As a professional, you make explicit commitments to every client you accept. Chief among these is your commitment to deliver your work-product on time.

You and your client may differ on matters of taste, opinion, values, payment, and more. But there is no room for disagreement as to deadlines. If you promise to deliver your work on the first of the month, delivering it any later than the first of the month is a major violation of your professionalism and your commitment.

With professional deadlines so important, here are some techniques to help you meet every delivery date to which you commit.

Plan Your Work

Some creative work, and some creative people, are not amenable to planning. If the work is too loosely defined, you may not be ready to plan what you’re going to create, how you’re going to create it, or even what tools you’re going to need to complete the project. If you need the Muse to rev up your creative engine, it’s improbable that you can schedule a creative work session for any particular time, such as 10 am next Tuesday.

Nevertheless, you can strive to make some progress toward completing the work, even if that progress is merely to do some preliminary thinking and feeling about where you want the project to go.

As you firm up your thoughts and feelings about the creative goal, you can usually begin to flesh out a more practical plan that specifies the tools you’ll need, the hours you’ll spend, the steps you’ll need to complete the project, the sequence in which you’ll want to complete the steps, and so forth.

Not everyone wants or needs a plan for every creative project, but it’s often a good idea to have one because it helps you focus, recognize your next step toward your goal, and appreciate the work and the steps you’ve already accomplished.

Work Your Plan

Many people say, “If you’re failing to plan, you’re planning to fail.” That’s mostly true, as far as it goes. But if you want to meet your deadlines, it’s equally important to work your plan once you have it. Otherwise, what’s the point of planning?

As I’ve learned from my son, a plan need not be frozen in place. It’s okay to revise your plan in light of new information or new developments. But a willingness to revise a plan when and as needed does not invalidate the importance of having a plan in the first place.

Think of a plan as a roadmap. It gives you the advantage of knowing the lay of the land, where you’ve been, and where you’re heading. It lets you know where you are in relation to your goal, and it helps you identify your next step in making progress toward it. With all of these advantages, the roadmap doesn’t prevent you from taking excursions off the main route, or staying longer at some waypoint that attracts your interest or demands your attention.

In terms of deadlines, your plan helps you recognize how much more work remains in the project you’re trying to complete and helps you calculate how many hours of effort that work is likely to require.

Without a plan, your next deadline can loom up suddenly out of the darkness and slip on past you before you can deal with it effectively.

However, if your plan shows that you have, for example, 100 hours until a deadline, and your plan helps you estimate that you need to put in 50 more hours of work before then, you’d have to be the opposite of a professional to let that deadline slip past you.

Work in Sync with Your Natural Patterns

As I’ve discussed in a previous post, creativity is a flow that almost always exhibits patterns you can follow to generate more and better work.

The basic idea is to recognize and sometimes even anticipate, based on your creative history, the dates and times you’re likely to be doing your best work—and your worst. This can help you select which project to pursue during upcoming periods of prime creativity and which projects you can afford to kick down the road a while longer.

Allow Extra Time in Case of Work Problems and Delays

Let’s go back to that hypothetical from above where you had 100 hours remaining in which to complete 50 hours of creative work. Hypothetically, any professional worthy of the name can meet that deadline.

But in the real world, there are unpredictable variables that can turn those 50 hours of remaining work into 75 hours, and can eat into those 100 hours of available time until there are only 50 hours of actual working time left. In other words, completing a project in time to meet a deadline can be far more difficult than you anticipate.

That’s why a professional interested in meeting deadlines does not schedule work too tightly, with too little room for delays and errors. A novice or amateur may be proud of finishing a project an hour before it’s due. But the prudent, experienced professional plans to finish a day, maybe even a week, in advance of the deadline. This way, when delays crop up—as they very often do—the seasoned professional still has a reasonable possibility of meeting the deadline.

Learn to More Accurately Estimate Your Time Requirements

Much of this discussion on meeting deadlines has involved estimating time requirements. Obviously, if your estimates are overly optimistic, you’ll run the risk of missing some deadlines that you might have met had you estimated more accurately.

For this reason, accurately estimating time requirements for a project’s remaining work is a valuable tool in meeting deadlines.

One of the best ways to learn to more accurately estimate how much time a project will require is to log the time you spend, and later review those logs to learn from your own experiences.

Your time estimates will naturally become more accurate as you gain professional experience. But keeping and reviewing a time log will significantly shorten your learning curve.

