Cushioning

Though I'm employed full time by the Brooklyn Museum, I also take freelance work. I do this for a few different reasons. 1) The extra income. 2) For keeping both my design and development skills in practice. 3) To help out friends. 4) Because I love making things .

Because of number 4, I say yes to just about anything that comes my way. This sometimes becomes a problem because I tend to make terrible assumptions about my time. Namely, how much of it I actually have to work. 

This is one of the reasons Jonnie Hallman has created Cushion. It's a web app with two very meaningful purposes. One is for tracking your income as a freelancer, making sure you have enough work scheduled to be financially stable. The other is to help make intelligent decisions about scheduling the work so that you're not doing too much at once. 

Since I have already have a sustaining salary, the income tracking feature is only a nice-to-have for me. It's great to see in one glance, though, and if I ever did go fully freelance, it would immediately become a need-to-have feature. But the scheduling view -- that is a feature which really pulls its weight for me.

Two things Cushion has shown me so far:

1) I did a pretty good job scheduling my freelance work in 2014:

2) 2015 is starting to look a little top-heavy.

I'm really glad to have seen this displayed so clearly. Seeing my time commitments in this way makes me feel empowered. I have a better grasp on how much work I can handle and what kind of promises I can and cannot make to current and future clients. This was definitely worth the cost of joining the paid beta.

There's a paid beta. If you're a freelancer, I'm already prepared to say that Cushion is worth it. And Jonnie is a good dude. Much respect for building a great, very useful thing.