Re-conquer your schedule
Smart availability planning for freelancers
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Determine the optimal time allocation over a given timespan.
Let Crow's Nest figure out how to distribute time boxes given
- a project timespan (start and end date), and
- a total number of hours
Improve results by including your project history.
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Use smart or standard burn rates.
The ideal burn rate is constant, but experience tells us that this hardly ever meets reality. Here are other burn rate types supported:
- Hill
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Hill-shaped work typically occurs when there is a culmination point, like an event (consider wedding photography, street interviews etc.).
You do a little planning upfront, then the majority of work hours takes place in a few days. Afterwards you do the follow up work in smaller time chunks (your mileage may vary of course).
- Valley
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Sprint-like workloads are often valley-shaped:
- You process tasks right after kick-off 🖥
- then slack 🏖
- and gain pace again right before sprint review 🚀
- Smart
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Connect your Harvest account and capitalize on your project and client history.
Even without a Harvest account, profit from anonymized industry data.
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Spot overbookings.
One of freelancers' primary sources of stress are hidden overbookings. These occur because ordinary calendar views do not take the non-linear nature of workloads into account.
Crow's Nest helps reduce these shortcomings by providing a more exact view into future workloads, thus minimizing the risk for burn out.
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Make accurate predictions of your availability.
A client calls whether you're available in the first two weeks of the following month. You look at your calendar, and in your head you start summing up all the hours you already allocated for other clients.
Stress kicks in, your instinct tells you to decline it but your brain argues that if you say no that client maybe never comes back. And you can always squeeze in a night shift...
Does this scenario sound familiar? It happens to a lot of freelancers at irregular intervals. Crow's Nest will take out a significant amount of strain from this process by allowing you to detect available spots in your calendar more precisely.
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From the blog
The Science Behind Crow's Nest's Burn Rate Types
In the previous post I presented Crow’s Nest’s central idea, that project burn rates aren’t constant and can be divided into certain categories. That certainly sounds plausible, but you don’t have to take my word for it, there’s actual evidence.
