What do you do when a client hands you a great project but with a daunting deadline? As a freelance professional, you may not want to turn down good paying work. After all, if you do, you risk losing the client to another freelancer.
Your first step: negotiate.
When a client says something like, “We need to see three concepts by Friday this week”, ask why that particular date is so important.
In my experience, most deadlines are arbitrary. Clients basically pick a date that is most convenient to them.
This is understandable. Busy business owners, marketing managers and agency creative directors naturally want to get their hands on your freelance work as early as possible. It makes things a lot less stressful — for them! — because that’s one less component of the project they have to worry about.
In these cases, you can often negotiate a more realistic deadline that fits both your schedule and that of your client’s. For example, you could say: “I’m booked solid early this week, but I can dive into your project with both feet on Thursday. What would happen if I delivered the three concepts to you by next Tuesday at noon?”
More often than not, the client will agree. And you can breathe a sigh of relief!
Sometimes, however, a client has a very good reason for a given deadline. Perhaps a trade show is looming and the salespeople need a new brochure to hand out to visitors. Or a seminar date is coming up and the web page promoting the event needs to be online next week.
When a deadline is carved in stone, you can still negotiate — a little. If your client wants the job done by Friday, you may be able to ask for an extension to Monday, but probably not much more.
So what do you do if a deadline is just that: the deadline.
Unless you’re willing to say no to your client and accept the consequences, your only choice is the Nike way. Just do it!
Here are some tips that will make working under impossible — well, nearly impossible — deadlines a lot easier.
1. Clear The Decks. Put everything you can on the backburner. Free up as much time as possible to devote exclusively to the project.
2. Add An Hour. Start an hour earlier, or work an hour later, each day. An extra hour of work is relatively painless, yet you’ll be surprised by how much more you’ll accomplish.
3. Close The Door. Ask your friends, colleagues, and family (especially the kids) to limit interruptions.
4. Plan Your Work. Decide, in advance, how much you’ll need to accomplish each day. Then stick to that schedule.
5. Start Now. Don’t procrastinate a few days and then pull an all-nighter. (Not fun.)
6. Avoid Perfection. You don’t have the time for that luxury! Create the piece as quickly as possible, no matter how terrible it is. Then clean it up. Revise it. And revise it again until it’s done. Aim for excellence, not perfection.
7. Do Your Best. Ultimately, that’s all you can do. Your best work, given the time you have available.
Surprisingly, creative work done under pressure — even when the timelines seem impossible and a detriment to quality — is often very good. Go figure.
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Steve Slaunwhite is co-editor of The Wealthy Freelancer and the author of Pricing Your Writing Services.
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A way to handle it is to have a sizable rush/overtime rate, such as 1.5X or 2X the normal rate, depending on the time crunch. Sometimes this slow things down, and if it doesn’t, the freelancer can be fairly compensated for the disruption the rush job can cause. Depends, of course, on the relationship you have, or want to keep, with the client.
I just wrote this in another blog — I had a three week deadline for a how to book on a software product. If it hadn’t been a how to on software, I may have never pulled it off… my dad had a stroke in the middle of it and was an hour’s drive away. I took my laptop, but I couldn’t concentate.
I didn’t ask for an extension because an author of one of the other books was in the hospital and couldn’t get an extension. So why should I? I mentioned that I didn’t know how I did it, but I think I did many of the things in your list here.
Great post and some excellent information. I have to admit, that some of my best work has come out of pressure to complete an assignment on time. I sometimes find that if I have a tight deadline I am more inclined to just start writing more so than procrastinating for days over the angle I want to take or the style I want to write in. Sometimes tight deadlines really do pay off.