Eira Tansey

Back in June I wrote about how my relationship with time has changed since I transitioned into self-employment. Reflecting further on this topic, something that’s worth highlighting is how much self-employment revealed the kinds of temporal conditions that I need for productive work. For years at my previous salaried position, I despaired over how difficult it was for me to move forward on many projects. On an intellectual level, I knew that working five days a week on-site in an office that faced constant interruptions and where I was often forced to put out fires of others’ making probably had something to do with feeling like I could never get anything done. My previous position basically had me working in on-call circumstances while expecting me to accomplish deep cognitive work–the exact kind of work that is not conducive for an environment with constant interruptions. But it really took working for myself–where I could control many of the external disruptions–to realize that I wasn’t broken and incapable of doing deep work. I can do a lot of deep work when I am not constantly battling interruptions.

Here is the other thing that I’ve had to unlearn, and it’s hard because even a committed socialist like me has a lot of internalized capitalism: I’ve had to let go of the idea of the 40-hour work week as a proxy for “productivity.” As I laid out in the last post, running a business means not just doing the work that gets you paid (i.e., billable work for clients), but lots and lots of unpaid work you need to do to keep the business running.

There is emerging research and self-reported anecdotes from knowledge workers showing that most individuals engaged in cognitive work have an upper limit to how many “productive” hours they have in a given day. In other words, most people are not only not actually working a “productive” 40 hours a week, most of them cognitively cannot perform deep work for more than 3-5 hours a day, even with ideal circumstances. Trying to do 40 hours of paid client work a week on a regular basis is a fast path to burnout, because then you would have to spend many more hours on top of 40 weekly in order to handle non-billable tasks. For example, AIIP advises allocating between 30-50% of your working hours for the overhead work of running your business.

Indeed, my own meticulous time-tracking I’ve undertaken since transitioning to self-employment underscores that there is a maximum limit to how much work I can do while ensuring I don’t accidentally replicate the cognitive exhaustion (and resentment, and anger, and lack of time for involvement in hobbies) that I routinely experienced in my previous salaried role. This has been super eye-opening. Since self-employed people love to compare numbers, I thought it would be helpful to break down what my average working time looks like, measured across six months. As with all self-employed stuff, assume the usual caveats, disclaimers, and gentle reminders that my numbers may not look like other’s numbers. I feel pretty self-conscious about sharing these numbers. I don’t know if it’s survivor guilt that I’m not grinding as hard as I used to, but I also know that my health and well-being is phenomenally much better right now since I can determine my own working pace.

I use Moxie¹ for time-tracking all of my paid work, and much of my unpaid work. I exported all of my time tracking data from April 1, 2024 through September 30, 2024. Here are some of the major highlights of that time period:

• I maintained a heavy workload with an ongoing major client, a second new major client, and engagements with several one-time client projects (speaking engagements, workshops, teaching, etc)
• In March I was still recovering from being hospitalized for appendicitis and my father passing away, but was slowly getting back to normal work capacity
• In April I traveled to Florida to see extended family
• In May I had my interval appendectomy
• Over the summer I finished my service on the National Archives Freedom of Information Advisory Committee and was elected to the Society of American Archivists Council
• In late summer, my mom was hospitalized multiples times due to a post-surgery infection and I provided significant support to her and my stepfather
• I attended the Society of American Archivists (August) and Council of State Archivists (September) annual meetings
• I had some other minor health and household things come up that while not catastrophic, were generally annoying and took time and energy to deal with that I would have rather used on literally anything else

Here is how the overall numbers shook out:

Type	Duration (hh:mm:ss)2	Monthly Average (hh:mm:ss)	Percentage
Paid Client Work	344:01:45	57:20:18	65.81%
Unpaid Business Dev/Admin Work	162:18:48	27:03:08	31.05%
Volunteer Work	16:26:35	2:44:26	3.15%
Grand Total	522:47:08	87:07:51

For those of you who like things visually represented, here’s a pie chart:

In some ways, the volunteer work is a bit underreported, because this represents only major current ongoing service commitments, such as my Society of American Archivists Council work, and some of my previous ongoing service work was counted under unpaid business dev/admin work. I strongly expect that this number is going to increase in the future, given that I only just started my Council role a few weeks before the end date of these numbers. Until I was elected to Council, I used to count professional service/volunteer work as part of my general unpaid overhead work, but given the major time commitment of being an SAA Council member, that’s why I recently designated SAA Council work as a totally separate time-tracking category.

