# AI for Freelancers: The Math Nobody Warned You About ## [00:00:00] Intro [00:00:00] **Tiana Ned:** Last night I couldn't sleep until 3:00 PM. And as I'm lying there completely still, you know, doing that thing where you, like, you hold your body like you're asleep in case moving wakes you up more, and my brain just doesn't let go of one specific thought on a loop. [00:00:24] I'm doing this again, the exact same thing I did in 2025. Here's what I realized at 2:00 in the morning while I was staring at the ceiling. I've been telling creative professionals for over a year now that the move is to productize what you do, to either build a fixed package, price the whole thing, stop quoting hour by hour like it's still 2019. [00:00:56] I mean, I say this to people constantly. Those are the discussions we have in my community, and the interesting thing is I have not done it for my own production work I planned it. I was thinking of doing it. I constantly say to myself that I will do it, but then someone reaches out, I take that client randomly, you know, whatever the scope ends up being. [00:01:25] I say yes first, and then I figure out, okay, this is how I'm gonna shape it. But it comes after, and it's exactly what I did in 2025, And the part that kept me up was I think some part of me had made peace with that being just, it's just a thing I do, you know? , But as I was doing math in my head while I was lying there, and realizing that with everything AI supposedly changed for me, I'm basically charging the same as I was before any of it. And I didn't,, just w- g- get up and, and make anything or a spreadsheet or a note on my phone. [00:02:07] I just laid there until I eventually fell asleep, and I felt like I caught myself, you know? "Hey, you're busted." Like, I've been telling myself a story about becoming more efficient, more capable, more valuable, . and as I was thinking last night, it was just, yeah, actually, no. [00:02:34] No, you're not doing it. Okay, before I go further, I wanna tell you something. While I was putting this episode together or thinking about how am I gonna present this, I kept picturing one specific person listening to this. Maybe you're scrolling through your podcast app half asleep. Maybe you're listening this on a walk you took specifically to get away from work Or to get away from your desk for 20 minutes. [00:03:08] And if some part of you is already tensing up because you know exactly what that 2:00 in the morning loop I'm talking about without me describing yours specifically at all, i'm talking to you. [00:03:23] So this is definitely not gonna be an upbeat episode. It's definitely not. Today I wanna talk about a specific kind of exhaustion that I think a lot of freelancers and creative professionals are living inside right now and probably not saying it out loud [00:03:38] because maybe they think it sounds ungrateful. Like, AI gave you more capacity and you're complaining? Like, yeah, kind of, because the capacity showed up, but the money mostly didn't, and the quality of what I'm putting out has gotten probably a little worse even without me really noticing until it was already a pattern. [00:04:01] So if that's you too, this one is for you. I'm not gonna wrap it up with a bow at the end at all, but I do have some things Or some tips, and I'll get there. [00:04:14] ## [00:04:14] Welcome [00:04:32] **Tiana Ned:** Hey, I'm Tijana, and this is AI for Creative Professionals. Normally, I try to leave you with something clean and practical by the end of these episodes. but today's gonna be a bit messier than that. please stay with me anyway. [00:04:48] Okay. First of all, ## [00:04:50] How the Overcommitting Trap Works [00:04:50] **Tiana Ned:** I don't think that really anyone sits down with themselves and says, "Hey, it's super fun to overcommit. [00:04:58] I'm gonna do it. Yay!" No. Like, it's never that one decision. It's hundred of small yeses that each feel completely reasonable in the moment. So once my repurposing workflow got fast, way faster than it used to be, once I could turn one episode into newsletter, a blog post, five social media posts, a set of clips in a few focused hours instead of few focused days, I started saying yes to things I would've said no to before, okay? [00:05:36] You know, there's a new client here, there's an inquiry on Upwork, and a rush turn around there, and every single one of those yeses made sense on their own, right? N- none of them at that time felt like overcommitting. It actually felt good because I thought, "Okay, I finally have something that I can do well enough and be able to handle more, more work." [00:06:04] Okay, I want you to do something right now, not later, but right at this point. Think about your own calendar for the next seven days specifically. How many of those yeses were ones you'd have s- said out loud to someone's face a year ago versus the one that just sort of slid into place because the tool made it possible for you? [00:06:29] Just sit with that for a second before you keep listening this is exactly what I think is the trap, okay? It's not the workload itself. The workload is just a symptom, But what AI gives you is a trap or a very physical feeling of having more time and having more room than you did before. [00:06:53] You have more hours in a day functionally, and that feeling can become intoxicating if you've spent years and years as freelancer constantly aware of the ceiling you have on your own time. So now that the ceiling seems to lift, you don't actually ease into the new space, but you just feel it immediately, right? [00:07:18] You feel all of it. Except what's funny is the ceiling didn't really lift. It just got repainted, because you can still only sit at your desk so many hours before your brain stops working and your eyes hurt, and you start making the kind of