Your clients expect you to be available – and you should be. You should answer the phone. You should answer emails. You should pick up on the occasional instant messenger buzz.
But how available should you really be? What does availability do to your productivity? What does that availability do to your life in general? Your creativity? Your professionalism?
In my business, I’ve found that availability is a double-edged sword. You want to be available to your clients, but you don’t want to be there all the time, as it can kill your real working time, kill your work and make you look needy or unpopular.
But at the same time, if you’re aloof or distant or unavailable all together, you’ll upset the very people who keep your freelance business going. It’s a fine line to walk, but it’s one that you have to address. You want your clients to feel loved. You want your clients to feel that you’re watching out for their best interests. But you also want your clients to understand that they are not the only clients you have – and you want them to understand that you have a life outside of their project.
I’ve also found that if you give them an inch, a lot of clients will take a mile. If you make yourself available after hours or on the weekend once, they’re going to expect you to do that all the time.
So much about the freelance and self-employment business is about training your clients, managing their expectations and also managing your image. All of these can take a long, long time to do – and if you approach it incorrectly, it’s enormously difficult to change any of these down the road.
If you make yourself seem too eager for the client’s business, they’ll see you as unprofessional or unpopular. The tattoo of “Please! Give me business! I’ll do anything!” is a tough one to wash off. Being over-eager or overly available can give the image of desperation, and no client wants to work with a desperate designer.
So – how do you handle your client’s expectations of your availability? Don’t rush to answer the phone. Don’t check your email and respond to it every 10 seconds (I’m guilty!) and don’t tell them that they can call you after hours, on your cell phone or on the weekend.
Give it time. Mull things over before you respond. Only respond to the things that need to be responded to.
What does this do? It lets the client know that you have a life away from your desk and chair and keyboard. It’ll buy you some space. It’ll buy you time. It’ll buy you the ability to communicate and work more on your terms – which is why you started down the twisting path of the freelancer.
Right?
Well – I gotta go. Phone is ringing, IM is buzzing, and I just got 45 emails that I need to ignore for a while.

(hint, hint)
There is so much noise these days.
I garner a fair amount of work from online sources, and I’ve found that there are a couple of universal red flags when it comes to bidding on projects or quoting a job. I’ll go into some of the others later, but the big one is “Budget is a concern.”
As I think I’ve mentioned, I’m an old-school guy in a lot of ways. I like to draw, I like paper, I keep notes on pads and sketches in sketchbooks.
One of the worst parts of the job could really be one of the best tools you can have.
Well – we’re moving the whole office, and I’ve come to realize a couple of things:
There are days when I’m incredibly productive. I can sit down and wipe out project after project. But – realistically, those days are reasonably few.
There seems to be a lot of musical symbolism out there, so I thought I’d take a well-known album, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and apply bits of it to the freelance designer’s life…
When I first started freelancing so many moons ago, I got a piece of advice that is really pretty good. It has nothing to do with finances or design. Nothing to do with software or time management or finding work.
Time management is crucial to the success of a freelance business.
Building an effective, hard-selling portfolio is a must for all designers, and there’s a science to building a portfolio.
1. Free Work
Don’t let things distract you from your ultimate goal of success as a freelance designer. Not TV. Not your spose. Nothing. Focus and drive for what you want. Your goal is only as reachable as your focus is sharp. For someone like me with acute attention defecit disorder, it can be rough. But – define what you want out of your venture and then grab on like a starving dog latches on to a soup bone. Tenacity and focus pays off every time.
First up is a Mac-only product – 





