Removing Stress From a Project

The following guest post was written by Joshua Danton Boyd. The author’s views are entirely his own and may not reflect the views of FreelanceCopywritersBlog.com. If you are interested in producing a Guest Post for this blog, please get in touch with your ideas.

Your eyes bulge, you grit your teeth and suddenly you’re smashing up the town in a pair of ripped purple trousers. People flee in fear as you shout something near unintelligible about “clients”, “cascading sheets” and “Internet Explorer compatibility”. Before long the entire area is rubble and you collapse to the floor murmuring, “What does make it pop more even mean?”.

Well this is what happened in your dream last night anyway. The stress of your latest project has flowed over into somewhere usually dedicated to non-sensical dreams about the death of your first goldfish and that time you were cruelly dumped by your first girlfriend in front of everyone. You have decided that enough is enough. Your work will never again infringe on the territory usually infested by your inner mental turmoil. Here’s a few tips on preventing this all happening again.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of your stress will stem from your client who, despite knowing exactly what they want, seem to have more trouble conveying their ideas than Washoe the signing chimpanzee. It’s up to you to guide your client through the strenuous purpose of communicating clearly and effectively. Try to meet with them in person to discuss ideas if this is possible. It’s a lot easier to bash ideas out like this, especially if you’re doing something visual as you can start sketching and get a better idea of exactly what your client wants.

You’ll want to keep in lots of regular contact with them too. Each time you do may cause a little bit of extra stress, but it is much better in comparison to doing a load of work only to discover the client wants an entire overhaul of everything you’ve done because they realise they now hate it. Despite the fact that you’ll often want to strangle your boss or put polonium in their tea, you need to stay on as good terms as possible with your client. The better the relationship the easier the process will be. This doesn’t mean you can’t still be a bit forceful. Remember you’re the one with the expertise, the client needs to be told when something just simply won’t work.

As soon as you’ve managed to remove a semblance of an idea from the mind of your client don’t just start straight away. Plan every tiny, little detail out first. See exactly what you need to do and prioritise everything. Give yourself some time limits to get certain tasks done. The whole project will become much clearer once you’ve got a decent plan in place and it’ll help you focus too.

Finally, don’t go around getting advice from friends, family and that dodgy guy down the pub who sells knock-off DVDs. It isn’t going to help and it’ll just muddy your vision. If you do show your mates what you’ve got so far, you’ll find yourself getting frustrated at their suggestions because they don’t know what the client wants. You’re the only one that does and so if you want some critique, ask your boss and not your friend whose entire set of expertise lie within the field of FIFA 2012.

Joshua Danton Boyd is a Brighton based copywriter. He currently works for the cloud accounting firm Crunch and contributes to Freelance Advisor.