What’s your best Freelance planning?
If you do freelance for a living or looking forward to freelance as a full-time job, what is your preferred project planning?
Possible options (but not exclusive to):
- A single customer project that occupies my full time
- Support tasks (fixing numerous small issues on many sites)
- Two or three projects occupying 10-15h/w each
- A large project and a smaller part-time one
and so on.
I normally fancy option 3, it brings some trust for the future financial load and assignments could be intriguing enough.
How about you?
I’ve got 1 & 4 experience and prefere 4.
Greets
Thanks for jumping onto that!
If I could choose I would go for one big project that does cost me around 32 hours. So I still have some time to work on support tasks or work on WordPress contributions.
Problem I have with multiple projects is that clients always expect problems to be solved the next day. What can be a pain if you are really into another one.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Marko!
about 5 years back I used to work for a company on-site for 32 h/w while attending lectures and building client projects in the spare time and weekends. Many multiple projects overlap indeed, normally if you have a weekly load of 10-15h for 2 or 3 projects that’s easier as it’s usually planned and you can react in 2-3 days (or catch up over the weekend). A single project could fail or drop you (or you can get tired/bored out of it) and the level of variety or burn out is easier to hit.
Having a single project can be dangerous. In the last 15 months I had two big projects for 4 months each. One fulltime and the other one 3 days a week. Both worked out pretty okay. The fulltime one should have been 5 months tho.
When doing only one project at a time you really should have a good feeling with the project. I don’t do it when I have mixed feelings and till now that worked out. But your comments are still valid with burning out if you are in a project that goes totally wrong.