Showerthought: I counted up my last 19 jobs and 4 of them ate up more than half my free time | Client Red Flags - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals
Showerthought: I counted up my last 19 jobs and 4 of them ate up more than half my free time
I keep a simple notebook of every job I take, date in, date paid, and last weekend I finally went back through it. Out of 19 jobs since February, four of them took up something like 55% of my work hours, and two of those four were the only ones that went past the quote. What surprised me is that all four had the same thing going on early: they wanted a bunch of little changes by text before I even started, nothing big, just "can you also" over and over. The ones who paid fast and stayed easy mostly gave me one clear list and left me alone to do it. So now I'm paying way more attention to how many messages I get in the first three days, because that seems to tell me more than the actual project ever does. Has anyone else tracked their own jobs like this and found a pattern that predicts the rough ones?