Yes, can confirm the first. Over half the time I'm basically designing the UI & UX for my clients (I'm a back-end dev), messaging or calling them about how they want certain logic or behavior to work, making my own decisions about what said behavior should be, prioritizing tasks for them, and managing my own task lists & estimates for the sake of my own organization and their invoice requirements.

Most freelancers only work part of the year, but only a small percentage of those freelancers do so because they choose to. For many its due to lack of work.

Ha, you're right - I didn't notice the contradiction. I guess we'd all like to work on absolutely fascinating stuff for about 4 hours a day.

That would probably be a better use of human abilities.

Right! And the rest of the work, like talking to the client, we can build robots for!