17. How to make faster freelancing decisions

Welcome to 15 Minute Freelancer, your snack-sized guide to being your own boss and building a business and life you love. I'm your host, Louise Shanahan. My LinkedIn bio says I'm a freelance health copywriter. But for the next 15 minutes, I'll be tickling your ears with practical strategies, behind the scenes stories, and nuggets o' wisdom so you can create a freelance business that works for you. Whether you're just starting out or you've been self-employed for a while, I'll be right here with you to help me navigate the ups and downs of freelancing life. So, grab a coffee relax and join me for 15 minutes of freelancing fun. Don't forget to hit subscribe! 

Hello, friends, how are you today? Now as some of you may know, I have a very fluffy, very high maintenance cat called Ziggy. He is our white ragdoll cat with oodles of fluff and big bright blue eyes. Maybe you've seen him on Instagram. He's very cute, very fluffy, very stupid.
We actually adopted him about five years ago from a guy named Guy. I think one of his kids had allergies or something. So Ziggy unfortunately had to move out. It was very sad. But I understand. If you've seen the amount of fluff produced by a ragdoll cat on a daily basis, you will probably understand that there are days when anyone would be tempted to start writing a rehoming ad for the vet's window, so you can stop finding cat hairs in your eyelashes, stop having to vacuum every five minutes or ever hope to wear a black top again. Guy took the rehoming decision for Ziggy very seriously though. We had three interviews! One time he even brought the cat to our flat to see if he liked it. He was like, sure I like my travel box. Obviously it worked out in the end. 

Why am I talking about this? Sometimes it's good to take time over decisions. Other times, maybe just trust your gut, make a decision, move on. Spending a long time deciding who to entrust your precious pet to is worth more than a few hours of your time. Deciding to fork out an eye watering sum of money for a robo-vac that will quietly chug around the flat sooking up cat hair of its own accord, so you never have to vacuum cat hair again, is a no brainer. That was a quick decision. Yes, we are talking about how to make decisions today. 

This topic came to me when I was on a call with a regular client this week, he was saying Oh, you're so lucky. We can just discuss a deal on this call and you can decide right now, deal or no deal? You're done. I have to go and discuss this with three or four other people. And that's what we love about being self employed, right? That flexibility, that agility, that autonomy to make decisions by ourselves. We're only accountable to ourselves. It's the best part of working for yourself, I think. It's so different to my previous career, where decisions would take weeks or months. And you'd have to go and defend them in board meetings. And then you'd go to stakeholder meetings and defend what the board had decided. I would worry that my boss would hate my decisions, or my team would think that I was really indecisive and a terrible manager. A lot of that is just my personality, I guess. But it's definitely easier when you only need to worry about what you think. 

That said making decisions is also the hardest part of running a business, I think, because you have to make all of them. Sometimes I'd love to just have someone else sitting here to say yeah, that's the right call, or no, what are you thinking? Some big decisions that I've agonised over are things like what business name should I have? What services you don't offer? Should I have a newsletter? How much should I charge? How should I respond to this client? Should I do this course? Should I create a course. It's a lot, isn't it? 

Some of these decisions should take some careful consideration, but I think others can be made a lot faster than we often think. So I thought that today I would talk through some of the frameworks that I've been using, or at least trying to use, to make easier or quicker decisions as a freelancer. 

So first up is something that I think works really well for those day to day decisions about what to do and when. It's a way for getting through your task list more efficiently. And that is Do-Delegate-Delete. The 3 Ds of decision making. This is a good one for firing through your emails. Maybe your inbox is packed, and you don't want to spend hours thinking about what to do with each one. You just go through each email, and with each one, you can decide if it's a task or reply that you can do right there and then, or something that you can stick on your to-do list for a particular day. Or maybe it's something that you can delegate to someone else, so you don't have to worry about it anymore, someone else will take care of it. Or maybe it's something that you can just delete. It's not something that needs any action. It's just done. 

This also works for any kind of small decisions that are niggling in the back of your mind. So maybe something like should I rewrite my about page? I can either do it myself, in which case, I should stick some time in the diary and make sure I just get the thing done. Or maybe I'll delegate it to another copywriter to do it for me. Or maybe I'll just decide that actually, it doesn't need done at all. It's not important. It's not going to change anything right now, so I can just delete that task from my mind. Hopefully that makes sense. 

The second tactic is another way to take off the smallest decisions - shark bites. So just do it now. Don't overthink it. Just bite off the task and decide what you're going to do. It's another way of thinking about that saying, How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How do you break down a big task or a big scary decision? Just one small decision at a time. Shark bites. Just make a small decision and go from there. For example, maybe you're wondering if you should move from being a freelancer to running an agency, maybe you're thinking about growth and scale and all those exciting things. That is a big decision. A shark bite might just be working with a subcontractor on one project and seeing how it goes. Dipping your toe in the water. Sorry, that's an unfortunate mixing of metaphors there!

