I recently hired a graphic designer to create a direct marketing piece for one of my clients.  The designer came up with a nice first draft, which I forwarded to my client so we could review them at the same time.

My client was out of town, so I went ahead and emailed my first comments to the designer.  (”Nice color — how about a font change here?  Oh, and here’s some more copy.  And can you try it with the other proposed logo?”)  You know — I figured that the sooner we started getting her changes, the faster the whole process would go.

Two days later, the client got their comments to me.  (”Great font.  And here’s yet more copy.  And here’s a correction on one line of the original copy.  And can we try a version without the logo?”)

I emailed the comments on to the designer.  And a few moments later I realized that the client  had a typo in their correction.  So I emailed the designer with a fix to that typo (and I labeled the email “high priority” so she’d read it before implementing the client’s erroneous change).    And of course I sent it quickly.  You know, about ten minutes before I remembered that I needed to request yet one more tweak…

Only one thing kept that graphic designer from shooting me — she charges by the hour.

Lesson: no one benefits from having a hundred tweaks requested one-at-a-time as they occur to the tweaker.  My ADD wanted me to deal with each idea as soon as it hit me, and maybe that would have been fine.  But I didn’t need to make the designer deal with each idea as soon as it hit me.  I could have collected them bit by bit into one document, which I could have emailed when it was complete, after I organized and reviewed it.  I’ll do better next time — I promise!