by Joe Wallace

Have you been slapped with an unreasonable deadline? One that’s conflicting with your other freelance writing work? Maybe you just plain fell behind.

When you need some extra deadline time, try a few of these tactics to help lighten the load:

1. Ask for clarification. On practically every project you can find some detail that needs a bit more elaboration from the client. Write an e-mail explaining that you’re stalled because you ran into a problem with X, Y, and X and you need additional information. Chances are the answer might not get back to you immediately and you can leverage the downtime into an extended deadline.

2. Outsource. If you’re juggling multiple projects and can’t get them all done (because you don’t have six pairs of hands) consider outsourcing some of your workload to a trusted freelancer friend. This isn’t the time to be experimenting with some new writer, make sure your fallback person is capable of doing the work and let them know you’ll probably re-write them.

3. Take advantage of flexible deadlines elsewhere. I should just title this one “reprioritize”. Any flexible deadlines you’ve got, shuffle to the back burner and make your tight deadline the priority. Here’s another situation where outsourcing might be helpful.

2. Computer Error. I would never suggest lying to a client, but I can tell you some of my biggest deadline challenges were due to having computer problems that wiped out part or all of the work. To prevent this, I back up to external media, but in the event you have a catostrophic crash, hard drive failure or other problem, contact your client right away to get an extension of your deadline while you recover your data or reaccomplish it.

1. On the heels of the last tip, you can always just ask the client for an extra day or so. Sometimes just being up front about an over-ambitious deadline is the best policy.