Managing my time as a remote worker

Hey,

I'm Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

In the last edition of this newsletter, I wrote about my Fractional CTO career, and the steep contrast between the periods without clients vs the periods with too many clients.

In fact, last week I didn't find the time to write this newsletter. It was the first time in 2 years since I started writing it. And that excess of clients was to blame.

I kicked off two new clients in a week, while keeping my ongoing engagements, and while having new clients reaching out to me. Did I ever mention that I'm not great at saying "No!" to clients who want to pay for my time?

For the first time ever I'm lucky enough to be in this position of excess demand. It's a privilege that I don't take for granted!

Being a Fractional CTO, as with any freelance type career, is a feast or famine career. We all experienced periods of famine and I'm no exception. That's the very reason why I'm taking this opportunity to feast like never before.

Now, it does come with downsides of course. In recent months I've found myself working long nights more often than I like. I've underperformed in my morning training sessions (that's a non-negotiable slot, I start training at 7am regardless of the time I go to sleep). And I've been feeling pretty tired at times.

Clearly my excess client demand is to blame, and me saying "Yes" to everything is the one thing I can change.

As you can tell, I'm not here to lecture you on the "10 things you must do to have great work life balance (number 7 will shock you)". Not at all! I'm as vulnerable as everyone else here. I'm learning as I go, and sharing my learnings along the way.

I started offloading clients that I don't have bandwidth to take myself. Either I bring in other CTOs/Engineers to share the work (and revenue!) with me, or I offload the client to some other Fractional CTO in my close network.

It's not enough though, I've done that in a few clients so far and I still have more clients coming my way than what I can service myself. Most of this comes from VCs, PE funds and marketing agencies that coincided with me in some client at some point. I'm to go-to CTO for many people with access to clients, which has built this organic flywheel of client introductions.

At the same time I have such high demand, hundreds of readers of this newsletter have reached out in recent editions. I haven't yet replied to everyone but I'm very impressed with the profiles I'm getting and with how many people want to shift to a Fractional career.

I'm now feeling like I must connect the dots:

• Clients who want to hire me as their Fractional CTO, but whom I don't have bandwidth for.

• Great CTOs and Engineers who want to get hired on a Fractional basis, but who can't find clients.

I must setup a more systematic and scalable process that will allow me to do this beyond the 3-4 clients where I've done it already. Hopefully I'll be able to announce it on next week's newsletter.

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira, 
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover