How To Manage Multiple Freelance Projects
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Ahhhh, the life of a skilled contractor or freelance professional is a great one, but before you know it, things can heat up quick. Soon, you’re getting awarded job after job from a crowd of clients ready and waiting to pay you for your skills. Sound hectic? Sometimes, it can be. Christopher Null, a freelance writer that contributes to Yahoo! Tech, Filmcritic.com, Drinkhacker.com, Wired, PCWorld, and more, gives us his tips on how he stays sharp and on top of his hectic work life.
In a perfect world, you’d take a single assignment, work on it for a month, collect your fee when you turn it in, and move on to the next job. But realistically that kind of stability is rare – and largely unheard-of – in the freelance world.
Jobs come in at unpredictable intervals, deadlines change, projects are abruptly postponed or canceled, and you’re stuck in the middle of it, trying to figure out how to manage it all.
Managing multiple and complex projects can overwhelm some people, but it doesn’t have to. With careful attention to organization, you can keep your assignments on track, hit your deadlines, make your clients happy, and still have time for the occasional cup of coffee.
Different techniques will work better for different types of workers, so I can’t offer a one-size-fits-all solution to keeping multiple projects on track. Still, here are some strategies and technologies that have worked for me and which I hope will also help you.
Leveraging Your Calendar
You probably think of your calendar as a repository for meetings, dental appointments, and birthdays, but you can leverage it to work well as a task management solution, too.
Any calendar software or service will work. It just requires a different way of thinking about your time. Say you have five projects with staggered deadlines and know you’ll need to spend 30 hours this week to get them all done. Instead of just putting the projects on an unstructured to-do list, try blocking out specific time in your calendar to work on each one. Monday may have three two-hour blocks scheduled, each devoted to a different assignment.
This can benefit you in a number of ways: It keeps you more focused on each task, less distracted, and sets a series of “mini-deadlines” for you to accomplish by the end of each work period. The risk, of course, is going over your allotted time – or budgeting that time incorrectly – so be realistic about what you think you can get done in an hour or two. Be careful not to get too granular with your time – split time into 30-minute intervals at the very smallest – and leave time for housekeeping issues like checking email, eating lunch, and taking breaks.
Managing By Spreadsheet
I use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of pending and outstanding invoices, but it can also work as a deadline management utility if you just add a column or two to it. A typical, simple billing spreadsheet might include columns for the client name, the assignment, the amount owed, and the date of the invoice. Now consider adding a date of assignment, deadline, and any needed note fields to the spreadsheet. This way you can build a very simple but effective way to look at all your outstanding work at a glance.
In practice, I split the spreadsheet into completed jobs and in-progress jobs (completed jobs at the top of the sheet, pending ones at the bottom), which makes it even easier to see what I need to prioritize in my work week and what’s already finished.
Your Inbox Is Your Friend
Your standard email inbox can also work as a good motivator and reminder of what needs to get done and when. It helps if you think of your inbox as a form of to-do list, where you keep one (and only one) email in the inbox relating to each project you have underway. Additional emails related to each project should be filed away in relevant folders, and junk mail simply deleted. This technique won’t work at all if you’re the kind of person who never deletes email from the inbox.
With your inbox pared down to a reasonable size – about 20 messages is the maximum number that I find manageable when pursuing this strategy – you can use color coding, such as the Category system built into Outlook – to sort messages based on task. For example, I categorize items I need to work on today as red, tomorrow as orange, and later this week as yellow. It’s not a very detailed way to keep track of projects, but because I have my email client open all day, it serves as a continuous reminder of what needs to get done and with little more than a glance.
To-Do Lists on Steroids
For some, nothing works better than a simple unstructured list of things to do, and that’s fine – but why stop at a static list of tasks? Assign dates on your to-do list and use color-coding (via colored pens or highlighters) to indicate tasks with higher priorities. Don’t let to-do lists get too big, or they lose their effectiveness and become overwhelming. You can also use Elance’s built-in “My Jobs” feature to quickly get a snapshot of everything you’re working on at the moment.
Combining Strategies
The strategies outlined above are not mutually exclusive, and adopting more than one of them can make it even easier to keep tabs on multiple projects. For example, the inbox strategy can work as a continuous reminder of what needs to get done, while your spreadsheet gives you a centralized place to check in once a day on your in-process tasks, giving you a longer-range view. Mix and match strategies until you find the set that works for you!
Christopher Null is the author of the books Half Mast and Five Stars! How to Become a Film Critic, the World’s Greatest Job, blogs daily for Yahoo! Tech, edits the popular movie review website Filmcritic.com, blogs about wine and spirits for Drinkhacker.com, and freelances regularly for PCWorld, Wired, and numerous other websites and magazines. His personal weblog can be found at chrisnull.com.
