Jeremiah Tolbert

What I’ve been learn­ing a lot lately involves how I man­age my time and how I should set my expec­ta­tions when work­ing on larger scale projects.  This sum­mer, I booked two  large projects with great bud­gets, and I started off believ­ing that I would have both these projects com­pleted by the end of September, leav­ing me with enough money and time to focus on other pur­suits for the rest of the year, should I want to do so.

Oh, how wrong I have been.

I was bas­ing this assump­tion on the idea that these projects would pro­ceed at the same gen­eral pace as my smaller projects with smaller clients.  What I failed to take into account was how much bureau­cracy is involved when work­ing with larger com­pa­nies.  They have larger bud­gets for big­ger projects, but there are more play­ers involved in the design and approval process.  Sometimes their con­tract approval process might take weeks, not days.   And when work­ing with larger, more suc­cess­ful clients, their time is less free to work with you, as their time is often taken up doing what they do so well and sup­port­ing their suc­cess.  It makes sense when you think about it—I just failed to do so.

The result here was that I was ini­tially look­ing at spend­ing con­sid­er­able time between mis­sives and project deliv­er­ables wait­ing on feed­back.  Any time spent wait­ing is money lost, and rather than being fully booked up as I thought, I found myself with time that I needed to fill.  This sent me scram­bling to pick up more projects, but none so big that they would con­flict with the already booked work.

I’ve learned this sum­mer that I need to plan for these larger projects to take even longer than I expect, and I need to be less likely to close myself off to book­ing new projects because of these larger scale projects. There are plenty of gaps to squeeze in the smaller work.

In gen­eral, time man­age­ment, when you’re paid basi­cally for the work you do and not just to show up at some office, is incred­i­bly impor­tant in this busi­ness.  I sus­pect many self-​​employed strug­gle with this part as much as I do.  Do you?  How do you jug­gle the balls to keep the work rolling in reg­u­larly?  I’ve been very lucky that my self-​​employed life has been mostly feast, with very lit­tle famine so far.  I’d like to keep it that way for the fore­see­able future.   Wouldn’t we all?

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Tags: freelancing, project management, time management