Remote UX writing #2: The work

Remote freelance work from the tropics is all selfies of your computer balanced on your bare knees, and your feet in the sand with blue waves gently caressing the shore beyond, right? Maybe there’s an umbrella. To keep the sun off. Your drink. Maybe it’s a cocktail, maybe a mocktail, it’s hard to tell from a photo and anyway, it’s always 5pm somewhere in the tropics, isn’t it?

Actually, it’s always 5am. That’s when GMT, which is my current timezone, roughly aligns with the end of the day in eastern Australia, where my clients are. 5am is when I wake up for 4.30pm-Australia-time video calls with clients. It sounds better than it is, because here in the tropics one thing is certain: time is fluid, my clients are sleeping during my day time, and I can nap again later if I need to catch up on sleep.

I’ve had a few jobs now where I need to get up at 5am and perform competently in professional meetings with others, and one thing I’ve learned is: don’t do it on an empty stomach. Even a cup of tea for a 30-minute meeting averts nausea and potential fainting when you stand up at the end of the meeting. Better still if that tea is a locally-grown blend of, say, hibiscus and ginger.*

So if your workspace isn’t a beach, what is it? In Australia I had a desk, and I built a standing desk addition to mix things up. The bulk of my luggage moving to Ghana was house supplies (a frying pan, bed sheets, extension cords, a drill and driver) and work equipment: computer, external keyboard and mouse, external memory for my backups, and cables. So when it comes to ergonomics, I’ve had to improvise.

As I mentioned last time, we’re repainting (and doing other work on) the house, so my computer stand is a 10-litre paint bucket. Just last week we upgraded from this folding picnic table to a dining table; hooray! And here’s the view from my seat. No sand in sight; just waves of razor-wire along the top of the garden wall.

Sometimes there’s power; sometimes I’m relying on battery, so it’s a priority to remember to plug my computer and pocket wifi in when the power’s actually on. Sometimes there’s running water to wash off the tropical sweat; more often, there’s not. When both power and water are off simultaneously, it can be difficult to concentrate, let alone muster anything approximating creative energy.

Which brings me to a point: if you’re freelancing for cachet, or for envy points on Instagram, you’ll be very restricted in where you can freelance from. Yes, when I say freelancing has let me work from San Francisco, Auckland, the Colombian Andes and West Africa’s Gold Coast, it sounds glamorous. But as this shows, it’s anything but.

Remote UX writing takes more than itchy feet and career aspiration. It takes an actual love of what you do. Not “passion”, that fly-by-night, red-hot fancy; I mean love. A willingness to endure the rough patches as well as the sweet ones, based on a soul-knowledge, learned over decades, that whether the rest of the world values them or not, words — and people — matter to you.

When I came back online from my break — five weeks used to fly to Ghana and “settle in”, including attempting (and, as it turns out, failing) to connect the internet to our house — my clients were indeed pleased to hear from me. But one thing surprised them.

What? I was still in Ghana? I couldn’t meet at 1pm Australian time? How long was I planning to stay?!?!?!?

Now for months I had been priming my clients for the fact that I was moving to Ghana for an unknown period, estimated at 2 years, in September 2019. I told each of them in person, during video calls or face-to-face meetings. When it came to prospective clients who approached me for work after we’d decided to move, I told them at first contact — even via the very first email — that I was going to be working from Ghana for up to 2 years. If it was a problem I’d understand, but if wasn’t a problem, I’d love to work together. For some of them (not all) it was not a problem.

I worked very closely with long-term clients to plan the move, working out what they’d need before I left, and making sure I delivered it. Even when Telstra, predictably, erroneously disconnected my landline and thus internet connection 5 days early, and I had to go to a friend’s house each day to work.

I also made sure they knew when I would be back online, so they could plan more work from November on. I didn’t want to leave anyone in the lurch because, after all, we’re partners. My clients aren’t “buyers”, and they don’t treat me like an overnight freelancer. They treat me as a business owner and colleague, and are capable of working to timeframes and setting internal expectations that reflect that understanding. If you want to work as a remote UX writer, you’ll do better with clients like these than the ones who think you should be available at a drop of a hat to turn things around within hours.

And yet, somehow some of them forgot I was staying here. I guess somewhere along the line they’d decided I was on a holiday. Which I was, but I wasn’t coming home at the end; I was returning to work from a different timezone. And with each of those who had forgotten there was a strange, suspended moment when I typed “No, I live in Ghana now. For the next two years. Remember?” into Slack … and waited for their response.

Would they balk? Would they cancel our agreement and find someone else to work with? Would they slowly forget that I, their friend and colleague, even existed?

But the suspense ended quickly enough. They had forgotten, they admitted, embarrassed. And we continued on, scheduling meetings for the end of their day, and communicating via email and Slack and video calls as we always had.

So, tip 1: If you’re going remote, you need to take your clients on the proverbial journey with you, so they know what’s going on and can plan accordingly. I did this, and it didn’t quite work for all of them: some of my closest clients forgot I wasn’t coming back. But many did, and at least I tried.

Tip 2: If you work with clients who have reasonable expectations of turnaround times (that is, not same-day), it’ll probably be easier to continue those relationships from a different timezone.

Tip 3: Make it easy for everyone to keep working with you, wherever you are. Go out of your way to make it work. Good clients will respect and appreciate your efforts, they’ll go out of their way too, and they’ll want to keep working with you wherever you’re located.

There’s one other thing I want to highlight here. As I mentioned last time, I’d been working remotely for years before I came to Ghana. And because I lived out of the city, I’d established strong working relationships with clients who do remote work well: their own staff work from home at will, and they have the systems and tools in place to make remote work as productive (if not more productive) than in-office work. So when it came to my working from a different location, it really wasn’t seen as a big deal by my clients. The only difficulty was timezones, and as I said, even though I’m 11 hours behind them—about as far behind as you can be—we’re working around that.

So what have I been writing since I returned to work in early November? Of course there has been UX writing (just this week I’ve been working on an onboarding feature-tour and some help content), but alongside that I’ve drafted learning modules and supporting email comms for an online training provider, contributed to a UX writing style guide that’s in development with one of my clients, and concepted physical billboard ads for another. Flexibility is key to making a living when you’re a freelancer, and variety is the spice of life.

Now we’re heading into the festive season, traditionally a quiet time in Australian business, and a period during which freelancers start climbing the walls for want of work and stable income. Fortunately, I have an English student (I also teach English as a second language) to keep me busy over the next couple of months, while the Aussies are off throwing prawns on barbies.

Still, climbing the walls is definitely something this remote UX writer has found herself doing; we’ll talk about the mental health aspects of remote-work-from-home in a very different country next time.

*Accra has a small and expensive but productive organic scene, praise be to the gods; speaking of which, I work to the singing, chanting and preaching that echoes from the many local Christian churches that surround us, and before you ask no, I have no noise-cancelling headphones, though I do have earplugs. Don’t like God? Don’t come to Ghana.