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How to Manage Multiple Projects and Clients as a Freelance Web Developer

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Emma Taylor
How to Manage Multiple Projects and Clients as a Freelance Web Developer

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Communicate regularly with your clients and give them project updates at least once a week so that they know what you are up to and how the project is going. Ideally, you should be talking to your client every day, however once a week is a good bare minimum requirement.

If you don’t communicate regularly with the client, they’ll start to formulate their own theories in their head as to how you’re running the project, and those theories may not necessarily match reality. Alleviate their fears in advance by just sending them a simple email once a week.

This will also allow you to receive potential changes from a client well in advance of the change actually being necessary, which gives you time to manage your own schedule of projects so that each project you’re involved in can remain on track without having to worry about surprises that can crop up and derail a development cycle.

If you don’t communicate regularly with the client, they’ll start to formulate their own theories in their head as to how you’re running the project

For example, what if two separate clients suddenly need a very important change for the same day? It is not as uncommon as you may think, and has happened to me before with three separate clients who all had important milestones land on the same day.

Because I communicated regularly with the clients and had the changes communicated to me in advance, I was able to make the changes well ahead of schedule instead of having to work all through the night on a rush job.

Stay focused

Proper time management is crucial to being able to manage multiple projects at once, and sitting down and focusing purely on the development work you’re doing without having any distractions will go a long way in helping you get there.

Set a goal, and work in short bursts of intense coding to reach your goal. Then, take a break for a couple minutes. Rinse and repeat. You’ll be surprised by how quickly this will allow you to complete entire projects in just one day alone, depending on the scope of the project.

Working this way will free your time up for other projects, or to just plain sit back and relax.

Focusing on the work you are doing is something that has become ever more difficult in this distraction filled age that we live in, which has only served to make focus more important than ever.

Set up a good dev environment

When you are working on multiple projects at once, it is not uncommon for there to be an overlap in some of the code and functionality that you create in these different projects.

You can save yourself a ton of time by just setting some time aside to abstract those commonly occurring elements into separate libraries or code snippets that you can just include right into the project.

Got three clients that all need banners? Build it once and then reuse it across projects. While this sounds like common sense (which it totally is), you’d be surprised how many professionals in the field don’t do this most basic of practices.

Take the time now, so that you don’t have to waste that time doing the same work again later.

Don't cut corners

We’re all guilty of cutting corners, myself included. That does not make cutting corners okay, and as a best practice cutting corners should be avoided as much as possible.

The reason for this is that it is easy to trap yourself into a corner if you get too zealous with the corners that you are cutting, which can result in you having to redo work in order to fix the original work you did that was supposed to save you time in the first place!

Why do the same work twice? Just do it right the first time, and think of the long term. Are you going to remember that Javascript hack you put in to meet a deadline six months from now? Is anyone else on your team going to remember? Likely not.

Do it right the first time, and not only will you thank yourself later down the road, however everyone else involved in the project will thank you as well.

Take responsibility

When you take on multiple projects from different clients, you are making an unspoken commitment to fulfill the needs of each individual client, and they won’t care if you are unable to fulfill those needs because you had to meet the needs of another client or just didn’t feel like working on the project because the latest episode of Lost was on. (Is Lost still relevant? I don’t watch TV that much. Dexter? Whatever.)

When you say you are going to do something, do it. Deliver on what you promise and your client will be happy. Exceed what you promise and your client will be ecstatic. The ability to take responsibility isn’t something that can be taught in school, it has to be learned through real world experiences, and even failing in some cases.

In Summary

These are just some of the many failures I’ve had in my own career, and I’m sure I’ve got many more ahead of me. I welcome them. It is absolutely okay to fail. What is not okay is to not learn anything from those failures.

I’ve learned from my failures. I hope that you all will learn something from my failures as well.

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