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Simultaneous projects

I said something to my wife this evening to the effect that it’s best for employees to have one or at most two projects at a time. Two is good because you can switch off when you’re tired of one project or if you’re waiting on input. But with three or more projects you spend a lot of time task switching.

She said “But …” and I immediately knew what she was thinking. I have a lot more than two projects going on. In fact, I would have to look at my project tracker to know exactly how many projects I have going on right now. How does this reconcile with my statement that two projects is optimal?

Unless you’re doing staff augmentation contracting, consulting work is substantially different from salaried work. For one thing, projects tend to be smaller and better defined.

Also consultants, at least in my experience, spend a lot of time waiting on clients (especially when clients are lawyers). So you take on more work than you could handle if everyone wanted your attention at once. At least you work up to that if you can. You balance the risk of being overwhelmed against the risk of not having enough work to do.

Working for several clients in a single day is exhausting, but that’s usually not necessary. My ideal is to do work for one or two clients each day, even if I have a lot of clients who are somewhere between initial proposal and final invoice.

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