Busy is good in our industry! It’s certainly better than the alternative. We tend to like a faster pace – we like it when things are going on, and we like to have projects. Most of us would say that we even work better under the pressure of deadlines and crunch time. But what happens when you just have too many things in the queue and not enough days in the week to get them done? As they say, something’s gotta give.
Don’t think of it as sacrificing. I know that sacrifice is kind of a dirty word in our field. I mean, who really wants to sacrifice? The idea of a forfeit or a loss of ANYTHING is NOT appetizing. Our clients want to get everything, get it quickly, and for cheap. Now WE know that’s not happening. And we want to be able to deliver quality, quickly, and for every client at the same time. The idea of having to sacrifice one of these elements seems like suffering. So no, it’s not sacrificing. It’s more like… prioritizing.
Have you ever hear the old line: “Good, fast or cheap – pick two.” It’s a little bit hokey, but it’s so true. Just like we explain to clients that really good work is worth the time and price, we need to remind ourselves as well that we can’t have everything. Some projects just aren’t going to get done this week. It sounds like a shocking and apocalyptic statement, I know. But when we do have to sacrifice something – I mean, identify our top priority – quality is far and away more important than time. Why? Because it’s much better to have to tell the client that we just aren’t quite done yet, than to deliver a sub-standard piece. Not making a small deadline every once in a while, well that’s something that you can recover from. But putting out crap just to put it out? Well that you may never live down.
So how do you try to manage the load and keep the fires down? What’s your secret strategy?
