Productivity Tips: Choosing Weekly Freelance Gigs Over Longer-Term Projects
How many of you have had jobs or freelance gigs which you billed for once a month? It often takes an act of financial yoga to balance your checkbook each month, right? Wouldn’t you say that being paid weekly or bi-weekly makes life more pleasant?
- You’re more relaxed about when your next paycheck is coming.
- You can take a few days off without worrying that you will not earn as much this month. You’ll be relaxed as a result. (See #1)
- Being paid weekly makes it much easier to ensure that there’ll be enough funds when a bill is paid through automatic deductions from your bank account. You’ll be more relaxed. (See #1. Again.)
When you’re more relaxed, you tend to be more creative, and to “catch” solutions that were otherwise hidden from plain view. This usually results in a higher productivity rate. There’s a nice positive feedback loop at play, as a result:
- You get paid the following week (or two) for a freelance job.
- You’ve now exceeded your low-water mark in PayPal funds (or whatever) and feel comfortable shifting some of it to your bank account.
- You feel happy that you can pre-authorize bills on time and don’t have to shuffle other bills around. It’s nice not having to pay by the skin of your teeth, or robbing Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes.
- Your happiness translates into an open mind for ideas and creative solutions, which will show in your IMs, Twitters, Plurks, phone calls, and email messages. (Remember the old advice about smiling when you’re on the phone selling something? It’s the same principle at play,and some people believe it actually has roots in quantum physics, despite seeming all new-agey and metaphysical.)
- You waste less time and get more work done. When you’re relaxed, you’re likely more efficient in your work.
- Your positive attitude results in higher quality work. Well, usually so, provided that you leverage your mindset.
- Your quality work leads to more work from clients, referrals, or even people who saw your work online. It’s happened to me in the past and in the present.
- You have enough upcoming work scheduled that even if one gig ends, you’ll still be pulling in weekly income.
Now all that said, this does not necessarily mean that every ongoing client pays weekly. Rather, if you establish with clients that completed work is to be paid “on delivery,” “Net 15″ or “Net 30,” then you just need to ensure that you have enough other clients so that someone’s check will be coming to you each week.
As for finding weekly work or accomplishing the net result of getting paid each week by one client or another, that all depends on what type of freelancing you do, and whether you’re doing big projects or small. My experience has been that it is sometimes worth accepting work that pays a bit less if it pays weekly or more than just once a month. Alternately, if I know a client well, some projects might pay 25-50% upfront, with milestone payments afterwards.
Of course, the problem is that some types of freelance work might taking longer. E.g., coding over writing. Just try to balance your workload with large and small projects that get you several paychecks per month.
What is your freelance workload like, and how do you cope?
Whether you want to learn while you work out or to make that commute useful, Freelance Radio is the place to hear all the tips, tricks and news of freelancing.
Freelance Radio
With over 100 weekly strips and counting, Freelance Freedom is an institution around here. Check out of all NC's brilliant work in the archives.
Freelance Freedom Archives
Interested in contributing to FreelanceSwitch? Write for the foremost freelance community and help share knowledge for the benefit of all!
Become a Guest Writer
It is always nice to know that the check is in the mail. The long-term projects usually bring in a better pay check so I feel that finding a way to get a deposit or payments along the way of those longer projects is the way to go.
Why don’t you just take on long term projects and bill weekly, if money is a problem?
“It’s the same principle at play,and some people believe it actually has roots in quantum physics, despite seeming all new-agey and metaphysical”. Um, no. Good article but leave out the pseudo-scientific BS.
Personally, I prefer to bill monthly for a few reasons.
1. Less admin/accounting involved (save time)
2. Easier for accounting when everything falls within a calendar month (simpler records)
3. I never NEED the money on a weekly basis, because I ensure that I live below my means and have a healthy savings to survive the inevitable lulls.
Anyone serious about freelancing full-time should have enough money in reserve that they don’t need to be cashing a check every week. If money is so tight for you that you’re choosing projects just because they’ll cut you check weekly you need to serious re-evaluate your business. I prefer monthly billing as well.
