The project began with everyone positive and upbeat, but then things began ton deteriorate. The schedule began to slip, and the quality of the project began to slide as well. Once this was realized, action was taken to remedy the situation, but it might have been too late. Trust with the client had begun to falter, and action was needed.

As part of the effort to rebuild trust, I drafted up an outline of the things that went wrong in the project, and how I might avoid at from happening in the future.

• If you cannot see the person working, then make sure that you can communicate on a regular basis, and that you are seeing their handiwork often to ensure that progress is being made.
• Never assume anything about the project. Always ask about every little detail, so that you truly know where the project stands.
• When budgeting, make sure that you use a buffer sufficiently large that were things to go severely downhill, you could still deliver within budget.
• Use milestones to cap the amount of work that needs to be done at any one point in time. That way, if any pArt of the project falls bend, there’s a limit on the amount of damage to the entire project it can cause.
• A tiny percentage of projects in IT finish both on time and on budget. Don’t stick to one to the absolute exclusion of the other.

There are other lessons, but theism I feel, real get to the gist if what can go wrong. Sometimes you need to sacrifice part of a project to meet a successful conclusion, and sometimes, the decisions that need to be made are tough.

That’s why not everyone is cut out for this kind of work – you can become a pretty unpopular person at times, but if you’re patient, the reward will come.

Related posts:

1. Working for Equity Doesn’t Always Work
2. Time Management and Procrastination
3. Risk and Reward

Hi, my name is Elie Kochman, and for the last four years, I’ve been working as a freelancer.

When Rachel asked me to present this session, I was amused. I had, after all, missed the deadline for submitting a proposal for a session. When we couple that with the fact that I was still making revisions to this presentation last night, well, I guess that makes me an expert on procrastination.

Before we proceed into the presentation, I have a question for you:

Why are you here and what are you hoping to gain from this presentation?

To begin, let’s dispose of the misconception that there are some hard and fast rules that can solve a time management problem. There aren’t any in particular to time management. There is one rule, though, and it has nothing to do with time management in particular, but still relevant.

Only you can bring about your own success.

That is, you cannot solve any problem, and time management is one such problem, until you recognize that you are capable of bringing about your own success, and that no one else is likely to do it for you.

Einstein said, and I’ve seen this quoted in a variety of ways:

You cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.

The issue of time management is no different. While you can, and likely already have, identified the missed deadlines and the late nights working to finish projects at the last minute, you might not be able to identify why. Procrastination is merely a result of poor time management – it’s not a cause.

Most of you will be familiar with the following statement:

It is human nature to be able to easily identify problems in other people while failing to recognize our own.

As we are notoriously bad at recognizing our own problems, or the causes of our own problems, the solution becomes quite simple. Find someone who can recognize our own failings.

If there’s one thing you take away from Freelance Camp TO, I would suggest that it be a new friend, or group of friends with whom you can share your experiences. Meet with that person on a regular basis and talk about the issues your businesses are facing, and how you’re dealing with them. The best source of ideas and suggestions are often from those people who are going, or have gone, through a similar situation to what you’re facing.

Going back to time management – what types of problems are you looking for? Some of my own that I’ve learned to deal with are a predisposition to spend time playing solitaire when I could be working, and failing to write down important pieces of information.

Both problems were pointed out by someone working in the same office as me. It wasn’t something I didn’t know, but it was something I was subconsciously blocking out.

Who can you turn to that might be able to identify such time-wasters for you?

Okay, so you’ve managed to identify some portions of your day that could be utilized more effectively. What do you do next?

The reality is that you’ll need a change of perspective, as the quote from Einstein implies. In this case, though, I’m more open to taking the approach from a large business:

Just do it!

Nike has it right when they say that there are times when the best course of action is to act. You need the mentality of success, but if you convince yourself that you can succeed, you will find the rest of the suggestions over the next little while not to be solutions per se, but rather tools in your arsenal to help you accomplish what you already know to be possible.

What is it that you’re doing? You’re taking control of your schedule, and you’re starting right now. Not later, when there’s a lull in the work. Not next week, after this emergency project gets sent to the client.

Today. Before you get out of your seat.

Recognize the power of a schedule, and make it work for you.

