maniya / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

There seems to be an age-old struggle between clients and freelancers: You need work in a pinch but don’t want to compromise on quality. Yes, I’m talking about rush jobs.

For many freelancers, this raises red flags. They’re concerned about being frazzled and not compensated for turning around top-notch work in a short span. You’re worried about meeting a deadline that just came up and saving your skin, too. If you can at all include more time for a project to be completed, do so. It’ll help you avoid rushing around—and probably save you a few bucks as well. But if that inevitable rush job comes into play, you’ll need to work with a freelancer that can swiftly get the job done.

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Every freelancer needs clients. We rely on them, nurture our relationships with them, and provide a quality of service that keeps then coming back. And we can never have enough of them! The Monster List of Freelance Job Sites has one purpose: to massively increase your source of potential clients and potential jobs.

This list, like Isaac Newton, stands on the shoulders of giants. The original Monster List of Freelance Job Sites has been valuable and much visited since April 2007. Your hundreds of comments have greatly added to its value. This list is a thorough update, removing dead links, adding new sites, and taking on board many of the suggestions from your comments.

We start the list with FreelanceSwitch’s own Job Board, which has categories for design, development, writing, illustration, Flash, and miscellaneous jobs, and at the time of writing contains a huge 200 jobs. You can see the available jobs with no strings attached, but to apply for jobs, you need to sign up, which costs just $7 a month. And you can advertise jobs at absolutely no cost.

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If you are like most freelancers, the concept of taking a day off

from work is pretty wonderful. But in reality, it can kind of put you in

a whirlwind. It can even be downright stressful.

I was thinking about how grateful I am to be self-employed today,

when I remembered what a friend said in her Facebook status message. She

said she was confident it would be a great day because she had a day

off from work. This friend works a full-time 9-to-5 gig. I remember what

it used to be like to have a day off. I lived for days off. Now, I

sometimes have to force myself to take days off. Sometimes when I decide

to take a weekday off, I sometimes have to battle an insane amount of

guilt.

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