Contractors may wonder if corporate clients would be quite as accommodating as Kaufman's government contacts; there is certainly some reason to worry.  Get-it-done yesterday production schedules are a fact of life in the corporate world.  Work until it's done or you're toast.  If you can't spend a week in Singapore, we'll find someone who can.

In fact, many clients and agencies will flatly refuse to agree to any special requests, like a promise that you'll only have to work overtime if it's really an emergency.  "The way we work is based on an outdated system when women stayed home," notes Elizabeth Perle McKenna, author of When Work Doesn't Work Anymore.  It's almost as if some employers forget (or want to forget) that employees have lives outside work.

A little searching may be required to hook up with people who understand your needs.  A contractor-slash-entomologist in San Diego has managed to find clients who accept his periodic disappearances into the natural world as the price they pay to access his skills.  Mark McWhirter, a Los Angeles specialist in robotic automation software, has time to "surf a lot, bike a lot and see my kids [ages 2 and 4]," while maintaining a full-time consulting practice.  Maybe it's a California thing.

Not necessarily.  Mike Mohrbacher, an independent contractor who lives in Northbrook, Illinois, has also made balance a priority.  "Part of raising a family is just showing up," he says.  "Adolescent boys [ages 16, 13, and 10 in the Mohrbacher family] just need time to talk."  A recent study by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development hints that Mohrbacher is right:  "Half of all [teens] are at moderate risk or high risk of abusing drugs, failing in school, getting pregnant, or otherwise seriously damaging their lives," Fortune magazine reported in March.

Mohrbacher is also using contracting to help him fund his retirement.  Although he works through contracting agencies exclusively, he bills through his company, Black River Systems.  Agencies issue him 1099s and he makes the maximum retirement contribution he can each year, which can reach five figures, although he is only working an average of 36 hours per week.

Mohrbacher's goals are to limit his work to 40 hours per week or less, keep his commute to no more than one hour, and minimize his absences from the dinner hour.  "There's always some project crunch time that comes along, but when I was younger, I routinely worked 10 to 12 hours per day.  Now I'm home by 6:00 or 6:30."  He would prefer to work at home, but the agencies and clients he works with want him on site.

Mohrbacher, whose work includes C++, Visual Basic, and Web development, is represented by Zeal, Inc., which has let him negotiate his working conditions directly with clients.  He reports on his current project to Marty Marcus, directory of applications development for Wheels, Inc., the third-largest fleet leasing company in the country.  Like his previous clients, says Mohrbacher, Wheels, Inc. has been responsive to his desire for more time at home.  But it was up to him to let his needs be known.  "When I interview consultants," says Marcus, "if they raise a concern like flextime, we talk.  But I don't bring it up."

Mixing work and life can be a challenge even without children in the picture.  Debbie Handler, a database and Web contractor who is single, devotes an enormous chunk of her time to volunteer activities.  She is currently president-elect of the 1500-member Independent Computer Consultants Association (ICCA), as well as the vice president of its Northern California chapter and membership chair of the Chicago chapter.  (Don't ask.)  The reason for her commitment is simple:  Most of her business comes from contacts she makes through ICCA.  She even met her fiancé, also an independent consultant, at an ICCA function.

"My clients have ICCA to thank for finding me, so they understand when I have to go to meetings or do ICCA work," says Handler.  All of her clients are aware, too, that she works on several projects at a time from her home office in Sausalito.  "No client knows exactly when I'm working on their stuff, but I have an 800 pager number and I always call them back within five or 10 minutes."

To maintain her juggling act, Handler has learned how to prioritize projects -- and how to separate real emergencies from imagined ones.  "It's vital to maintain lines of communication and let my clients know what my schedule is," she says, noting that people who call needing something "yesterday" are usually told, "Sorry, you're too late."  They also that she will drop everything to help if a real catastrophe hits.

It is that kind of commitment that has allowed Handler to maintain her client base when she moved her business from Chicago to Sausalito two years ago.  Heading west to join her fiancé, she convinced Imperial Service Systems, Inc. of Villa Park, Illinois, to put her on retainer even though her original contract contained a cancellation clause.  "We like the setup, the ability to call her and she'll us back right away," says Joseph Zych, controller at Imperial.  "In a way her California hours are great.  She can keep working a few hours after our day is over."

Barney Kaufman, Mike Mohrbacher, and Debbie Handler have figured out how to have a life and stay aloft financially.  Sure, they're not making as much money as contractors willing to work until they drop, in whatever location, for however long it takes.  But they don't care.

Says author McKenna, "You have to live by what you treasure."

Nancy Shepherdson, who is married to an IT contractor, is a freelance writer based in Glenview, Illinois.  She can be reached at personbiz@aol.com.