Big companies spend significant amounts of time and money on management, because people are more effective when they are working with a schedule. A good manager will have their team working effectively by scheduling their time for them.

When you’re working for yourself, there really isn’t anyone to do this for you, so you need to do it for yourself.

Steven Covey, author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, describes the progression of time management techniques under the heading of one of the habits. I don’t agree with his list completely, but the first three of the following tips I discovered yesterday as I was reading his book overlap exactly with 3 stages of the progression, though in a different order.

Get a daily planner.

First, if you don’t already have one, go out and invest in a daily agenda. If you use a smart phone, there’s probably an app already on it that can do the job. You need to commit to using it, and the best way to do that is to write EVERYTHING into the agenda.

For each item in the agenda, make sure you put on appropriate reminders. For example, you might enter all your bills from vendors that need to be paid. Set the reminder for a few days before the bills are due so that you don’t miss deadlines because you forgot.

Use to-do lists.

Second, make your schedule for each day in terms of what you are going to accomplish before the end of the day. Balance the need to finish projects to get them out the door against the excitement of working on the next big project.

The way I do this is with a large whiteboard, on which I’ve written a detailed list of things I need to do. Each morning, I spend a few minutes marking which items I’m going to finish today, and over the course of the day, I tick them off. At the end of the day, I erase all the completed tasks, and fill in any new tasks that came up that day.

Prioritize daily.

Schedules change constantly, because what you need to complete changes constantly. Clients come and go, emergencies arise, scope of projects expand and contract. You need to recognize that this means priorities are likewise changing. By combining the previous two tips, you can take control of your priorities by always knowing what you need to do, and when it needs to be done.

Each day, as you set the priorities for that day, remember that you are dealing with both the priorities of the here and now as well as the future. Try to set some time every day for the low priority items, because otherwise they will never get done.

Think tasks, not time.

Here’s where I digress from Covey’s progression. In my experience, I’ve found that thinking about work in terms of tasks makes me much more efficient than when I focus on time. When I decide which tasks to work on today, I think about completing those tasks, not how much time I’m going to spend doing that.

The problem, of course, is that with larger projects, it might not be possible to complete them in a single day. So break them into smaller pieces, and make a deadline for finishing each piece of the project.

Use artificial deadlines to assist scheduling.

An artificial deadline is one created by yourself, over which you have absolute control. Once you’ve set that deadline, though, it needs to be considered as rigid as if a client assigned it.

What this lets you do is to create a to-do list that has many manageable tasks in it, and to schedule each of those accordingly. Your schedule doesn’t look like blocks of time assigned to various tasks, but a list of tasks that you’re going to do on any given day. Some tasks might have specific times assigned to them, such as meetings with clients, but others will only specify what, not how long.

Last, I want to talk about interruptions, or, more specifically, phone calls and emails.

You don’t have to answer right away.

While many people find a ringing phone to be an irritant that cannot be ignored, the truth is, you don’t need to pick up every time. Look at your call display quickly to see if it warrants an immediate pick-up. If you do pick up, change your answer to something like,

Hi, this is Elie. I’m just in the middle of something right now – can I call you back in about 20 minutes when I’m done?

Most people would rather talk to you in 20 minutes and get your undivided attention than have a conversation with someone who just admitted their mind is on something else. The same applies to email. While we’ve been trained to respond quickly to emails, the truth is that most emails are not urgent, and can wait an hour for a response.

What I would suggest, then, is that making phone calls and checking emails become a task you do several times a day, perhaps between all the other items from your to-do list that you’ve chosen to do.

Success breeds success.

What you will discover is that each day you succeed at managing your time will result in making it easier for you to manage your time the next day. By constantly looking both ahead and behind you, you will find that you do, in fact, take control of your schedule. Your success, in short, will make it easier for you to continue to succeed in the future.

Related posts:

1. Managing Multiple Projects
2. The Ideal Management Team
3. When Time Runs Out

The problem is actually one that many small businesses that grow face at some point in their transitionary period – where the word becomes more than one person can handle, and yet there is not quite enough work, or enough regular work, to justify employing another person to help out. A typical work-work goes from 40 hours to 60 hours to 80 hours – and there is still a reluctance to hire someone, despite the fact that there’s enough work for two. I digress, though, as this is the topic of another article regarding growth, expansion, and the first hire.

