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Comment by Markoff | Hacker News Reader

if I start rejecting projects they will find someone else and I will have nothing to reject in the end, not even that half I would be fine with. it doesn't work that easily that I can just limit how much work I take without repercussions (it already happened in past, but not because of rejecting reason)

and yes, there is also the money reasoning why not to reject something if it's still within my limits, although I rejected rarely some tasks, but it's like <5 out of maybe 200-300 I get per month

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> if I start rejecting projects they will find someone else

... Which you're basing on:

> it doesn't work that easily that I can just limit how much work I take without repercussions (it already happened in past, but not because of rejecting reason)

If it's true that they won't accept anything less than 12 hour days with zero down time, then you're better off working elsewhere.

it's not 12 hours day, on bad day (usually monday and friday) is 8-10 hours of actual work, on good days (which are very rare recently) 3-4 hours, but usually I work between 5-7 hours (with some gaps between) plus I have free weekends most of the time and maybe 10 days of Chinese holidays spread over year

If I worked as full time employee here in Europe, I would spend 9-10 hours in work each day including commuting but with lot of spare time just sitting/resting in work plus 5 weeks of paid vacation, but also my salary would be like 20-30% of what I have as self employed working from home, nobody can offer me what I have in this company, so I wanna bank on this while it's available, because I'm sure it won't last forever (though I had this attitude already years ago and I'm still doing it with more work)

my main (if not only) issue is lack of continous vacation, I was just asking in OP how to justify taking it under these circumstances, if you are willing to spend let's say 4000USD on short vacation and another 2-3000USD on lost income, if I didn't work in hotel room. I just can't justify completely stop working even without worrying to be replaced

4000 USD is a fairly lavish holiday.

I consider myself fairly well off and that's roughly what I'd spend in two months.

I've had a few vacations turn into work trips. It's really easy (at least for me) to work a lot in the morning and spend the late afternoon at the beach, park, or museum.

If all you need is a laptop and internet then there's nothing stopping you from an entire month at a vacation destination.

But is it really a vacation, if you MUST work in the hotel room often? (not just rarely)

Losing pay isn't so important at all, if you have enough for your family, and your pay shouldn't depend on taking merely 20-30 days vacation an year .. with your skills you can find very well paid european remote jobs with much better vacation

Friend, if they expect to be working 12 hour days, 365 a year that's the best thing that could happen. You have talent, you can find other work, work that's not killing your life, your relationships with your wife and children. Get out now.

Maybe you can inform them well in advance (say, 2 months in advance) that you will be on vacation so they can plan ahead? If they like you and your works, they certainly have no problem rescheduling stuff so you can take your vacation, no?

200-300 tasks is a lot. Do you work only for one company or for a bunch of companies. Can you drop one of the companies and keep all the others?

one company, multiple projects (but basically two main ones and under them subprojects), each has many tasks (some of them smaller doable in minutes, some of them bigger taking hours)

I could drop one project I really don't like, because how unprofessional they are, so I started to get quite bitchy about it and also refused recently task and voiced my objections about their workflow/mismanagement. I would not mind at all if they would assign it to someone else, but honestly this project doesn't take that significant portion of time, maybe hour a day and pays better than the other one per minute, like now I just finished 60USD task in 20mins

If you are accepting / rejecting work in 20 min units of work, you might want to rethink things a bit. The micromanagement level at play here would make any work/life balance out of whack.

Maybe the question to ask is — can I start bidding on work in units of 1-2 week increments? You’d still have multiple smaller tasks in that block. But that would start to give you more flexibility in how to organize you days.

in 95% of my income I'm not paid per hour/time (rarely I have tasks paid per hour, which I usually don't like), but per size of the task, I just use time/money cost for easier understanding after calculation, if I average my income my minimum hourly rate would be between 60-200USD depending on how efficient I am with certain task

and the tasks are assigned by currently 2nd biggest company in their field (over 100bln USD revenue last year), you seriously don't expect me telling them how should their multiple teams manage their tasks and workflow? I'm not doing any bidding, I have my rate and I can decide if I accept or reject task they assign to me (and pretty much all of them go first to me, then to my official backup).

working per hour/time would be worse for me, because I'm much more efficient than other people so some average 1-2 week income would be much lower than what I can get per size. and getting some fixed size for 1-2 weeks would be still pointless because all these smaller tasks have usually deadline within 24hrs, many less than 12hrs. they have vry strict daily deadlines and you can do nothing about it

anyway I was not complaining about my job as most of the commenters picked up, I am happy with with how much I earn for work I do, I would just prefer to have less work, but that's not really an option unless I would subcontract someone working for me, but anyway I would need to check up on their work and it would bring lot of paperwork. if I would start refusing tasks regularly to lower workload they will just find someone who will not refuse, because they need consistent results.

so I was basically asking in my OP how to manage vacation with such schedule/circumstances and how people without fixed monthly income justify taking days off and letting the money go

Think hiring people might not be as hard as you think. I've done consulting for a company in Shanghai and there was minimal paperwork as we both were professional about it, set expectations clearly, and documented them. There would be some checking but you've got some margin with 60-200USD hourly rate, if you can start to outsource some work then checking it will become less of a burden. With deadlines, having someone in a different timezone may help. You can also outsource some of the paperwork. You might want to consider this regardless of time off, because you sound like you could probably make more by taking a break and also looking for more clients. If you have someone you trust then you won't worry so much about losing the existing client.

It may be difficult to switch just now, but for the future consider billing weekly. Obligatory patio11 link: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...

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