Number three is catastrophizing. Bear with me on this one. What's the worst that could happen? Sometimes when you have a big decision to make, the thing that's putting you off making the decision is imagining all the ways it can go wrong. We love to do this as humans. One approach is actually to lean into that and really imagine the worst case scenario, then you can think about what you would do if that awful outcome transpired. Chances are, you'll find a way to move forward. Or you can then start getting really practical and think about what can you do to prevent those things from happening? Sometimes you realise that the worst case scenario really isn't that big of a deal at all. So you can just get on with making the decision. I think I talked in a previous episode about how I use this approach to imagine what would happen when I was considering leaving my previous career. So by imagining that the worst case scenario is okay, no clients, I'll have no money, I'll be a complete failure. I could start to make a plan to prevent those things happening. 

And you could do the opposite here, too. What's the best thing that could happen? Wouldn't that be amazing? How would you feel if that option was suddenly taken away from you? Like, maybe you're thinking about working with a new bigger client on a bigger project than you've done before. Maybe it feels really scary. And you just can't decide if you want to say yes. What if you were told you weren't allowed the option? Maybe that would be really disappointing. Now you know how much you want it, your decision might be easier. Maybe you think about what's the best thing that could happen here. And you really visualise how that's all gonna look. That makes the decision easier. And you think, yes, I want to go for that. Now all you need to focus on is taking those shark bites and breaking the task into more manageable chunks to actually make it happen. 

Fourth is another reframe of breaking it down into easy chunks. You can see a trend here. Okay. This is the MVD, the minimum viable decision. If you have a big decision to make, and you just feel like you can't decide, what's the minimum that you could decide right now? What parts of the decision can you put off until later? Maybe you're wondering if freelancing is even for you, maybe you're tired of all these decisions, tired of looking for leads tired of dealing with different clients. And you're wondering if you should jack it all in and get a job working for someone else. But you love your business. And you can't decide. A MVD might be to say, Okay, I'll look for a three or six month contract, maybe just to take the pressure off for a bit. And I can kick the decision about the longer term plan into the long grass and decide later. The MVD is just to help you start now. Just start. Just do something, there's really not much that can be changed later. 

Number five is sorry, Ziggy is waiting at the door. I should have brought him in to be the special guest on this episode. Okay, number five is to phone a friend. Is there someone that you can talk through your decision with? Can you find another freelancer to act as a sounding board? Sometimes we want to talk to our partner or our friends or family about stuff that's going on in our business. And it can be really frustrating when they don't really seem to get it. Like you're agonising over what to say, in response to a snippy email you've got from a client or something and they don't really know how to help. So is there someone in your freelance community that you could reach out to for some support? 

Number six is listening to your gut. This is something that I really have to work on. I've always been a very logical person. I'd be far more likely to make a careful list of pros and cons than go with my gut normally, but I'm trying to tune into my intuition more because often your body's telling you if something feels right, isn't it? So maybe one way to pull yourself out of the sludge of indecision is to move away from your logical thinking and ask yourself what your gut is telling you deep down. How do you feel about what it's saying? You can always go back to that logical brain later. 

One thing I see a lot of people talking about lately is how to minimise decision fatigue. Like I said earlier, decision fatigue can be a real challenge for freelancers, because we have so many decisions to make each day. We can take the pressure off by minimising the number of decisions we have to make so we have more energy to focus on the most important ones. So what might some examples be here? Maybe you've heard of how Steve Jobs used to wear the same jeans and black t shirt or black polo every day, so he didn't have to waste energy on deciding what to wear. He could just grab the same outfit and go. Clearly he didn't have a white cat! What could that sort of thing look like for you? It doesn't have to be what you wear each day, it could be a part of your routine that you can automate or make the same each day or each time you do them, so you can minimise the number of decisions you have to make. 

Maybe it's having the same lunch every day, maybe it's going for a walk at the same time every day or on the same route every day. You know, it doesn't have to be those things, just find something that works for you in your business.  Maybe it's having set rates for a project, so you don't have to spend hours figuring out pricing each time. Maybe you use theme days, so you can batch the same types of tasks together and avoid context switching, so you're not having to sit down each day and decide what to do first. Maybe you can create some templates for proposals or emails that you're regularly having to send, so you don't need to spend time deciding what to write each time and starting from scratch. 

So I hope these tactics are helpful for you. Remember, it's your business, so you get to make the decisions. And that is a huge privilege. You're the boss, you get to decide, you can make your business whatever you want. And isn't that amazing? So I would encourage you to just make the decision, just rip the band aid off, just decide and go because there are very few decisions that can't be changed later. Okay, as always, I hope you found this helpful. I would be extremely grateful if you would leave a review or share it with a friend if you enjoyed it. It really does mean so much to me when you do that. Thank you. Until next time, happy freelancing.

You've been listening to 15 Minute Freelancer with me, Louise Shanahan, freelance health copywriter and content marketer at thecopyprescription.com. If you enjoyed this, please hit subscribe, leave a review or share it with a freelance friend. And if you've got a freelancing question you want answered on the podcast find me and say hi on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. Thanks, and until next time, happy freelancing!