When You Get Overwhelmed

Anyone who's been following Freelance Survivor for a while might have noticed that this site got a bit erratic lately. The world of a freelancer exists of two major phases, feast and famine, and a number of things can contribute to finding yourself eyeballs deep and gasping for air. I found myself in one of those feast phases in the be careful what you wish for department. This article isn't a call for pity, it's more a chance to share the experience of how to handle it when you find yourself in the same situation.

First, how in the heck do freelancers let ourselves get into these situations? For one thing, since famine is a real possibility, it can be difficult to say no to a job if the pay and terms are otherwise decent. Heck, if things have been slow you might not even care if the pay or terms are decent, you'll just say yes to keep a roof over your head.

Another issue is planning and time estimation. Each project has its issues. Some of them are within your control, and others are not. And some like to hide in the bushes and jump at you when you're innocently plugging away, throwing off the entire schedule. You may have thought that you would have project A done weeks before project B needed to start, only to discover that you're expected to go full tilt on both simultaneously.

And sometimes, well, we're just really bad estimators. I won't claim that time estimation is one of my strengths. That's a skill I'm working on.

Regardless of how we get there, everyone becomes completely overwhelmed with just too much to do at some point. How you react to this feeling can be quite individual. Some people freeze, paralyzed, just having no idea what to do first. Others might start rushing, being sloppy and making mistakes along the way. Then there's those who just refuse to even acknowledge that there's a problem in the first place.

You absolutely must start by admitting to yourself that you're in over your head. Sometimes I find that I'll spin in circles, so to speak, until I realize what has me freaked out. Just naming the problem makes me feel better even when it means I have to now solve the problem.

And yes, you do have to solve it. You don't want to spend weeks figuring out how to do so, as obviously you have work to get done, but something has to give. I'll go over a method that's worked for me. If you have one that works better for you, feel free to share in the comments.

I start by looking at the total of what needs to be done, by when, and for whom. If you have something scheduled a month in advance then you can probably ignore it for a week while you work on other things, but be careful with this. If you, say, need to get interview responses from someone, you need to send the questions early enough so they have time to answer.

In my case I decided that what was bogging me down was work I was doing for a particular client. They were my lowest paying, the work was something I was unaccustomed to doing, and they wanted a lot of pieces turned in regularly in short amounts of time. I was spending an inordinate amount of time just on them, trying to keep up, and was doing the work so inefficiently that i was falling behind everywhere else.

So with the problem identified in more detail, I had to solve it. There are many ways to do so, and the option you choose depends on how important the client and the work you do for them is to you compared to everything else you're doing. I try to take both a short and long range view of these things, where do they fit in my overall short term and long term goals compared to everything else?

Once I have a feeling for that, I have to decide how I want to handle things. Letting the situation continue is absolutely out of the question. One way or another it has to be solved. In my case, I decided that I wanted to keep this client, I like working with them and the work I do for them is strategic for me for a number of reasons even though they paid the least out of everyone I work for. However, I needed both to learn how to be more efficient, and slow down the work load a bit so that I could catch up elsewhere. Then we could revisit things. If this wasn't possible and they couldn't or wouldn't be flexible, I would have to seriously reconsider what I was doing.

But of course there are two entities in that equation. Once I had the problem identified and knew what I hoped to do about it, it was time to leap in and just handle it. I'm always a bundle of nerves when going into what might turn into confrontation or rejection, but handling such things is just part of being an adult and a businessperson. So, I contacted the client and said I'd like to talk to them by phone.

Within hours, I was explaining to them the problem I was running into. I'm a person who prefers to find a win-win approach, and so I stuck with the basic facts of where I was running into trouble to see if they were interested in working with me to find a solution. I never said that I needed a raise. Obviously I'd love one, but the point was that I was overwhelmed and needed to adjust my workload. Keeping the same workload for higher pay would leave me just as overwhelmed, if maybe looking forward to the pay a bit more.

By the end of the conversation, I had a raise anyway, we'd discussed various ways that I could be more efficient on my end and ways they could help from their end, and the amount of work I was expected to turn in regularly was significantly reduced until I get caught up.

I also allowed this site to linger a bit. As important is it is to me to try to be consistent with Freelance Survivor, ultimately I won't be surviving very well as a freelancer if I can't step back from my own projects for a moment to give my clients more attention. In the future I hope to have more ways to keep this from happening, such as having more articles lined up to go ahead of time. I'd allowed myself to fall behind until I was working on the next article on the queue each time instead of a week ahead, and it bit me. 

I'm not completely caught up yet, but I've been steadily getting there, and boy is it a good feeling. It's easy to not realize just how stressful it is to be far behind. I feel like the Sword of Damocles was hanging over my head and I finally might slide out from under it. That I was able to handle this without losing a valued client is definitely icing on the cake. Things don't always turn out so neatly, but in the end it's better to end a single project than mess up for multiple clients simultaneously. 

So what do you do when you find you've dug yourself into a hole and can't seem to climb out?

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