I’ve had the opportunity to work with clients worldwide, I've learned on more than one occasion that time zone differences are the biggest factor in delayed responses, not the quality of the work.

Life is not a school evaluation. It’s a constant race against uncertainty, commitments, and upheavals. We all deal with the unexpected — what matters is how we live through it.

Self-Control over Control of Time

In the end, the core issue is the lack of control — control over my schedule, my perspectives, and options. Waiting only reinforces that feeling of powerlessness. I have no control over the passing of time. I have no agency over what might happen. But what I do have is the ability to acknowledge that I can’t control everything.

Waiting is inevitable. No matter how much we try to stuff up our schedules to fill in the gaps, there will be moments when time slips out of our control. By labeling the situation, I hope to remind myself that  I’ve experienced those moments hundreds of times, and they usually end up the same way.

I still haven’t learned how to stop waiting.

But I’m beginning to understand that freelancing is not just about learning how to work alone. It’s learning how to live with uncertainty without letting it consume the hours in between.