Back to basics freelancing challenge

14. May, 2010 0 Comments

Lately I’ve been focusing a lot on vec3t projects and on the ecommerce stores. Since freelancing still makes up the lion’s share of my income, and since I want more money, I’ve decided I’ve got to lift my freelancing game.

I am not optimal in a number of ways at the moment.

I don’t bill a very high % of my hours (I think mostly because I have been outsourcing a lot, which is ok since it’s marked up, but I want to get back to basics)
I spend 3 hours outsourcing a 10-15 hour job that I could do myself
I have heaps of projects on the go at once, and hop between them
I get distracted by the phone and email all day
My design skills have stopped progressing

Of those, the main thing I want to change is the outsourcing. I’ve advocated outsourcing on this blog, and I still am an advocate. But it does have some downsides, the main one being, it pushes out the turnaround time on projects something fierce. It’s innefficient, which is fine for big companies with big projects, but for a small company like me, maybe I can make more money not doing it (I’ll see).

Another reason I want to try this is that when I’m outsourcing a lot of work and just managing the projects, I’m spending more time sending emails and less time doing actual work. I like doing work, and as much as I like sending emails, it isn’t as fun.

It could be just one of those stupid phase things I seem to go through, but whatever the reason, I’m setting myself a ‘back to basics’ challenge for the next month:

Plan what days I’ll be doing tasks so I don’t overbook myself
No outsourcing design work on my projects
Work on one main project at a time
No interruptions to the main project
Small jobs get batched and done while waiting for feedback or input for the main project
Finish all projects by the planned time
Track time spent on projects
Setup an answering machine and batch phone calls/emails

All pretty basic stuff, but I believe doing them all right will result in better results for clients and better results for me. I’ll post results as I go.

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