Calendarize

You’re reading an excerpt from Art For Money, by Michael Ardelean. This small but powerful book helps every creative freelancer know their value and scale their business. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

Willpower is garbage. It is for amateurs. It’s for people still conflicted about what they want to do.Darren Hardy

Every force of evil in the world is conspiring against you delivering this project on time. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. It will not be a thing that you expect. It will be a thing that is easy to blame on someone else. Don’t fool yourself.

If you’re the best photographer in Los Angeles and you deliver your projects three days late, what are you?

Not the best photographer in Los Angeles.

Your reputation is your ability to keep working. Your reputation is quickly destroyed when you deliver late. Your clients don’t remember the beautiful lighting, the perfect retouching, or the fact that you made the models feel comfortable and brought out their best. What they’ll remember—and what they’ll tell their professional colleagues—is that you delivered late.

It’s not hard to deliver on time. When you deliver late, it’s almost never because you weren’t talented enough or the work was too hard. It’s usually because your “calendarization” was lacking.

Calendarizing, though not a real word, will make or break your project. It guides your workflow and it guides your client’s expectations. It controls your anxiety and your client’s anxiety. It gets you paid on time and makes everyone happy.

As illustrated in Writing a Good Proposal, every project should be broken down into phases (which will appear in your proposal). Calendarize these phases by detailing what needs to be done to complete each phase, and marking them in your calendar for you and anyone else you are relying on for help on this project.

If a project is large or has a long lead time, we tend to relax at the beginning and thrash at the end. This is exactly the opposite of a good approach. To avoid tricking ourselves into thinking we have plenty of time to finish a project, focus on Phase 1. That’s much shorter. And it has a real deadline. This encourages us to “Thrash Now, Ship Early,” as Seth Godin preaches. Never thrash at the end. The end is stressful enough as it is.

Also, good news: you’ve already outlined the phases of work, back when you made your proposal. So, all you’re really doing now is applying dates to those phases.