the freelance life i - income streams

2026-11-13

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." — Mr. Wilkins Micawber

the topics#

The classic interview question is where do you see yourself in five years. Things move quite fast these days, time is compressed. So this is about where I see myself in two months. A much less hazy future seeing as how I am putting the pieces together right now that will make up much of the vision. So when is it, where am I, and what is all working like a well oiled machine on Wednesday the 13th January 2027.

I'm at a coffee shop, talking to someone who could be a friend, could be a client, or both or neither. In any case, we are talking about something that could lead to work. So I put a note in my _scratch note to remember to do something about it later.

At home I create a project based on this talk. This is 2027-001. The first project of the year. It is something easy, that I know I can do and know how much to charge for how long it will take. I can easily put together a tender and send it by email to this person. This is all in my commonplace-book, which is synced via Koofr and backed up to git by an agent on Blackbox or watching a watcher.

At some point I am at my computer and the person has said go ahead with the deal. I create a repo for the work and can link it to this project, I buy a few things like domains, devices etc that I can bill to this project, I have blocks in my calendar showing work done during that time that I can bill to this project.

On my phone I can see a dashboard when looking at this project in obsidian that shows how much it costs in terms of time and money, and see expected, billed and received based on transactions that have been imported into hledger or invoices issued for this project already.

The project is big enough that it needs its own docs and I can spin up an astro starlight project and get suggestions of content that is needed based on existing pages and discussion around this project. Coming from a project specific discord channel, GitHub history and repo docs, obsidian vaults etc.

When a payment comes in I can look at a filtered view in hledger and see instantly whether this job was worth it. I can add notes to the project in obsidian that can be taken in by another page for lessons learned or new processes learned from a given project. Or how to keep it running smoothly if it is ongoing. So that the next ones are easier.

A lot of that is being put together right now. I was writing this while the agents were working on the website. So I guess I should try to publish this, to see if the whole thing works. Here goes nothing.