How To Create An "External Brain" That Helps You Finish Projects On Time Every Time | The Infinite Clients Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 295

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello, and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, hi, hey, hello, welcome, so glad to have you here. This podcast is for you if you're a creative freelancer who offers creative services, and you want to make money, more money, from those creative services without selling your soul, without absolutely and utterly throwing your life away. This is the podcast for you. From our returning listeners, glad to have you back. We are going to continue the series we had last week, but before we continue, PSA, tomorrow is Valentine's Day, I believe. But this episode should come out on the 13th, if I'm correct. It's the day before Valentine's Day. If you haven't done something for your boo, gotten something scheduled for your boo, booked a date night, gotten, I don't know, a little trinket, whatever. If you haven't flowers, do something for your boo. That's my PSA today. If you're like on a podcast walk this morning, it hasn't crossed your mind.

Now it has. And now you got to do something. Although it may be too late by now. Who knows?

So that is my one warning to you. Do something. All right, so let's get into the series or the topic of today's episode. We're continuing the Infinite Client Series. Again, if this is your first episode or you're new to this series, this series is trying to answer the question.

If you had to create a business and a service and a fulfillment process that was so good, so magical, so remarkable, that every single client you worked with referred at least one more client to you, what would that look like? And we've already talked through a bunch of things like onboarding, the client agreement, communication. All these things are really important. But today's episode is for all my creatives out there that suck at delivering projects on time. They suck at estimating project length or how long something will take or when things will be sent.

And you suck at remembering every single little detail for a project. Thus you drop the ball all the time.

And if you're always feeling like you just are forgetting something, if that's you, this episode is for you today. Many freelancers mess things up because we try to remember everything up here in this brain, this incredibly complex yet somehow stupid thing between our ears called our brain. The thing that somehow remembers a song that I heard when I was a child that I'll start whistling when I'm making coffee in the morning for no reason whatsoever, that my wife says, what the hell?

And I'm like, what the hell?

Why is that still up there? But it doesn't remember to send a major deliverable to a client by the end of the day. It's a remarkable and utterly baffling thing to me how stupid our brains can be sometimes.

And so when we try to remember, keep everything up here, and or we also just wing it on every single project, it's like, oh, I do roughly the same thing every time. I know roughly how long it takes. I know I won't forget these things because it's the same steps in every project that I do.

This is how we get to that sad, pathetic wasteland of drop balls, waking up in a cold panic sweat at 3 a.m. because we know we forgot to send that thing to the client at the end of the day, or some other important step that you forgot to do. Guilty myself here. You're perpetually delivering things late. You're just basically running around like a chicken with your head cut off. And because of that, you're stressed all the time.

That's what happens when we try to keep these things up in our brains, right? Because there's no real possible way that we can keep track of complex projects or overlapping deliverables. Some of us juggle multiple clients at the same time. There's no way we can effectively keep that in our brains and not mess it up sometimes. There are too many variables for us to keep track of in our head, and there's no way for us to even remotely estimate how long or when we'll deliver something three weeks from now if we don't know every single step from now to then and how long each step should take and where we're at in that process.