The first thing I did when I realized that I had more demands on my time than I was able to track was that I wrote down a detailed list of all the projects I was working on. For each project, I wrote down what the next few tasks were, and if there was a real deadline involved.

Each morning, I would clear the list of all completed tasks, and add in the next set of tasks for each project. I would then figure out which tasks were most important, and therefore had to be done immediately, which projects I hadn’t worked on in the last few days, and therefore deserve attention, and which were waiting for some other input out of my control.

I found that merely creating and looking at this list increased my productivity, for a few reasons.

First, it gave me the ability to clearly see where I stood on each project.

Second, it reduced the likelihood of me forgetting a project, thereby impacting relationships with my clients.

Third, it helped me by providing satisfaction at marking another item as complete, limiting the number of items I would start one day and leave hanging, incomplete, until the next day.

A piece of advice given to me by Jeremy Lichtman of Lichtman Consulting was as follows. Make sure you work every day on every project, even for a few minutes. The reasoning is that by putting in some effort every day, even the low priority projects will get worked on, as well as the projects that have become irritants. Otherwise, you run the risk of having low priority projects never get completed until they become high priorities, which is usually at the expense of a client relationship.

Do you have any other suggestions to share? Please comment, I would love to hear from you.

Related posts:

1. Task Management
2. For the Right Price
3. Choosing to Outsource

Today, as you may have noticed, this article was published about an hour late.

I’ve written before that one of the best things you can do for your site is to provide regular updates, and on a schedule. Since January 1, 2010, I’ve posted an article Monday through Friday at 7:45 AM Toronto time. Holiday? I posted anyhow.

I kept this aggressive schedule by always posting in advance, usually several days before the article would be made public. It took the pressure off.

Today, I ran out of articles. I was tired last night, and didn’t realize that there was nothing scheduled for today.

Keeping a schedule is one thing. Remembering to look at your schedule is quite another.

Time management techniques will talk about priorities, making lists of things to be done, of organizing your day, and of keeping a calendar. But if you don’t remember to look at those things constantly during the day, it won’t help you to have any of that.

Related posts:

1. Changes for 2010
2. Milestones
3. Site Review: Under 30 CEO

The reality is that if you have 10 clients running simultaneously, (and we’ll assume that the amount of work for each is equal,) then you’ll be spending about 8% of your time on each client. (The balance of 20% is for your overhead of administrative work and locating new clients.) You can’t give any one client more than that percentage.

To handle that, I suggest you adopt some of the following strategies. If you have other ideas, please share in the comments.

1. Keep a list of what needs doing for each client, so that the time you spend on that client isn’t wasted figuring out what to do next. Just select something from that list and do that. This will help you be better organized with your time, which may end up freeing up more of your time.
2. Don’t answer the phone if you can’t give it 100% of your attention. Let the client leave a message, and use that to determine if you should call back immediately, or if it can wait a bit. Book some time in your daily calendar to make that call, when you don’t have something else to keep you busy.
3. With e-mails, split your incoming messages into 2 groups (if you feel it necessary to constantly watch your mail) – one that can be answered in a sentence or two, and the other to be dealt with later. Sending off an e-mail that doesn’t address the questions the client was asking properly can generate negative feedback, which you can easily avoid by taking the time to read the questions slowly.
4. Publish your calendar online so your clients can see when it’s best to get in touch with you. Sure, emergencies crop up, but if you allocate specific times each day for phone calls, you should see the number of calls at other times go down significantly. (I didn’t say your calendar has to be accurate, or even fully published – just a list of times that you have booked for meetings/phone calls and a list of available times would suffice.
5. Block off time to work on each client’s projects to the exclusion of all others. Treat that time as if you were in a meeting, that is, only be disrupted if it really is urgent.

Do you have other suggestions for balancing multiple clients and projects? Please let me know of your ideas in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. Email Overload and Prompt Replies
2. Starting a Business
3. Managing Multiple Projects

Before I get into that, however, there are three things you should know.

First, I’m in the IT consulting business, so some of the sections here won’t apply to you if you’re in a different field. However, the method itself is extensible to other fields with the details of each segment being modified to suit the project.

Second, the method was inspired by a comment from Joel Spolsky regarding evidence-based scheduling:

You have to break your schedule into very small tasks that can be measured in hours.