s- small, dumb mistakes to eat back the time you thought you saved, okay? [00:07:42] So what AI gave you was not really more hours, but more tasks per hour, and those are some extremely different things, and I conflated them for the better part of a year. Something that used to take me... That, now that I think about it, this is what keeps me up at night. Something that used to take me, let's say, a full week or four working days start to finish, research to final draft, now gets expected in the same day or in two days at least. [00:08:20] I didn't necessarily tell anyone it should. N- uh, you know, it's not like people emailed me and renegotiated a turnaround. But I think that somewhere along the lines, it just became the default because of what's technically possible now, and it happened slowly and quietly enough without anyone n- deciding, "Hey, this should take you one day," okay? [00:08:47] It's not like everyone agreed on a one-day turnaround. But I think us as creative professionals never really said the sentence, "Hey, actually, this still takes what it takes." And by the time you notice it, the calendar had already rearranged itself around this new assumption. And the ugly part is that just because you're doing more tasks per hour, you start saying yes to more clients, or it doesn't really matter if you're a freelancer, you're working at a company full-time. [00:09:25] You just start saying yes more because it feels doable. But I think the problem with us creative professionals is that we are mostly freelancers whose work sits one or two or more steps away from the client's actual revenue. So you're not the person closing the sale or shipping the product. You are the editor, the writer, the designer, the video person. [00:09:57] You are the person making the thing that supports the thing that makes money, which means even though you're now producing more, you don't have the obvious lever to charge proportionally more for it because from the client's end, the value of a newsletter or a set of show notes didn't change just because you got faster at making it, right? [00:10:25] Because you're not billing for the outcome. You're still usually, And, and I'm not saying this is everyone's case, but usually, you're billing for the labor, and the labor got cheaper to produce for you invisibly, while the price basically stayed roughly where, where it was. So when I think about it, the honest version of what happened with me is I thought, "Okay, I found a way to do close to double the work for maybe, what, 12% more money or whatever." [00:11:01] And I thought, "Okay, that's progress." I, I actually thought that for a better part of the year, probably 'cause I was too busy to do the real math And I wanna be clear, because you can not really systemize your way out of this problem, since it's not related to a productivity problem. ## [00:11:21] When the Work Itself Starts to Slip [00:11:21] **Tiana Ned:** The thing that started breaking was the work itself and not my schedule. [00:11:29] Somewhere in the last six months or so, I started noticing some small things. I had a feedback from a client who said that a Substack post felt a bit generic for her, which really stung at that point because generic Is that one word I built my whole w- voice workflow around avoiding, right? [00:11:57] And I didn't think she was really wrong in her judgment. It might be true that the rhythm was flatter, and the specific little [00:12:06] digressions That I used . when I was doing my repurposing had probably thinned out And I think it happened because I just stopped having the spare time and attention to notice when a piece needed more than one pass or more than one quality check, because there were like six other things behind in the queue. [00:12:30] And I think if we stop and think about it, it doesn't really show once as, as one big obvious failure. But it happens slowly, you know? It can be a slow flattening, or you take fewer risks in your work because more risks and more creative ideations require more thinking time, [00:12:56] and you don't have it, right? Fewer of your weird instincts to override something that AI draft already suggested, because that would mean you'd spend more energy. And I don't think, when I really think about it, that you got lazy and you started doing worse work. But the problem, the real problem, is you're doing more of the work at the same time, in the same week, with the same brain capacity you had before, right? [00:13:37] Which was never really built to run 10 client relationships in parallel at full attention. Nobody's is. Okay? And you already know which piece of work it was for you, don't you? I'm not gonna describe it because I don't feel like I need to. You're picturing it right now. That one that went out a little flatter or where you produced worse work than you know you're capable of And the one you hoped maybe nobody would look too closely, or what's even worse, that you didn't even notice, okay? [00:14:17] And that feeling that you just had right now, that little wince, that's the thing this podcast episode is about. And the twist is that this is exactly backwards from what was supposed to happen, right? Because, uh, uh, in my mind, AI was supposed to free up the mental space for the strategic thinking, for the big picture stuff, for the taste and the judgment. [00:14:47] That's supposed to be, you know, the, the actual differentiator once the execution gets automated. And instead, for me, it did the opposite. It filled that freed-up space with more and more execution, more clients, more deliverables, more Slack threads. And the strategic thinking, the stuff that would have actually let me raise my rates or change my positioning or figure out what to stop doing, that thing never got its turn. [00:15:20] Why? 