Back in March I showed you my work stock and flow diagram.
I had at that point four sources of work — I was, as it happens, trying to reduce the number of sources to the minimum and to restrict it only to people who would give me 1099s, in hopes of making my taxes simpler.
Ha!
The thing about stock and flow is that it doesn’t respond immediately. If you are filling a bathtub and it gets higher than you want, you can turn off the taps and open the drain and the level of the bathwater will go down — but not instantly. And that’s a bathtub, which is a pretty simple system.
If you sell things, you can’t make stuff or buy stuff from your supplier and then sell it, and after it’s all gone, restock. You have to sell steadily and also restock steadily, or you end up with stock (and therefore sales) problems. If you have a service business, then in order to keep your workflow up, you have to accept work while you’re still working at capacity, or you’ll end up with slow times.
Thus it is that I’ve accepted a job from a Hungarian fellow. He has hired me for one series of articles, with a view to having it be ongoing if it works out well.
He approached me at oDesk. I’ve been pulling back at oDesk, on the path to switching from being a freelance to being a company, but as I recall, December and January were slow for me last year, and I still have tuition payments in those months, so some work with definite paydays will be a good thing.
Today I’ll be finishing up the Influential Men articles, and getting started on the next round for Artsedge, and doing everybody’s analytics. Oh, and there’s class today. And rehearsal. That’s it.