Third, despite knowing the method, it is still easy to make mistakes, and experience alone can reduce the cost of those errors. As an example, there was one project where my quote was off by so much, I ended up earning less than $10 per hour for my work. That project taught me many things, including how to price certain types of projects better. The method can help you develop your intuition, but at the end of the day, if you don’t have any intuition, the method will only get you so far.

The Process

I try not to spend too much time coming up with a quote, as I’m not paid to do that. Typically, I can produce a quote for a project within a couple hours for larger projects, and in minutes for small projects.

1. Agree on scope: This can take about an hour for a tiny project to weeks for a project with several months of development anticipated.
2. Draft requirements and design: Sometimes, this is done as part of the first step, especially for the smaller projects. For larger projects, this could mean as much as 6 months of work (a.k.a. 1000 hours). Experience will help you narrow that range down fairly well.
3. Development: For this, I try to break down the tasks I need to do into the smallest pieces possible, each one no longer than a week, and preferably less than 10 hours, although for large projects, getting it down to 50 hour pieces can be difficult enough.
4. Testing: Usually 20-30% of the development time will be spent on testing.
5. Deployment and Training: This can be anywhere from a few minutes to copy some files and e-mail a document, to a couple days of presentations and creating complex support documentation and procedures.

Now, you add up all the hours you counted in each step. Add 20% to that number. Multiply by the rate you want to get paid for the work. That’s your quote. You can fiddle with the number a bit, but the more you deviate from this, the more risk you take in either quoting too high and losing the project, or quoting too low and not being compensated appropriately.

If you’re worried about the unexpected, realize that you’ve actually already covered it.

The first step will prevent scope creep to some extent, and the better you are at drafting a Statement of Work, the more control you will have over what’s included in each project.

The extra 20% you added at the end is in case something unexpected, but covered by the Statement of Work, comes up during the project. In most projects, this happens, you just don’t know what it will be until it’s too late. If nothing comes up, then your margin on the project is larger.

Last, to determine your hourly rate, I use about two-thirds of my maintenance rate. Since I can dedicate time to the project, and I can schedule it, I don’t mind earning less per hour for that work. In other words, my maintenance rate is 150% of my normal hourly rate because I can’t schedule it and it’s generally for small amounts of work at a time.

Related posts:

1. Finding the Right Price
2. Project versus Hourly Pricing
3. Managing Multiple Projects

The last year has been a learning experience – I’ve set up this blog, tried a wide selection of topics for articles, and settled on providing interesting articles on subjects relevant to business owners. In that, I hope I have been providing you with quality content over the course of the last several months, and will continue to do so in the upcoming year.

What will be different?

In the past, I wrote articles as the fancy struck me, as I discovered a new topic to talk about. For that reason, if you look at the distribution of posts, you may notice that some weeks I post more than others. Some days I post several articles, and then silence for a couple weeks. Going forward, however, while I will continue to write the occasional off-schedule article, you will begin to notice regularity in the posting schedule.

Every Monday and Friday, there will be something new here, whether discussion of a news item, a hot topic in the social media buzz, or something else entirely. But it will be there.

On Wednesday, there will be a post from one of the following categories:

1. Guest writers – I will be inviting people to post articles here, and there’s no telling who may show up. If you think you might be interested in writing an article here, please contact me with a summary of what you might like to write about, and where I can read some of your previous postings.
2. Book reviews – as an avid reader, I cover about 3 books per week, and some of these books may be of value to you. I will select a few of the more useful books for a detailed review.
3. Product reviews – no, this isn’t about affiliate marketing. This is about telling you, my readers, about some product or service that I personally find useful, and you might benefit from as well. If I’m getting paid to write the article, though, I’ll be sure to let you know.
4. Site reviews – I come across a variety of sites during the course of the week, and whenever I come across one that would be of particular benefit to you, I’ll write about it and direct you there so you can enjoy it too.

So that’s the plan – 3 articles per week, with two of them being information-based articles, and the third being from a particular category. Of course, I’m always interested in hearing the feedback from my readers, so if you have any additional suggestions, please let me know!

Related posts:

1. Milestones
2. I Missed It
3. Business and Social Media – Part 3