Many people describe me as organized. I follow Getting Things Done. I use my calender and am always on-time for meetings. I plan my day every morning and diligently check off little boxes as I work.
In the years since I’ve gotten organized I’ve learned a thing or two. One of the most important things has been: don’t manage your time, manage your energy.
There will always be more things to do than time to do them in. Trying to cram in as many things into your short time available is solving the wrong problem. Instead you need to do the best things you can given the amount of energy you have. Best could be urgent tasks, or important ones, or as Ed Gandia writes about in Forget About Time Management!, the tasks that let your "true genius" shine.
Focus on the few tasks that you can be the best at.
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The Freelancer’s Guide to Long-Term Contracts (theadmin.org) SPONSOR
Long-term contracts have been the one technique that really made my freelance business a success. So successful in fact that I’m able to work one week each month, taking the rest of the month off, and still make enough to live off of. This training teaches you how.
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A fear everyone has is screwing up their pricing. Overcharge and we’re afraid of losing all of our clients. Undercharge and we won’t win the clients we want, get stuck with bad ones, and still have to work every waking moment to scrape by. But given those two extremes, it seems almost everyone veers on the side of undercharging and then justifying it through various excuses.
When I started freelancing in 2007 I had a couple of years of solid Ruby on Rails development and was experienced enough to be a mid-high level professional. At that time Rails developers were charging $100-150 per hour. But did I start at that rate? Oh no, I could only charge $35 per hour because… (a long list of valid sounding excuses). The thing is, I didn’t have the confidence in myself that I could charge more even though I had the skills to back up a higher rate.
There are many ways to "get over yourself" and start charging what you should but Naomi Dunford’s How To Confidently Raise Your Rates really nails it. Two points that really stand out are:
- If you aren’t charging what the industry is charging, you have a self-confidence issue (like I did).
- If your client is getting more value than what your charging, you still have room to charge more.
Or do as Blair Enns writes about slowly raising your rates a little at a time:
We both know this is the cycle so why don’t we just make a little pact right now: you’re going to skip the next three price increments and go right to the fourth or the fifth with your next price on the next new client.
Pure gold.
Oh and the fear of losing clients when you raise your rates? I still, 8 years later, have a client who first worked with me at $45 per hour and my rate is… shall we say, measurably higher now.
Quick Links
Forget ABC selling (curtismchale.ca)
What Is Warm Traffic? (And What Should You Do About It?) (ittybiz.com)
Why pros publish their newsletter regularly (freelancersunion.org)
Being successful vs. being known (pjrvs.com)
Consulting Proposals Don’t Win Business (consultingsuccess.com)
9 Freelancing Myths, EXPOSED! (creativeclass.io)
How to Shift From Projects to Retainers (nusii.com)
How To Handle The Scary Parts Of Change (ittybiz.com)
Positioning: How to Stop Cutting Vegetables With a Mallet (doubleyourfreelancing.com)
Thanks, I’ll see you next week
Eric Davis (@edavis10)