The Freelance Diaries: The Caffeinated Project Manager
The Freelance Diaries: The Caffeinated Project Manager
18 comments — written on January 14th, 2010
As part of the series on earning more money, today’s Money Diaries — actually, today’s Freelance Diaries — is from a project manager who left his fulltime job to work as a freelancer.
Below, you’ll notice:
- He now makes 3 times what he made at his fulltime job — but he still nets less overall
- His tactics for managing his clients
- Weaving lifestyle (video games from 3:30pm – 6:00pm) with work
Be sure to sign up at Earn1k to get specific scripts on increasing your rates, managing clients, and using psychology against yourself to keep motivated.
* * *
“I’m a freelance project manager. Which I know sounds weird. Project management, I always thought, was one of those made-up corporate jobs, kind of like that one guy from Office Space who deals with people so the engineers don’t have to. You’ve seen it, right? Of course you have.
In reality, project management basically just means I get paid to make sure things get done. It’s incredibly valuable to companies that are disorganized or run tight deadlines. The hard part is packaging it because it’s not often perceived as high-value (kind of like how most people think they know how to write well).
The trick for me is, I never position myself as a project manager when first pitching to a client. I’m usually brought on to do something small, like a writing project or a PR project. At some point, the client realizes their organization/communication flow used to suck and I’m making it better. So after that I usually just end up being a project manager. That’s the classic “sell them what they want, give them what they need” technique, I guess.
Anyways, here’s my Diary.”
Day 1
6 am: Wake up. Yeahhh, freelancing doesn’t always mean you get to sleep all day. Although sometimes it does!
7am: Drive over to a coffee shop to start working. I have noticed that good, work-friendly coffee shops (meaning they don’t have screaming children or broken tables) are rare. The only one in town worth going to costs $5 a cup, and parking there sucks. But it’s worth it. My time is important, so I try to save it any way I can.
8am: I spend a few hours at the coffee shop doing some work, following up on deadlines, shooting emails. No interruptions or random requests from clients, which is nice. I know you’re not supposed to leave your email open all day (the 4-Hour Workweek people tell me so) but whatever. I like to be responsive to clients, and I have a good process for handling email already.
2pm: My productivity level is dropping off. I guess that’s why I get up at 6 to work. Once I hit that “I don’t feel like working anymore” zone, I usually stop and pick it back up in ...
Related Articles
Categories: Uncategorized Tags: Coffee Shop, Freelancer, Freelancing, Lifestyle, Psychology, Scripts, Sleep, Sure Things, Video Games