At the beginning of a new project, it’s easy for the freelance remote worker to leave the decision-making about the project to the client. Often, I find myself thinking, “Well, they know what they want; I’ll let them explain it.”

But it can be extremely valuable to promote conversations about your remote working arrangements with clients yourself. By taking the lead in initiating discussions, you can:

  • Communicate your enthusiasm for their project.
  • Raise — and propose answers to — questions the client hadn’t even thought of.
  • Identify your preferred working arrangements, technologies, and so on, and have a good chance of having them adopted.
  • Set expectations early, and make sure everyone’s on the same page.

Recently, a client asked me to send me an outline of my rate for a project. Ordinarily, I’d have done just that — and only that. But this time, I decided to take a different approach: along with that information, I explained some of the thoughts I’d had about the way we might work together, and asked a few questions.

There was nothing unprecedented in my message — I included information on the standard hurdles remote web workers need to cross when they start a new gig — but raising these topics up-front, before the project’s terms had even been finalized, helped to set a certain expectation between myself and the client.

First, let’s look at the topics I raised, in addition to the rate question the client had asked.

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