LONG: Summary of Simultaneous Contract question

Subject: LONG: Summary of Simultaneous Contract question
From: joanne grey <j_grey -at- WRITEANGLES -dot- COM>
Date: Tue, 27 May 1997 12:54:28 -0700

Thanks to everyone who has responded. The response was overwhelmingly
one-sided.

On Friday, I asked the list:
> Do you totally complete one contract before beginning
>another, or do you regularly overlap contracts?

And promised to post a summary if there was interest. So, for those of
you interested in the responses I got, here is what I've learned. I am
not including the names of the people who responded, simply because all
of the responses were private, and in one case, "you never know if your
boss reads this list, too". For those of you who are legal nit-pickers,
these messages do retain copyright. <ducking>

- "If the new one can be an at-home contract, they run concurrently."

- "I like to have two different clients going at the same time but I
don't very often get the chance because each of my projects is more or
less full time."

- "It would be very difficult to synchronize things if I had to wait
for one contract to be completed before I started another. Every client
wants you to start on their project immediately. Sometimes, if I'm
really swamped, I can delay things a few days, a week tops, but there's
no way I will wait that long. I would surely lose many prospects."

- "Most of the contracts I have aren't "full time" (mostly because the
client doesn't get info to me when I need it, so I have "down time" or
non-billable hours to fill), so I often have 2 or 3 contracts going at
the same time."

- "I try very hard to have more than one contract going at a time. I'm
not always successful, but that's my goal."

- "I'm always working on multiple projects (if that's what you mean by
contracts). Usually have anywhere from 3 to 10 projects going on at the
same time."

- "I definitely overlap contracts if I'm lucky enough to have them to
overlap!!!"

- "Yes, when I'm doing contract work (a supplement to my day job), I do
take on more than one contract at a time. However, I'm very careful to
specify times for the incoming work. For example, if I'm working on an
editing job for company A and I've got another 2-3 days on it, I'll tell
company B that I can do their rewrite job by the end of next week. In
other words, I build in the overlap to allow enough time to do a decent
job on each one."

- "Having multiple contracts really depends on the work you're required
to do and how hard you want to work. I don't want to work that hard, so
if I had my druthers, I would have two good, long-term contracts and
maybe pick up another small one as time permits."

- "Truly small contracts can overlap comfortably, if no one contract
needs 40+ hours per week (or whatever you're comfortable with).
Sometimes I have a couple of smaller things on the go, none of which
requires more than 10 hours per week when I'm waiting for final reviews
and markups. I take most of my projects through production of final
deliverables, so some of my time at project's end is spent chasing down
print jobs, assembling binders, etc. I can usually kick off another
project while doing the mindless stuff."

- "I typically have about 3 contracts going simultaneously (and maybe
1-2 small jobs like Frame template design). There always seems to be
times when the software or hardware "isn't quite ready", or the review
process is taking a while, or whatever."

________________________________________________________
Joanne Grey http://www.writeangles.com
Write Angles j_grey -at- writeangles -dot- com

The future is not something we enter. The future is
something we create. -Leonard I. Sweet

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