Work, Time, and Focus
By: Zoran Spirkovski
Tags: Freelancing, Work, Organization, Projects, Project Management

Work, Time, and Focus

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Any endeavor of substantial value will take more than 24 hours to complete, making it very important to develop processes that enable you to divide your work into smaller pieces.

A common example would be formal education. You regularly attend a lot of classes that take anywhere between 45 minutes and two hours. Over the longer period, you have a few tests to “solidify” knowledge, or at least practice information retention.

All of that culminates with a thesis that will be the grounds for your graduation. That was the goal all along. The thesis itself is another project in the grand scheme of getting you to graduate (or make money for universities.)

But, let’s remain focused on workflow.

To get from point A, a new student, to point Z, a graduated student, you need to spend countless hours in class, learning new information, finding ways to retain it for the tests, writing homework, and doing research for your thesis.

It would be very difficult to go from point A to point Z in 24 hours. Not impossible, because in the future a time traveler may decide to go back in time and graduate as some sort of challenge for himself.

So, in order to achieve success and produce the desired substantial result (graduation,) you need to split your work into smaller parts. Unfortunately, the educational system has already done a lot of the thinking work for you, and all that is required of you is to do the work and plan your time.

How does this translate to the work a freelancer does?

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You don’t get to decide your tasks as a student, but the opposite is true for freelancers. Freelancers do not have any one person that would act as a manager telling them what to do and track their performance.

You know when you are doing poorly when you get worried about starvation, and you know you are doing well when money is rolling in. In the end, a freelancer’s workflow must include sales, otherwise, there’s no cash flow.

I’m not going to talk about the sales part of the freelance business, but rather the doing part.

Before we continue let’s make some distinctions between tasks based on the time required to fulfill the project:

Short — Done in 24 hours.

Medium — Done in 1-29 days.

Long — Done in 30 days or more.

Short Projects

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Short projects can pass without any division of sub-tasks without penalty. In fact, dividing them up into smaller pieces may even be detrimental.

For example “Write an article that teaches mathematicians how to calculate equilateral triangles.” is pretty straightforward, assuming you are decent at math.

Even if you are not, the division of tasks would be research, write, and edit.

Anything beyond this can be considered a part of the work, minute details, and a waste of time to think about. There is rarely any large-scale thinking when you are working on short projects.

You are most likely there to fill a gap in the organizational skillset, provide a service, and you rarely have a lot of negotiation power from this position. Most freelancers start working with short and small projects, graduating upwards to more complexity.

Medium Projects

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It may take years before a freelancer is ready to take the plunge on a medium project. It requires a lot more responsibility, capability, skills, and design thinking. You cannot complete a medium project without going beyond the day-to-day and think about the client’s true needs.

In fact, clients that know what they want should be rightly concerned if you are not able to ask at least a few insightful questions. Whereas for short projects, clients will already have a plan in motion, medium projects are different.

Instead of a plan, they have a mission or a vision. They know what they want to go, but they don’t necessarily know how to get there. But, don't make any assumptions if you don’t plan on verifying it.

You don’t know what the client is thinking until you ask.

In practice, medium projects will have a clear and measurable goal in mind. “Bring X amount of traffic to a website.” or “We have Y amount of people visiting our homepage and we want to capture their attention with a creative lead magnet.”

Translated, both of these lead to the client making more money from his assets, in this case, a website. If the client doesn’t have a measurable goal, it’s vital that you help him get to this point first. Whether you charge for strategy or not, this is vital for your project’s success.

If you don’t specify goals, it will cause a lot of frustration down the line, often resulting in the freelancer overworking to make the client happy, rather than achieve the desired result.

It’s not your job to make the client happy, it’s your job to get the job done. That also happens to make the client happy, but it’s a side-effect.

Focus, remember?

Medium projects will require a lot more breakdown of tasks into smaller projects, all of them dependant on your skillset. Your client may also be involved, or other freelancers too. You are not there to just fill a gap, but rather you are there to think and provide solutions.

Long /Large Projects

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Most of my experience has been with short and medium assignments. Apart from missions regarding my own business, I haven’t worked on anything else that lasted more than 30 days.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked with clients for more than 30 days, but this was on the basis of repeating short or medium projects.

Some assumptions that I can make about long projects would be that they will require the freelancer to take full control over a project, full responsibility. The freelancer that works on long projects is financed by the client, but he or she also becomes a client that needs to hire others to fulfill parts of the project.

They do all of the thinking, with stylistic decisions made by the client. Prior to the start of a long project, the freelancer would usually provide a strategic session, where a plan is generated about what, how, who, and by when, well before any work begins.

Long projects require significant upfront payment to cover material costs (if any), manpower wages, and a guarantee for willingness to pay. The client will only approach famous, or at least known to be highly competent freelancers in the field.

Trust between the client and the freelancer is a topic for another time.

In addition to dividing tasks down into small projects, the freelancer assuming control of a long-term project will delegate tasks to other freelancers that are capable of responsible undertaking.

I’ll speak more about long-term projects in a few years after I have some experience with them.

Do these categories apply to all freelancers?

I did my best to keep this top-level and general, so as to provide value to any type of freelancer. I hope that you found it useful. Personally, I think writing this post was quite boring, but it’s a good result nonetheless.

Not everything related to freelancing is exciting!

In practice, planning and organizing your work is vital to your success as a freelancer. Great clients will not tolerate many errors and mistakes. If you can improve your workflow to better ensure task completion, go for it.

Both you and your client will be happier because of it.

About this blog

Zoran is a professional freelance writer and journalist and pursues many hobbies in graphic design, woodworking, psychology, sports, sales, negotiation, pretty much a bottomless pit of interest.

Right now he is dedicating time to improve his writing to a remarkable level, and for this reason, he stopped accepting new client assignments, focusing only on clearing out the backlog of projects that have accumulated over time.

He’s working on rebranding into a more specific type of writer and is still figuring things out. Join him on his journey as he blogs about it right here on Medium.

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