Are you curious about how the 162 hours of unpaid overhead/business development/administrative work shakes out? I have those numbers as well!

Memory Rising Overhead/Biz Dev/Admin/Service	Duration (hh:mm:ss)
2024 Accounting and Admin	35:24:44
2024 Business Development	44:20:28
2024 Professional Development	21:20:01
2024 Professional Service	19:07:19
New Deal podcast	42:06:16
Grand Total	162:18:48

Here’s a little explanation of what’s in each category:

• Accounting and administration:
  • Updating my bookkeeping and receipts in Quickbooks
  • Calculating quarterly estimated taxes
  • Reviewing what tasks/projects I have to do over the next week/month
  • Triaging my email inbox
• Business development:
  • Working on my newsletter
  • Updating my website
  • Attending mostly virtual and sometimes IRL networking coffees/meetups
• Professional development:
  • Attending webinars
  • Meetings with a mentor
  • Identifying grants/fellowships I may be eligible for
• Professional service:
  • Media interviews
  • FOIA Advisory Committee meetings
  • ALA/SLI National Climate Action Strategy for Libraries
  • Society of Ohio Archivists newsletter column
• New Deal podcast:
  • This is not yet off the ground but it’s a huge goal to launch it in the first half of 2025. Until I a) establish that it’s a project I want to commit to long-term and b) find a funding model for its longevity, I’m counting it as part of my business overhead until I can justify breaking it out into its own category.

1. Disclosure: this is a free trial affiliate link that gives me a small payment if you try out Moxie. I’m not paid by the company, I’m just a big fan of the software. It’s not perfect, but it meets most of my time tracking/scheduling/project management/proposal drafting needs, and I’ve been using it almost since I started working for myself. ↩︎
2. hh:mm:ss means hours:minutes:seconds ↩︎

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Since leaving salaried employment to work for myself, my relationship to time has transformed in ways that are good, bad, and not ugly, but undeniably….weird. The math of salaried employment is relatively straightforward: you trade a relatively consistent amount of your time for financial compensation (which is also why people who routinely work beyond the hours of a normal work week, or take work home with them after their normal office hours, are effectively participating in undermining their own salary).

But when you are self-employed, the math of time and money totally changes. You are no longer earning a dependable, predictable monthly salary. You are bringing in variable amounts of money depending on what you have negotiated with a variety of clients. And unless you have figured out a way to totally standardize every aspect of your business and have a predictable way to bring in a reliable number of reliable clients…the reality is that your monthly revenue is likely to fluctuate. That’s just the nature of running a solo business.

Within the small business world, there is a lot of emphasis on selling your services based on value or as a package, not based on hours/hourly pricing. But the reality is that no matter how you price your work, there are hours being factored in at some point in the equation that translate into the revenue you bring in. If you write a book and then sell it, those hours at the front end will hopefully transform into a book contract, advance, and if you’re really lucky, maybe even royalties if you earn out your advance. If you pitch a consulting or research contract to a client and then they agree to do business with you, then the hours come afterwards to deliver the work so you get paid. Even if you don’t price per hour, savvy business owners have a general sense of how much time something should take, so they don’t accept or negotiate prices that would not bring in enough revenue to pay their bills.

This is where the opportunity cost of time comes in for self-employed people and why it has fundamentally changed my relationship to time and money. Before I entered the wild west of self-employment, I worked for fifteen years in academic libraries as a salaried worker. I commuted on-site five days a week to work normal business hours, with only a few exceptions like the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic and my sabbatical. My monthly paycheck was the same regardless of what was happening at work. If I was on vacation or out sick, was helping to organize a conference or had a rare lull between service commitments, whether the archive was super busy or super quiet, I received the same paycheck each month, and it only changed on an annual basis when either a promotion or union-mandated pay increase and benefits election amounts were used to adjust my salary.

