What To Do When Constant Client Emails Keep You From Working
I love my clients. They keep me in business and they allow me to have the kind of career and lifestyle I’ve always wanted. However that’s not to saythey aren’t without their vices. The busier we get as freelancers, the less time we have to answer emails, yet the more emails we seem to get.
What’s worse is that we often get several clients who seemed to need babysitting on the web. While I don’t mind teaching my clients how to use their new sites, I’ve come across several clients that would literally email me at least 10-15 times a day on every subject from their website, to SEO, to using email, to turning on their computer.
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About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
Great post Amber! All ideas are needed in different circumstances. I only have a handful of clients thus far but have had one or two that have taken up way too much time via email. The first thing I did to clean up my inbox was set up a basecamp [http://basecamphq.com] project for them. Of course this only applies to paying clients but it sure did help. They may continue to send multiple emails in a span of a few minutes but they are a little more organized.
Here’s a related question. I was actually thinking about this today and thought hmm maybe I’ll email that really nice Amber girl, but then I come here and see that you made this post. Anyways I’m new to web design and my “problem” is similar although it’s more so during the design process.
I want to be helpful and make as many changes as the client wants, but it seems I either ask for too much feedback and am stuck doing TONS of changes along the way, or I go ahead and do a lot of work only to back track later and scrap some of the work I’ve already done because the client had something different in mind.
So I guess my question is what’s a good way of going about the approval process? Multiple times throughout the design process, a set number of times, etc.? Hopefully this makes sense.