A thought occurred to me today. I should be planning for extra time between projects. So for instance, if I think my next five projects are going to take two weeks each, I might add in a couple 1-week periods to my timeline where no project is planned.
Why is this?
A number of reasons! The first and most obvious is that it allows for some wiggle room if projects go past their deadlines. Currently, if one project goes over, all of the remaining ones will be delayed as well, which causes problems.
No one will be upset if a project is done early. But a project done late tends to upset people.
The other reason is because sometimes projects come up that have very strict timelines, and might require us to complete it right away. Obviously we don’t want overbearing, entitled clients who want to take advantage of us, but occasionally there are great opportunities that require immediate attention. If I have extra time between projects, I can take these on as they come up.
And sometimes it’s not even totally new projects. Occasionally I’ll have dormant clients who I’ve given proposals to show up out of nowhere wanting to act on their proposal. Sometimes, when I originally met with them and wrote the proposal, it was a time when I could take on their project right away. But perhaps now I’m booked out for months.
It’s nice to have the flexibility to be able to work with these people, and with the originally suggested timeline.
Overall, it will allow me to be much more flexible with which projects we can take on, and will also remove some stress and problems caused by getting behind schedule and having it create a domino effect.
Of course there might be downsides, but I don’t think they are even close to the benefits from doing it. Really the only thing is that when I’m writing proposals, I’ll have to tell potential clients that we wouldn’t be able to start until a further point in time. This could be enough that some of them decide not to work with me.
That’s fine, though. Realistically, the only time that would even be a big problem is if I didn’t have any projects lined up. But if I didn’t have projects lined up, there wouldn’t really be a wait, so that wouldn’t happen.
So I think it’s definitely something I should do!