A Matter of Urgency

Maybe It’s Not Your Fault

Now, you probably have a schedule for your weekly, monthly, or yearly tasks. You plan things ahead – then why do things seem to be always lagging behind?

The main issue is that most of it seems out of your control. How are you to know that one of your clients will launch a campaign tomorrow and needs that content strategy today if he hasn’t told you until this morning? Your clients may not be organised in their tasks, or they may forget about you altogether until it is too late to make something you’ll be proud of. Let’s not talk about whose fault it is: the thing is that you have to be able to predict any extra tasks that might come in every week and every month that weren’t properly planned before. Your schedule might be a tight one, but if you organise yourself to make for a few blank spaces, you’ll be prepared to handle emergencies in a calm and collected manner. You must, in a sentence, predict the unpredictable – and make space in your daily schedule for it. Obviously, you don’t know if those things are going to come up or not – but, if they do, then you’ll have time to do them; and if they don’t, that’s a time slot that you can use to make some research, read about some pending issue that you’ve been trying to solve for a while, anything. Time is a precious resource that should be used wisely.

Educating your clients

Even if you plan ahead, and you’ve made a pretty tight schedule that accounts for any occurrence within it, you’ll still need help from your clients to make sure things work. Make your clients understand that the things you do take time, and that unless they are willing to let go of a percentage of the quality you can provide, they should warn you of any events in time. You can rush things, but they must understand that less planning on their side means less quality in the final results of your work. This is quite important. Maybe you can schedule a monthly meeting to discuss everything that’s going to happen during that period so that you can establish reasonable deadlines. If your client still keeps on pushing everything forward in a way that makes you unsure of which job you should take as a priority, then it’s time to apply some pressure. Stand your ground. You may not be able to afford to lose that client, but he is not able to let go of your service overnight as well. You both need each other. Cooperation is key.