face-to-face problem solving

I’ve always been a fan of face-to-face contact. Online tutorials are great and all, but I just seem to grasp things quicker and more easily if someone right in front of me takes three minutes to explain it.
If you work in a company with other people, this potential exists every minute of every day. Colleagues explain how they do things and help you along when you’re stuck in a rut. As a freelancer, however, you don’t have this possibility – especially if you work from home.

dealing with challenges
So what can you do? Once you’ve discovered where your weak points lie, you can do two things:
1)   outsource the problem to another freelancer who can take care of it for you (if your network allows this), or
2)   try to tackle the problem on your own.
If you do the latter, watching tutorials on the internet can be helpful for smaller problems. But for bigger issues, there comes a point where a tutorial just isn’t enough. Sometimes you think you’ve got it right but understood one detail wrong and you fail.

go to workshops
In these cases, the best thing you can do as a freelancer is take part in a workshop that is geared toward your challenging topic. This way, you pay for the information you get, but this money is well invested.

1)   You realize other people need help in the same field. You’re not alone.
Even if it’s the only thing you take away from the workshop, this is valuable for your ego. You can see other professionals like yourself struggling with the same problem. Also, chances are you know things they don’t (and vice versa), so you inevitably profit from a workshop. (Not to mention the networking possibilities that come from spending time with people face-to-face!)

2)   You get personal attention. You can ask questions.
When you watch a tutorial, you have to watch/listen to every little thing the person explains; more often than not, the answer to your question is in the last 30 seconds of the video. But how could you ever have known that? And lo and behold, you’ve spent 15 minutes surfing the net rather than working efficiently. In a workshop atmosphere, you get one-to-one care and can ask exactly the question you want to. Your answer is a just a question away.

3)   You get to see first hand how the people hosting the workshop (›the experts‹) deal with your problem.
Even in the rare case when you shouldn’t happen to learn a thing in a workshop – which I highly doubt, otherwise you wouldn’t have booked one in the first place – there’s one further advantage of booking one: you get to see how other people work. Getting out of the (home) office is not only good for your mental health and social skills, it also allows you to see beyond your own nose, as it were. Be it that you see how the person sitting next to you tackles problems or how the person hosting the workshop does; you will inevitably learn one or two things that you didn’t expect to learn going into the experience. (In this last workshop I went to, I learned that in most keyboard shortcuts it doesn’t make a difference which key you press first. Mind. Blown.)

4)   You are forced to produce results. And you are forced to share them.
If you’re a procrastinator like me, you tend to put off making decisions. You might get to work, but being forced to come up with the design of a few letters in less than three hours is something different altogether. Also, if you have perfectionist tendencies – like I do – it’s a real challenge to share your results right away, even if they’re not perfect, let alone finished. Because everyone is in the same boat, sharing your progress helps you realize you don’t have to wait for it to be perfect before you share your work.

results
This weekend, I visited a workshop on type design hosted by the Typejockeys. Even though my general ambition wasn’t to become a type designer per se, I wanted to check out the workshop in order to get a feeling for the details of letters and how a font is built up.
Not only did I see that, I also got to know ten other people who work with typography and design. And, I profited from the extremely professional teachers who have been working in this field for years.
My horizon was expanded, I overcame my ›fear‹ of unknown computer programs quite a bit, I learned even more about Bézier curves and the anatomy of letters, and I made new friends. All in all, a priceless experience.

Workshops are money well spent. And, you can write them off your taxes!

Here are a few impressions of this past weekend’s workshop.