'Cause there was always something due first. And I don't know if this is relatable, but I think there's a specific ... I don't know how I would call it. I think it's a shame. Yeah, basically shame that comes with this particular flavor of struggling. Because from the outside, it looks like success. You're... [00:15:44] Right? Because you're, you're busier than ever. You're using the tools. You sound in, uh, in, let's say in a five-minute conversation at a, at a networking thing, uh, you sound like someone who's thriving in the AI era. You know your, uh, tools, you know your things, right? But privately, when you're doing the math on a Sunday night, realizing you're working more for basically the same money, and your work is slowly getting a little worse than it used to be, but also you don't feel allowed to say any of that stuff out loud because, I mean, who's gonna feel sorry for the f- freelancer that has a full roster of clients now? [00:16:28] ## [00:16:28] Why "Just Charge More" Doesn't Cut It [00:16:29] **Tiana Ned:** So every piece of advice out there would tell you the fix is simple. Just charge more. Charge more. Move to value-based pricing. Charge for outcomes and not for hours. And look, there's nothing wrong with that approach. But I think in our world, it skips something that matters a lot more if you do the kind of work most of us do here. [00:16:56] So let's say you are a person that is driving revenue directly. You're either closing deals, or you're running ads, or ba- basically you're doing anything where you can point at a dollar figure and say, "I made that happen." In that case, th- yeah, value-based pricing is an option, and you should definitely explore it. [00:17:22] But if you are an editor, a copywriter, a designer, a photographer, a video editor, a UX designer, someone whose work supports the thing that makes money rather than being the thing that makes money, it's a bit harder to make that case. It's not impossible. I'm not saying it's impossible. People raise their rates all the time. [00:17:49] People productize their service. So it's not impossible, but it's harder because the client can see that you got faster. What they can't as easily see is why that means they should pay you more for the same deliverable they were already getting. That's the structure of being one or two or more steps removed from the revenue line, [00:18:14] and it-- I think it's worth naming it for what it is because I don't think it's a mindset problem or you just don't believe in yourself enough to raise the rates or whatnot. [00:18:26] Okay, so ## [00:18:27] What I'm Actually Doing About It [00:18:28] **Tiana Ned:** here's what I've been doing, and I wanna say upfront because some of this is gonna sound like it assumes you have a financial cushion, and I, I know not everyone does, okay? [00:18:37] I'll come back to that. But the first thing is looking hard at whether there's a skill sitting closer to the client's actual revenue that you could grow into instead of just producing more of the same execution work faster For me, that looked like leaning a bit harder into strategy conversations with my existing clients. [00:19:00] So not just like, "Hey, here is your edited episode, final folder," but more like talking with them about, "Let's see why your growth stalled here, and here are the three things I would change." You know? Because that's a completely different kind of value that isn't priced by hour because it isn't really labor in the traditional sense, right? [00:19:25] It's more judgment and strategy work. And it took me months and months to build confidence in, and I'm, I'm... I still think I'm not all the way there, but it's the only lever I've found that, you know, isn't just do more, produce more faster and faster forever, okay? Then the second thing is boundaries. But what I mean is boundaries with yourself because you need to cap active clients at a number you set in advance, okay? [00:19:59] And when a great opportunity shows up past that cap, you have to practice saying something like, "I don't have room for this right now," without dropping quality somewhere else. "Can... Hey, can we talk next quarter, quarter, please?" Uh, for me, ugh, oh, that sentence took me a long time to be able to say without immediately backpedaling. [00:20:24] Okay, s- here's an example for me specifically of that cap. I can realistically, at this point in time, take six podcast clients right now. That, that's what I concluded, so not 12 or 10 or 20 just because AI makes things faster. Six is that number, that sweet spot. Five to six, or, uh, let's say four to six, okay? [00:20:50] Depending on the deliverables. so instead of using that extra speed to squeeze in more clients, I've started thinking about bundling more deliverables into each of those six. So the rate for a client is the episode plus the newsletter, plus the platform description, plus around the social posts, all under one number that reflects everything now included, okay? [00:21:14] So it's same service for same six people, That's the version of charging more in my mind that's available to me because it's not asking the client necessarily to pay more for the same thing. It, it, it really is a bigger thing and a bigger scope. [00:21:30] And the third thing that I think is a bit of uncomfortable is that I took on fewer clients this quarter than I could have, and it's on purpose, even though it means less money in the pocket right now because I needed, I desperately needed the thinking time back. And I'm not talking about, you know, the, the squeezed between deliverables thinking time. [00:22:00] No, no, no. Like space, real space. And I wanna acknowledge that this can potentially be a privilege, right? Because it assumes you have some kind of buffer to absorb a slower month. But then there's a fourth thing I'll say, because I don't have it all figured