How to Prepare Your Project Deadlines
One of the biggest obstacles that can prevent a freelancer from earning an income is the inability to respect his project deadlines. Unfortunately, the fact that you are working from home, combined with several other factors that you unfortunately cannot control, can often easily make you lose track of time and thus unable to deliver your project on time. Obviously, this is something you absolutely need to avoid since an unhappy seller will invariably leave you negative feedback and this may drastically affect your freelancing career, especially if you are new to the community.
As such, one of the most important things to do when embarking in a project is to quote a deadline that you are absolutely sure you can meet. Otherwise, you run the risk of not being able to deliver on time, which will obviously cause you to panic and can be extremely stressful. When you are bidding on a project, many freelancers mistakenly assume that a faster delivery date will increase their chances of being selected. They thus give short deadlines in the hopes that this will impress the buyer into choosing them.
However, this is often far from the actual truth. The thing to understand here is that if the buyer has already selected a deadline for the project, it is well within your rights to choose that last day as your delivery day. The fact that a deadline has already been specified means the buyer does not expect to receive a complete project before. In such instances, if you feel that you cannot complete the project must earlier, you can explain why you need the time quoted when bidding on the project.
Of course, you however still want to deliver a bit before the deadline whenever possible. While this is not a big factor in increasing your selection chances, it can nevertheless still be an advantage if the buyer cannot select between two quality bids. In such cases, a shorter deadline could work to your advantage. When you prepare your bid, you should thus give a deadline that you absolutely know you can stick to.
A good deadline estimate, regardless of the project, is to work out how many days you actually need and add a couple of days to it to cater for these little problems you could not originally account for. For example, if you had a coding project that you know would require 10 days as long as you worked on it according to a set schedule, it would be preferable to quote 12 instead of those 10 days. In this case, even if something happens and delays you, you have two extra days to complete the project. And if you do manage to work on it according to the schedule you prepared, you will be able to deliver the project even before the deadline, which will no doubt please the buyer and may even result in an extra bonus.
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