By Patience Ngwira.
Image Caption: I seldom take behind the scenes selfies when I'm working night shift. But for the purposes of today's article I had to. It was 2:30 AM Johannesburg time when I took the selfie, finalizing some work for a client about 7 hours ahead of my time. I was doing minor changes to the work before the client was about to walk into a presentation. Though White was currently out of town, he had managed to guide me through making all the necessary last minute client changes. By the time I took this selfie we had successfully managed to meet the client's deadline😊. But it wasn't so from the beginning as we often messed up on client deadlines , kkkk😂🤣. Read on...
You can still read Part 1 of this series here if you missed it. Truth be told, White & I have lots of experiences with trial and error, kkkk🤣😂. And I’m here to share some of our experiences with you here today. We have learnt the hard way that pursuing a goal & achieving it involves a lot of struggle, consistency, unlimited strength to fail again & again but never giving up on the dream so as to achieve it one day. Thanks to the rise of marketplaces, networks & communities dedicated to helping us freelancers find jobs. Our multimedia freelance services are no-longer limited to a specific location for work. As we can now find jobs & opportunities anywhere across the globe. However, along with this undeniable benefits & broad opportunities. White & I faced a lot of challenges initially. The biggest being, "Working With Clients In Different Time Zones." While some freelancers filter their job search by location so they are able to work with clients in their time-zone. We decided to work through shifts to maximize our income. We began to work for clients who were very much ahead of us in terms of time, a few were behind, we often messed up on deadlines because of not getting used to the time differences. Learning to manage these effectively has been a challenge to say the least. With some trial & error, we now feel that we have found our rhythm that works well with us. But to make it work, it took a lot of planning & sticking to a strict schedule to accommodate clients’ different time zones. They say;“If the plan doesn’t work, change the plan but never change the goal.” Utilize Google Calendar Well! Using Google Calendar has proven to be very handy for us, because it allows us to schedule meetings and appointments in both our time zone and our clients, without either having to decipher it together. We even share our calendars with our clients to keep across our availability and movements clearly. Working with clients across multiple time zones doesn’t have to be a burden.Just get familiar as quickly as you can; start to live and breathe those zones. Part 3 of “Working With Clients in Different Time Zones As a Freelancer” coming soon.
You can view all our past completed projects here.
AFTERTHOUGHT - The above are just my few tips for managing your work with clients in different time zones effectively. Do you know any others? Both White & I we’ll be more than happy to discuss your experience in working remotely with your clients in the comment section below!