The main point here is simple: The ability to set and meet deadlines without stressing yourself to the breaking point is a critically important tool in the professional writer’s toolkit. I’ve seen lots of professionals sharpen their deadline-meeting skills to better match the increasing scope of their projects, and the prestige and importance of their professional challenges. You can do this, too.

Robert Moskowitz is an award-winning independent professional writer who has written and sold millions of words in just about every format over five decades. He instinctively sees the big pictures, breaks each one down into coherent slices, meaningfully prioritizes and sequences those slices, and then executes the tasks inherent in each slice in very productive ways. Put more simply, Robert knows how to succeed as an independent writer, covering all the bases from soliciting assignments to delivering polished work, from pricing jobs to budgeting and managing personal finances, from organizing a conducive office environment to establishing and following sensible guidelines regarding life, work, and productivity. Having done all this, and having paid attention to how he did it, Robert is now in a position to pass along what he knows to others.

You can’t negotiate your birthday. But pretty much everything else is susceptible to discussion and change, provided you’re open to such a conversation and you know how to proceed.

What Is Negotiation?

Negotiation is very simply a method people of good will often use to discuss their differences of opinion or choice and—under certain circumstances—to determine a way forward that all parties are willing to accept.

Since (as a writer) you generally have little or no power over your subjects, your sources, your collaborators, your publishers, your clients, or anyone else involved in your professional projects, negotiation is one of the primary tools you have available to try to produce the outcomes you want.

While negotiation sometimes produces a deal that’s far less advantageous than you may have hoped, it can also produce an acceptable deal in a situation that at some point seemed hopeless.

Important Notes

Fundamentally, negotiation is the process of reaching an agreeable way forward (often through compromise or consensus, two very different things) without the use of force. In other words, when we negotiate, we all choose to participate and we all choose to abide by the result. If one party needs or uses force to get another party to comply, it’s no longer negotiation.

Negotiation works only among people of good will. If you’re dealing with someone who isn’t willing to be fair or isn’t willing to abide by a negotiated agreement, there’s no point in trying to negotiate.

Just for the record: I doubt I can motivate you in this short article to want to negotiate for more than you think you deserve, but I know for certain I can help you—as I have helped many others—improve your chances of getting all you want through negotiation.

How Do You Start Negotiating?

The best way to begin negotiating is for both sides to make a plain statement of what they want. In the best-case scenario, there may be no need for negotiation because each side wants something the other side can easily and willingly provide.

If there are important differences in desired outcomes, and also a willingness to negotiate, it’s helpful for each side to supplement their plain statement of what they want by specifying more detailed “must haves” and “would like to haves” in rank order.

In other words, if I make a plain statement that I want you to write a million words for $100, maybe I will supplement that with a “must have” of half a million words rather than a million. If you make a plain statement that you want a million dollars for a million words, maybe you will supplement that with a “must have” of half a million dollars.

Now we’re getting somewhere, because if we both feel okay with these fall back positions, there’s a neat and natural point of agreement: I’ll be willing to pay half a million dollars and you’ll be willing to write half a million words.

The negotiation is complete. Congratulations.

But if there is no immediately neat and natural point of agreement, we can nevertheless continue to negotiate our way through our differences, which can fruitfully be viewed as some combination of obstacles and resistance.

How Do You Negotiate Through Obstacles and Resistance?

Obstacles are best thought of as relatively non-negotiable differences in the agendas and goals of the negotiating parties. I need to get half a million words. You need to get half a million dollars. As the negotiation continues, we may find ways to get past those obstacles or ways to accept those obstacles and move on.

Resistance is best thought of as a relatively negotiable difference in the agendas and goals of the negotiating parties. For example, I may be resistant to working with a writer I don’t know very well, particularly if I’m asked to pay an advance. You may be resistant to working on a project without getting half the payment up front, particularly if you’re working for a client whose track record on payments you can’t ascertain. We are far apart, but we may be able to negotiate through these points of resistance.

One of the first steps in completing a successful negotiation is to establish and build a relationship of trust with the other party. You can start doing this, even during preliminary phases of the negotiation, by such actions as

• talking on the phone or in person and getting to know more about each other
• making and keeping commitments, such as to exchange documents or share information
• asking for and giving personal or professional references from reliable people
• negotiating the small stuff, such as the meeting place for the serious negotiations, the shape of the negotiating table, and the number and qualifications of other people who will be in the room for the negotiations
• fully and honestly stating what you want, what you must have, and what you would like to have from the negotiation.

