…you wait an hour for one, and then three come along at once.
I try to ensure I’m not taking on too much work at any one time, but my clients are generally individuals and small groups. It’s hard for them to find the time to write content, to consider the various points I put to them in the course of developing a website, to talk to colleagues and lawyers, and all the little things that need to be done during the development process.
This means that projects are developed asynchronously, each of us working on it when we can find the time. Things move in fits and starts.
An awful lot of groundwork goes into any web project before a line of code has been written, but eventually there comes a point when everything is developed as far as it can be without any content. It then becomes a waiting game, and the result of this game is—all too often—that famine is followed by feast. No work for a month is followed by three sets of people wanting to see three different websites up and running within a short timeframe.
I suppose that at this point I should ask the question, “How do you cope?” to all the freelancers out there. But before I do—or at any rate, before you answer—it’d be rude of me not to say what I do to cope. The answer is often, sadly, “I don’t.” Three things at once is at least two more than my brain can cope with. Apparently, multi-tasking is a myth and all I need to learn to do is learn to slice my attention-span more finely.
It’s all very well saying it; doing it may be more than I can manage. Maybe, instead, I should just focus on being more realistic and more upfront about deadlines with my clients; maybe I should be saying, “If you can’t deliver the content within a certain timeframe then I can’t promise I’ll deliver the site by two weeks [or whatever] after that date.” Honesty, in my experience, works well. I should try it more often.
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Contracts. Mine specify a timeframe for both the work on my end and the content to be provided on their end.
If they’re late, they’re going to have to wait in line until I’m ready to work on their site again.
ceejayoz November 10th, 2005
Contracts are good, but in truth they only help some. From my experience, even with clients that have dedicate time to a web project, we eventually hit a stage (section, pages, etc.) that they hadn’t thought about, and it takes forever to get content for it. I often, do temporary write-ups of pages and or sections just to get content in. The good clients, then just edit, write anew, copy and paste, etc. The bad, just complain that the content isn’t the way they want it. Despite my, “well, your suppose to write something and deliver it.”
The problem often stems from smaller clients can’t devote a person to a single job, which makes responsiveness, just darn flaky. Then as they’re response overlaps with new projects, all of a sudden your feeling flaky, but the reality is their time line has passed, your just making secondary accommodations.
allgood2 November 11th, 2005
I have run into this more times that I would like to admit. In the end the client just needs to know that they have a responsibility to this project the same as you. They need to hold up thier end regardless and if they can’t. Tuff
Jeremiah November 14th, 2005
Being the developer, you should stand firm in your deadlines. I like the idea above regarding just telling them, if you make me wait, I make you wait. For, in the long run, you are developing for more than one client, and they should know you have a business to run just as much as they do.
If you stagger your deadlines and then give them a window of opportunity (i.e. making the deadline a few days long) , then you could have the time to devote to the one project. If the client needs it now, bump them up in priority and notify the other clients accordingly.
It can be tough, as most clients always want priority, but if you clarify to your clients that these deadlines are in place so that you can provide a quality product, then they might adhere to those deadlines and alleviate this problem all together.
Lauchlin November 15th, 2005