Tag Archives: time management

editorial, lifestyle

Top 5 Ways to Buy More Deadline Time

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buy more time on your deadline

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.

lifestyle, resources

Boost Your Time Management Skills

 Ok….let’s be honest….are you good at time management? Do the days tend to get away from you or are you able to keep up on projects with no problem? Most of us who work at home need to stay on top of things to make sure projects get completed on time. If you could use a little help, check out this site. You’ll find some great tips and resources, such as how to benefit from an activity log, how to prioritize your tasks and great info on beating procrastination. Excellent stuff!

advice

The Golden Pencil’s Anne Wayman on Overwork

The Golden Pencil ran a piece on freelance writing overwork, what I like to call “deadline creep” and time management. When reading Anne Wayman’s description of how she tries to keep her writing off limits on the weekends, I was reminded of a set of my own crazy work problems last year.

Like Anne, I think the division between work and play is very important for a self-employed freelance writer. The problem is, if you don’t work, you don’t get paid–and once I get used to being paid on a fairly steady clip I like to keep the run going as long as it will last.

Before the holiday season 2007, I was running myself into the ground. I worked 10 and 12 hour days, weekends and evenings. My problem was that I had taken a long series of smaller jobs for lower pay instead of working fewer gigs for more money. I felt trapped by the steady income–not enough from one individual client, but steady enough to make excuses for when all lumped together.

Oddly enough, circumstances forced me to cut out all the low-payers (which all had vast demands on my time far out of proportion to what was being paid). Once I ditched the time-wasters, I found myself earning much more on a single gig than with all those other jobs combined. Continue reading The Golden Pencil’s Anne Wayman on Overwork →