5 tips to better manage your freelancing projects
Freelancing is a business in which one person has to play multiple roles for his own freelancing business but at the same time play the same role for multiple businesses. Being a freelancer is quite difficult as the multiple projects with different requirements and handling them all at once is rather overwhelming. New projects, Weekly meetings, client updates, team communication, project timelines and above all maintaining deadlines is stressful and hard to keep in check when you have multiple projects.
And if you don’t get your hands on all these things, you might drown in the sea of freelancing chaos. That’s when you understand the importance of project management in freelancing business. Therefore, the best way to manage your workload and keep everything in check would be to consider using a project management tool that addresses your bare essentials.
- Organize your work with tools
- Considering the complexity of work network of a freelancer, use of the tools that suit the type of work they perform is must. Managing the projects is the basic foundation that ought to be strong and perfect. Therefore adapting to a Project Management tool like ProjectBoard could ease the stress to a large extent.
- A tool should at least serve the basic needs such as remote user integration, task management and project invoicing.
2. Manage your Deadlines
- As you go under the planning phase, break the tasks into simpler version to avoid inter dependency delays and assign them to users relatively.
- Setting deadlines to a project as a whole could be a real challenge and complicate decision considering the capabilities, resources, scope and client requirements.
- Managing timeline is very crucial and this can be monitored with the help of right tools. Use Project Management tools that help you set deadlines for multiple tasks and calculate the matrix of the days left, delays, and estimated completion.
3. Eliminate the communication gap
Communication is the most important part as a freelancer, any gaps could cost your pile of efforts put to build your image as an outstanding freelancer. It’s an utter necessity to keep your clients in the loop of your work. Frequent interaction, requirement gathering, change implementation and more are some of the difficult parts that come along with every profitable customer. Choosing to communicate over emails could lose time and money, instant communication should be preferred especially if you are a freelancer.
Great communication is imperative to building a strong personal brand image as a freelancer. Along with the perks of being able to work at your convenience, the downsides of facing communication problems with the remote team can’t be ignored. Always consider having software where your clients and teams could easily be managed and appreciated.
Remember all communications with your clients and team matters.
4. Track your project hours and reports
Being a freelancer the billing and payment for the services offered are as complicated as the task management. When you are juggling with hours you work and payments from multiple sources do not make a mistake to manage it manually. In doing so, you are bound to make mistakes and put yourself in the risk of loss. While working on the different projects of different magnitude, you want to be able to analyze the working hours, efforts, time and cost for the projects you manage. Use tools like ProjectBoard to track project hours, analyze reports and generate invoices.
5. Prefer to have it all at one place
Having a single tool to manage your client and a single platform where you can communicate with your teams on multiple tasks is a great strategy to manage your freelancing smoothly. Instead of toggling to emails, google calender and document sharing apps, prefer using a tool like ProjectBoard that has a platform for instant communication with integrated file sharing features. This can help you streamline your focus on multiple projects, track your project hours and reports for multiple clients and generate invoices, all at one place.
A freelance’s job can be quite chaotic and can demand management of projects, tasks, deadlines, meetings, clients with high precision. Maintaining everything in order could ease the difficulty of managing and this could be achieved with the right management tool. One should definitely consider using a right project management or task management tool to boost productivity, reduce workload and shed some stress. I would highly recommend Project Board as the perfect project management tool that could keep your projects, tasks, clients and team all in order, especially suited for freelancers.