This guy didn’t mention the bad parts about weekly projects.
You have to find 52 clients in one year compared to 12. This means you have to do 4 time the amount of work doing sales, advertising, networking or whatever to bring in clients.
What about invoices and billing? You have an exponentially larger risk of headache clients to get money from with 4x the amount of work.
Therefore, every week at work consists of finding clients, paying clients, and learning a new client/project. How many hours can you really put in to actually coding/designing, when you work strictly on weekly projects?
The worst part is consistency. I love month to two month projects because there is a certain consistency that builds up. It can be broken up into parts and easily digested. Most sites or coded in their own particular way, and it would be frustrating to learn a new style – week in and week out.
I think this far outweighs your lone benefit of a weekly paycheck. My solution to your problem is a personal one – learn how to balance your budget and pay yourself in weekly amounts if you have too.
I agree with most of the posts here – if you learn to live within your means, always have savings on hand to tide you over (or take time off), and you are happily doing ‘X’ amount of billable hours per week that will eventually turn into cash – when and how often you’re paid shouldn’t matter. If a job looks like it will be long and drawn-out, an upfront fee or payments at certain deliverable stages should suffice.
Yeah I prefer to bill monthly as well. Plus I agree with comments that you need to have a healthy savings account to keep your business afloat, rather than trying to survive from one cheque to the next.
Right now I’m doing a project where I get paid weekly, but most of my projects bill monthly. That to me offers enough stability that I’m not in suspense about whether I can pay my bills but it also gives a little more flexibility on a day to day or week to week basis.
I’m going to agree with Susan Johnston. You should have a variety of projects, with a variety of billable periods.
I’m doing a lot of long-term writing projects now.. where I get paid a lump sum over a short period of time.. and there’s a drought period.. and I get paid the same way again. Although I’d much prefer getting paid weekly, it’s just not possible now.
But I think some of you are missing the brilliant part of this post — staggering the billing and so subsequently the payments. I have several clients and I used to bill them all at the end of each month. Now I bill half mid-month and half at the end of the month. This smooths out my receivables considerably and doesn’t add much overhead to the invoicing process.
I definitely support the idea of billing weekly, that´s a very intelligent approach, since you maintain a constant cashflow.
Why would you want to see your money once a month if you can have it every week?
In my case I have invoices to send every single week, that way I keep my biz cashflow active all the time.
Great article
How about targeting on money coming in everyday? A freelancer should aim at least enough (or more than enough) money to cover the day.
Before, I record every expenses and keeping receipts, but when I tried both keeping and aiming daily income taught me to prioritize and organize projects smoothly. I just knew when to take a day off and how many offs I should take in a week – or maybe not, if I want to earn more at the end of the month.
There are lots of good comments regrading the post here.
There are always the problems that are out of your hands. We started Easily Amused sort of unexpectedly, I got laid off on Dec 1 2007 and we said “OK, lets go for it!” We were planing on doing it just not yet or then but we felt there is not time like the present. So, two of my best friends and I went for it. We had (and some what still have) crappy computers and no savings. Witch I would not recommend to anyone. We did, and we have been going strong since then. It has been tight and all of or credits have been messed up. Would I do it again? Yea, I would and so would one of my business partners. Saving is the key point here. Please, Please, have a backup plan! No one needs to lose everything because of their dreams. Do it right, and it’s the best thing in the world. Do it wrong, and you could lose more than your dream(s).
To build on Eliffio’s point: Why let your client collect interest when you can?
I have 2 clients I do a ton of work for and I bill them monthly for all the work we do. Those are nice checks to get and they pay quickly because all my invoices are due on receipt. Big projects get billed percent complete monthly so I can keep money flowing through the checking account. Works great! I’ve had to learn to actually budget my money coming in so I can spend and save accordingly.
Right now for me, it’s not very busy at all since I am not getting work like I want to be. So, I spend my time creating personal projects or design as a way to build up my portfolio, but I agree about working better and having a better attitude when life is less stressful. I seem to create designs in less than 5 hours when I am working with a great attitude rather than self pity not having work or getting any clients. Thanks for the article.