Now, my self-employment math means that there are typically a certain number of hours I need to work every month, with an average hourly rate of X, to ensure I am bringing in enough revenue so that I can:

• a) pay my taxes (which are higher than before due to self-employment taxes),
• b) pay my business operating expenses (website hosting fees, Zoom license, etc, and also closely track these expenses with receipts and bookkeeping since IRS-approved business expenses reduce your taxable income), and
• c) pay myself a reliable amount so I can cover my living expenses, fund my retirement, and also enjoy life.

When you are a salaried academic librarian and asked to do volunteer service work, the cost-benefit analysis is typically “Do I want to do this work? And will it benefit my career somehow?” Obviously, salaried people have to run some calculations based on whether they have workplace support and energetic bandwidth to do service. For academic librarians in a tenure-track system that counts service towards promotion and tenure, these decisions do have some degree of indirect economic consequences. But in general, most academic librarians’ salaries are not directly and immediately impacted by performing service work. When I worked in academic libraries, my salary did not change depending on whether I was chairing a conference program committee or faculty executive committee (a ton of ongoing work stretching out over months or years) versus a lighter weight commitment such as performing peer review of an article (a one time commitment of a few hours).

In contrast, now that I’m self-employed, there is also another question I have to ask, which is whether I can quite literally afford to do uncompensated service work (or, even work that is poorly paid). This is where opportunity cost comes in. Opportunity cost is an economic term that means when you make a choice, you lose out on the benefits from not making a different choice. When I choose to take on service work, there is an opportunity cost of not otherwise using those hours for work that pays me. In other words, if I know that I can generally allocate X hours a month for revenue-generating work, allocating some of those hours for work that will not result in direct monthly revenue generation means that I am choosing to forego potential additional monthly revenue.

That trade-off is one I’m willing to make, especially since I have a lifelong orientation to service, and since no business spends its time solely on billable client contracted projects anyway (in order to run a business, you also have to set aside time for non-billable work like marketing, bookkeeping, etc). My career has been immeasurably helped at every stage by those who volunteered their time to help me, and I consider it a reciprocal obligation to the universe to pay back that help as much as I can afford to do so.¹ But this trade-off now that I am self-employed is calculated far differently than when I was salaried.

One of the ways in which running this calculation has become pretty weird is that I find myself increasingly having to decline requests for unpaid and underpaid work that I would have been much more likely to say yes to when I was salaried. This is awkward and weird because I really like being helpful (and I think I have a reputation in my profession for this?), and I can tell some people are offended when I say no, or tell them I can only accommodate their request if the stipend is increased. Something I wish more people understood is that stipends might be lagniappe for someone who is already salaried, but most stipends for unclear service work commitments or talks do not come close to the actual compensation needed to do this work well if you aren’t salaried.

Time and money are both forms of currency, but they function differently. Money is a renewable resource, but time is not. I can do all sorts of things to change how my revenue is replenished–increase my rates, bring on more clients, invest profits from my business somewhere, cut expenses, etc. Because time is a non-renewable resource, this requires me to be incredibly discerning in how I use it. Even if I bring in assistance or remove various commitments, I cannot invent more time in my week or month. I have the exact same number of hours each week and each month that you do. I love self-employment, and I know that if I don’t use my most precious finite resource, time, as responsibly as possible, my business will not have staying power.

1. I’m running for SAA Council this year, and am fully cognizant that if I am elected, it will likely artificially depress my earning capacity over the next few years since it is a major time commitment without compensation. I do not think it is an accident that I am the only non-university person running for Council, since university-based archivists typically have the highest rates of support for service work. If I am elected, I apologize in advance to those I’ll be serving with for how much of a stickler I will be for not wasting time. Now you know why. ↩︎

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It’s been about eight months since I took the leap to self-employment and building my business. In reality, the transition started much earlier, because it took months of planning and laying the groundwork to follow through on such a major decision. With the end of the year coming up, and today as the anniversary of my LLC registration, I’m reflecting a lot on the major behind the scenes work it took to take the leap.

When I was knee deep in navigating my career transition, I was (and remain) constantly hungry for stories of how people made their own major career shifts. Over the last couple years I’ve received more advice and wisdom from strangers, acquaintances, and friends than I could ever possibly pay back, so I want to share a little bit here about how it went (and is still going) for me. Life is too short to stay in a job that’s making you miserable, but sometimes when you’re in the middle of the misery it’s difficult to even see an exit strategy.