out yet, I don't have enough to, to make a separate segment on it, [00:22:25] and I'll probably talk about it in some of the future episodes, but part of my plan is upskilling into something completely different. It is a skill that sits more in the ROI realm, so it's way closer to client revenue than production work will ever be. And I don't have the specifics nailed down just yet, so I'd rather not half-explain something I'm still processing and working through. [00:22:51] I'll talk about it properly, in the next few months once I have more clarity on what, what it will look like. But that's my goal, to be honest with you. That by the end of year, by the end of 2026, I am able to let go of production work, not entirely, but by a big chunk. If I can make it work of course. [00:23:14] And don't get me wrong, I love what I do. I love production. I love podcast editing. I love making short clips. I love doing the blogs, the newsletters, but it is labor-intensive, let's be honest. And the exhausting side of it is the, that thing, the, the hours for a dollar ceiling we've been talking about this whole episode. [00:23:39] I honestly would just rather be spending my best thinking on the thing instead of the seventh hour of execution on it. Which brings me to the part I don't wanna skip past, because I know that if you are supporting a family or if you don't have savings to lean on, I know that turning down a client this month means a real problem next month for you. [00:24:05] So n- none of this advice is meant to land on you the same way, okay? You're definitely not failing at, at your boundaries by continuing to say yes. I get it. You are making a rational decision under constraints that a lot of the advice out there just doesn't account for, okay? If that is your situation right now, the advice for you is not, "Hey, just take fewer clients and take it easy." [00:24:31] No. But you need to find one place in your week where you can get back 30 minutes, just 30 minutes of thinking time. So not between admin, client deliverables, not squeezing it in somewhere there, but just scheduling 30 minutes to ask yourself what you would change if you could, okay? [00:24:59] And protecting only that. And look, I know it's, it's not enough. I know. But it's a doable start when the bigger version isn't available to you yet, okay? And it's not also requiring you to turn down income you can't afford to turn down right now. [00:25:20] [00:25:22] **Tiana Ned:** I'm Still probably gonna be thinking about this More like a marker Because it's the same pattern as in 2025, same or similar rate as before AI overall after everything you account for. This just feels like information I didn't have before about a trap I couldn't see the shape of until I made myself actually lie there last night at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and stop distracting myself from it. [00:25:54] Okay, ## [00:25:54] The Question to Sit With [00:25:57] **Tiana Ned:** I'm not gonna end this episode with a tidy list, but I'm gonna ask you to do something before you close out this app you're on, whether it's Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or whatnot, and you'll go and make your dinner or answer that Slack message that's been sitting there waiting for you. [00:26:14] Do it in the next few minutes while it's still fresh. ## [00:26:17] Your Way Out [00:26:17] **Tiana Ned:** Think about this question that I'm gonna ask you and answer it honestly. [00:26:23] Is your way out perhaps productizing what you already do, okay? is it building the thing where the deliverables are fixed and repeatable, the pricing reflects the whole package, but not your hours? Or is it upskilling and moving towards something closer to the money, [00:26:46] even if it means feeling like a beginner again for a while? Which I know is hard and kind of awful when you've spent years and years being the person who's good at whatever you do, whether it's graphic design or video editing or copywriting. Or and I'll say this gently, , because most people wouldn't really say it out loud, but is maybe the answer stepping away from freelance production work entirely? [00:27:13] Maybe it's finding something offline. Maybe something with a ceiling on the demands instead of the invisible ones that keep moving. Think about it. I really don't know which one is your way out. I really don't. It might be some combination, [00:27:30] or it might be none of these, and something I haven't even named. But what I do know is that it has to be something. You have to sit with this and pick a direction, even a rough one, or w- the one you're not sure about yet, because what's the alternative? [00:27:48] The alternative is that you keep doing exactly what you're doing now. You tell yourself you'll figure it out once things calm down. Things are not gonna calm down on their own. I waited for mine, and instead I got to a 2:00 in the morning loop that wouldn't let me sleep until I admitted what it was. [00:28:10] Don't wait for yours to get that loud before you listen to it. Think about it, because if you don't, you're gonna burn yourself all the way to the ground, and it's gonna happen slowly, like a slow burner, and quietly enough that you won't notice it until you're already there If you've got an answer starting to form, even a half-formed , I'd really like to hear about it. [00:28:36] Shoot me a message on Instagram or Substack. And we can continue the discussion there. So now I'm gonna go and prepare myself a smoothie and get on with my working day. [00:28:54] Thank you for listening to another episode of AI For Creative Professionals., I would appreciate it if you took a minute to leave a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts because it would help other creative professionals like you find this show. I'll talk to you next week.