Customers are fragile creatures. When they hire you (unless you're lucky enough to own a fancy title of a "coach" or a "mentor") they assume that their part is mostly done and expect the rest of what they want to appear as if by magic on the schedule and according to their standards.
Sometimes it's the right expectation and sometime it's not. Now, imagine for a second that the customer needs to make a major contribution to the project. Lets say, he needs to provide texts and graphics for the website you're building for him. And he doesn't have them -- yet. But in his mind he is done -- mostly. It's a paradox, I know.
Then, around the time when the deadline for him to deliver all he has to deliver for the project is about to happen, it suddenly downs on him like a ton of bricks: OMG, he has to do this, and that, and that, and it should've been done, like, yesterday. So, he starts running around trying to finish everything at once, and it gets him overwhelmed. Severely. He suddenly realizes he should've started two month ago and there's no way on earth he can finish it in a week. This thought pains him. This thought makes him tired even more than he's already tired, and he stops reading emails from you. Because your emails wake up the torturing memory of all the things he should have accomplished yet hasn't accomplished for his own dear project.
And then, he gets depressed.
Damn!
And then everything stops and nothing gets done from that point on because you're waiting for him to get over himself and finally deliver to you what he had to deliver, like, two weeks ago... In a meantime, he is overwhelmed and depressed, and it pains him to even think about it. So, he doesn't.
It's madness with no system in it!
When I just started this project I was thinking of using some project management software. I looked at a couple of services online, but they seemed either like an overkill with bells and whistles that would require ridiculous amount of time to just maintain them, or like an awkward and rather useless service that wouldn't even let you properly enter all the tasks for the project. On the third try I decided to give up, not waste any more time and simply rely on e-mails. After all, there are mainly two people involved - I and my customer. Surely two smart people can communicate effectively using e-mail and phone, right? Boy, was I wrong!
For almost three weeks now I can't make my customer send me a simple phone# without which I can't open a business PayPal account, without which I can't create Purchase web page, without which I can't finish the darn website and move on to the next one! She feels overwhelmed, so she ignores "the small" tasks she has to do.
I got it. Customers are fragile creatures. Unless they see tasks from the "outsourced" projects on their own schedule in black and white, they either procrastinate on them endlessly or ignore them completely.
Learn from my mistake, if you can. Even if there are only two of you -- you and your customer -- get your project a schedule with tasks assigned to a person responsible for it and deadlines for each of the tasks. At least that.
Even though, half of my project is done, I can't stand waiting any longer for the phone# to show up in my mailbox. I created a project in OfficeZilla.com and added that small task to the list of tasks. I assigned it to her. From now on, it'll all be there in black and white. Tomorrow I am sending an invitation to my customer to join...