An important aspect of negotiation is to be clear about your own bottom line. For example, if you are absolutely dead set on not writing a word until you have received some money in advance, then you will find it easier to cut through the chatter and understand whether the negotiation is advancing or at a standstill.

This kind of clarity helps the negotiations in three ways:

• Your clarity helps you understand in detail what you must have from this negotiation, and it saves you the time and trouble of negotiating further once it’s clear you’re not going to get it.
• Your clarity helps communicate your must haves to the other party and—more often than you might suspect—provides extra motivation for them to relent on some obstacle or resistance that has been standing in the way of negotiation progress.
• Your clarity fuels a unique technique: It cues you when to  walk away from the negotiation. Physically departing from the negotiation creates an immediate sense of loss in the other party and possibly confusion, too. You’re sending a very strong message that you’re not going to agree to their demands, and this may cause them to back down and demand less.

The good thing about walking away is that you don’t have to mean it: there’s nothing to stop you from turning around and walking right back into the negotiations if you wish. But you’ll often find walking away is a powerful negotiating technique that can break a negotiation log jam.

Another proven negotiating technique is simple compromise. You want a million dollars, but you’ll accept half a million. I want a million words, but I can make do with half a million. Let’s compromise on three quarters of a million—both words and dollars. “Let’s meet in the middle” is a rallying cry that has forged acceptable ways forward through what many have perceived as negotiation dead ends. Offered judiciously, a compromise can exert great power.

Perhaps the most important technique that helps in negotiating a satisfactory way forward is to listen carefully to the other party. You can do this by letting them talk at length, by repeating what they say back to them in different words, and by a willingness to modify your demands to accommodate some of their positions. For example, I may be insisting on a full million words, but I may also be open to you delivering those million words over a 12-month period or allowing a large number of those words to be repeated many times, effectively cutting back on the work I’m actually requiring.

I’m not going to give more examples here because that’s outside the scope of this article. But the point is simply that by actively listening to the other party and thinking hard about what they really seem to want instead of what they are literally saying, you can often find a way forward that cuts through seemingly insurmountable obstacles and resistances.

How Do You Complete Negotiations?

There are many techniques that top negotiators use to push through all the obstacles and resistances and to hammer out a satisfactory way forward for all parties. They can include any combination of

• charm and charisma
• logical argument
• emotional persuasion
• bartering (I’ll accept your specific terms on one item if you’ll accept my specific terms on some other item)
• establishing a deadline for completing the negotiations
• shortening the term of the proposed agreement (automatically making it less onerous than a longer lasting agreement)
• calling for a “cooling off” period (temporarily halting negotiations and resuming later).

In addition to these, one technique I often use is to start with the least important difference and try to get it resolved, then move on to negotiating a slightly more important difference, and so on. This approach has four distinct advantages:

• The least important item to negotiate is often the easiest to resolve. You want to write those million words on a Mac instead of the PC I asked for? Sure, no problem. Let’s move on.
• Eliminating one item of disagreement simplifies the rest of the negotiations.
• Resolving one item helps build additional trust and rapport between the negotiating parties.
• Completing a discrete piece of the negotiating agenda establishes a point of common ground, effectively strengthening the parties’ emotional and practical commitments to completing the rest of the negotiation.

(In addition, as a writer, I just plain feel good memorializing each completed item I’m negotiating.)

Of course, there’s a lot more to successful negotiation than I can cover in this short piece. Nevertheless, I’ve found these tools and ideas generally provide writers with lasting motivation to develop their negotiating skills and use them to improve the results they’re getting as professional writers.

Robert Moskowitz is an award-winning independent professional writer who has written and sold millions of words in just about every format over five decades. He instinctively sees the big pictures, breaks each one down into coherent slices, meaningfully prioritizes and sequences those slices, and then executes the tasks inherent in each slice in very productive ways. Put more simply, Robert knows how to succeed as an independent writer, covering all the bases from soliciting assignments to delivering polished work, from pricing jobs to budgeting and managing personal finances, from organizing a conducive office environment to establishing and following sensible guidelines regarding life, work, and productivity. Having done all this, and having paid attention to how he did it, Robert is now in a position to pass along what he knows to others.