In order to take the leap, I had to talk to a lot of people, and then I had to listen. A lot. And I also had to start listening to sources of information I had never really listened to before.

Over the last two years as I knew I needed a change, I talked to people who had left academic libraries altogether. I talked to interviewers during job interviews for new roles. I talked to people who had moved back and forth between employee and freelancer roles. I talked to friends who were laid off from salaried roles who unexpectedly became self-employed and loved it. I talked to friends who voluntarily left salaried roles to deliberately become self-employed and loved it. I talked to formerly self-employed people who decided it wasn’t for them and went back to salaried roles. I talked to retired people. I talked to people in my network who ended up becoming some of my first clients. I talked to self-employed librarians/archivists/museum people who had been doing it a long time who helped me see what the day to day would look like (and every single good, bad, and ugly thing they told me about all happened within the first six months I went out on my own).

I talked to my friends in group chats. I talked to my friends over phone calls. I talked to my friends over beers. I talked to my friends over ice cream. I talked to my friends so much I got to a point where I felt sheepish about continuing to talk about it. I talked to my parents (my dad told me that one of the best jobs he’d ever had had started out as a part-time consulting gig when he was between jobs). I talked to my cousin, who is like my sister. I talked to a therapist. I talked to a career coach. I (silently) talked to God every Sunday morning at 10:00 AM at my Quaker meeting. I talked to a clearness committee at my Quaker meeting. I talked to my financial advisor. I talked to my husband so incessantly that at one point he bought me a shirt on Valentines Day that said QUIT YOUR JOB.

I had to talk to a lot of people because my brain had to see that it was possible, that I was not trapped, that I wouldn’t be ruining my life forever if I left a tenured and unionized faculty librarian role for something else, and that I not only could but maybe should try something new. I had to listen to the stories of tons of other people, see where their paths could inform or inspire or caution my own. I talked, and asked, and then I listened, over and over. But then I also had to talk with myself, and I had to listen to not just my head but ultimately to my body and my gut and my heart in a way I was not used to doing.

I’ve mentioned before that teaching the CalRBS seminar on Archives and Climate Change was a real turning point for me. But part of how I knew intrinsically – almost immediately – that it was a turning point and not a fluke was because of how I physically felt during and after teaching the seminar. I knew this was exactly how I was supposed to feel, by doing the work I am supposed to be doing, and that I needed to figure out how to shift my working life towards that as much as possible. There were some days my face began to feel sore because I was smiling so much, because it was so powerful and it felt so right to be in community with other librarians and archivists who cared about this issue just as much as myself. Nothing in my previous job made me feel that way – in fact, often the opposite.

For the last couple of years in my previous role, I had often tried to describe how I was feeling with a series of pretty grim metaphors – like I was dropped into a forest with no map, or that I was running a marathon where the route kept changing, or that I was on the Titanic and I was the only one who could see the iceberg ahead. But when I started figuring out how to make a business work and how to chart my exit strategy, the metaphor that came to me was that it felt like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle (I like jigsaw puzzles, though I don’t do them as often as I’d like). There are multiple paths to putting together something big and unwieldy, and it can be a lot of fun along the way.

The other physical signal that really confirmed for me that I had made the right choice was that when I gave notice at my prior role, my long-term sleep issues immediately improved. I recently read that our bodies often start preparing for major transitions long before our brain/rational mind catches up. Looking back on this, I think when I finally gave notice, it must have been such a flood of relief for the rest of my being to finally feel heard and respected and honored for the things it had been trying to tell me for a very long time. Since leaving academia, I have increasingly learned to rely on my gut and the way things make me feel in terms of business decision making.

When you are in the middle of making a transition and talking to a million people about how they did it, there can be a point where you cross the threshold from information gathering to reassurance seeking. Ultimately, a lot of people can open the doors for you, but only you can walk through. The single best piece of advice I got from everyone I talked to was my cousin. She said something to the effect of, “Would you rather bet on an institution that is making you miserable, or would you rather bet on yourself?”

Every day I’m glad I took the leap.

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