Five Ways to Meet Every Freelance Writing Deadline
With every freelance writing project you accept, you will have to negotiate a deadline with the client. Personally, most of my clients are easy to work with in this area. In other words, they are flexible and willing to work with me to make things as easy as possible. With that being said, I have had some freelance writing clients that are a pain in the neck as far as deadlines are concerned.
Here are five tips that will help you to meet each and every freelance writing deadline.
1. Never agree to take on a new job if you do not think that you will be able to complete it on time. The main culprit of this problem is taking on more work than you can handle. I have done this in the past, and the end result was long work days in order to meet every deadline.
2. Keep a list of every freelance writing deadline that you have. This will help you to keep track of what is due, and when you need to have it to the client. I do this both in paper and electronic form.
3. Try to spread out your deadlines. In other words, if you have five projects lined up, try spreading them out across the course of a week. This is much more manageable than having to finish and send all five projects on the same day.
4. Give yourself enough time to complete your projects so that you are not working your fingers to the bone on deadline day. There is nothing more stressful than having a project due, but not having it done in advance. Finishing work early, if only by a day, will help immensely.
5. Obviously, you will want to plan for the delivery of the project. In today’s day and age this is not too much of a problem because you will more than likely use email to send completed work. But in some cases, you may be forced to use snail mail. If this is the case, you need to factor it into your schedule. After all, it will take a few days for your mail to reach your client.
With these five tips, you should never miss a freelance writing deadline!
January 15th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Also…be sure to back up your work. This is something that people generally don’t think about doing until it’s too late.
By backing up your documents on a USB, CD-RW, or emailing the documents to yourself - you can save yourself a MAJOR pain in the butt when something bad actually happens (hard drive crash, saving over wrong file, accidentally deleting a file, etc.).
January 15th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Another one to add to the list Chris is having help on standby when needed. Before you find yourself in a bind, you might want to post an ad on Craigslist, for example, to line up freelance help you can call on in a pitch. I recently got in a crunch and turned to Craigslist to get help when I landed three new projects in one day. It was a Godsend!
Excellent tips!
January 16th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
[...] Bibey is a freelance writer that I respect highly, so when he dishes out advice on meeting every freelance writing deadline, I’m all ears. If you find yourself balancing too many projects at a time, these tips may [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 1:33 am
Good ideas. I’ll have to remember them.
January 17th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Yuwanda - You are right about that! It is always nice to have a backup lined up just in case something comes up.