Freelancers are great list makers, and it is little wonder. Running your own business, handling multiple clients and projects, leaves you with lots of things to manage and remember.

I know that I start every week, and every day, with “to-do” lists. I consider what needs to get done, what I want to achieve in a given time span. Then I generally end up with a list that is too long, and cut it down to focus on priority items.

Unfortunately, for a long time I found that items I dropped from the day’s “to-do” list didn’t really go away. Continue Reading

Photo by /junku-newcleus.

In 2007, I was an employee working with a great company.

My boss was intelligent and inspiring. My coworkers were amicable and worked well as a team. The office environment was entirely casual; no suit and tie required. The pay was acceptable and vacation time fair.

The work was adequate, with some days more challenging than others. Office communication was radically transparent, as the staff would often meet weekly to review the recent triumphs and discuss the goals ahead. By most accounts, I should have been content with my career.

But something was missing.

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Photo by gaetan lee.

In a previous article, Managing Multiple Freelance Gigs With Mind Maps, I covered how to use a grid/ mind map to track your freelancing projects and tasks. In this post, there’s a bit more detail about actually working on tasks, not just tracking them. ( See bottom of article for a free MindJet MindManager 8/Pro 7 map template of my work grid, as per some requests in the comments of the last article.)

The freelance task management process is best demonstrated by an example. Since my work is mostly freelance writing, that’s what I’m using here, though you can extrapolate for other types of work.  Assume that you have a big writing project and several smaller ones for a given week – possibly with some of the larger projects spanning several weeks. Here’s what you do to manage and work on your tasks.

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One of the biggest reasons I purchased my laptop was because I envisioned how great a tool it was going to be for working remotely. I will readily admit that although I look nothing like Mel Gibson, I had big plans on becoming the next Road Warrior.

It did not take me long to realize that there is no easy way to sync information between two computers, especially Outlook email, contacts, and tasks. I have a decent size contact list and a full calendar, so it was too late to switch everything over to online applications. For that reason I started a search into easy and affordable ways to sync Outlook between computers.

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Image by Creative_photography.

One of the smartest business decisions I’ve made as a freelancer is to stop charging by the hour. I want to take the plate and bat for this method — not because I’m trying to convince every paid-by-the-hour freelancer to do an about-face, but simply because I don’t hear a lot of discussion taking place about per-task payment and its pros and cons.

Throughout the course of the article I’ll outline the six strengths of per-task pay, then respond to a few of the questions and criticisms you might have. Let’s start with the pros:

1. You can charge based on value to the customer. Let’s say you’re a freelance search-engine optimizer. You see websites making the same mistakes all the time and can optimize any website for search traffic in an hour. If you’re charging by the hour, you might make $65 for your services. If your skills allow the website to make $50 more sales each week, your per hour price is just a fraction of the real value of what you do. You’re under-valuing yourself. A task-based price can help you change that.

2. It often sounds cheaper than it is. Let’s assume a simple logo takes you half an hour to make and costs the client $200. To the client’s mind, $200 for a finished logo is a lot cheaper than paying a freelancer the hourly-rate equivalent of $400 per hour (most clients would probably faint at the price!) I think a lot of clients will also compare the hourly rates you charge to the hourly rates they themselves make and think: “If I’m not worth thirty dollars an hour, you’re definitely not worth $70!” Separating payment from hours worked can help prevent that unfavorable comparison. Continue Reading