Organizational Skills

As promised, this week we’ll kick of a series on how we have implemented certain tools to help us in our freelance efforts. While not an exhaustive list, these should give you a good understanding of what/why you need something before you spend your hard-earned cash on something pointless.
Organizational Skills
Before you do anything else, you need to get organized. You need to develop a system for storing projects and their files on your computer or an external hard drive in a way that is easy to manage. And don’t forget to backup the files on a regular basis. This seems like common sense, but so many designers fall into prey for bad organization.
Just when you least expect it, a client calls will 8 months after their project and request that logo they sent for their project’s second page on the third revision. And while you are at it, they really liked you second revision and they’d like a copy of that as well. While you are stumbling over your words, your mind will definitely race back to when you first set the project up. And you’ll either freak. Or you’ll smile because you organized your project really well.
I currently assign all my clients call letters. For example one of my clients, Quartzsite Southern Baptist Church is QSBC. Then I organize a client’s project files by the month and day the design began. E.g. QSBC 0109 Would refer to Quartzsite SBC’s January 9th project. In addition, I use these call letters for invoices and estimates. This does two things for me: it keeps me organized; and it sets a date to the project that corresponds to the estimate and/or invoice.
There are many ways to stay organized and we will be discussing some Web-based practical tools throughout this week. Stay tuned and be sure to comment with your own advice on how to develop good organizational skills.


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After nearly two years of experience, we have encountered several ups and downs in the world of freelance business. Our goal is to share our past, current and future experiences on this blog in hopes that you can learn from and laugh at our mistakes, utter failures, and our rare successes.
