Some clients have no concept of priority gradation. Everything is urgent. Every message expects an immediate response. Every request appears with an implicit pressure to drop everything.
Working with this type of client in an unmanaged way is exhausting and produces poor work, because constant urgent interruptions are incompatible with the focused attention that good development requires.
The good news: most clients who behave this way are not doing it maliciously. They are doing it because nobody has established a different expectation.
Setting the expectation at the start
The best time to establish communication norms is at the start of the engagement, before the pattern develops.
"I work best with batched communication. I check and respond to messages twice a day, at [time] and [time]. For genuine emergencies, here is how to reach me: [method]. Everything else I will address in the next communication window."
This statement in the onboarding message or kickoff call establishes your working style as a professional norm, not a personal preference.
Most clients accept this. A few push back. The ones who push back significantly are signaling how they will operate throughout the project - useful early information.
Resetting the expectation mid-project
If the pattern has already developed without this conversation, you can reset it.
"I want to make a small process adjustment. I have noticed that our communication is quite reactive, which makes it hard to maintain focus on the project work. Going forward, I will batch responses to twice a day. For anything that cannot wait, [method]. This will let me give the project work the attention it deserves."
Not a complaint. A process improvement framed as serving the project.
The response to the "just quickly" message
"Just quickly" is the signal that a client is about to add something outside the expected communication pattern.
You do not need to respond immediately to a message that begins "just quickly." You can respond in your next communication window.
If you respond to every "just quickly" immediately, you establish that "just quickly" gets immediate responses. The pattern compounds.
What genuinely requires immediate response
Production is down. A security incident. A decision that is blocking client operations and cannot wait.
Everything else is not actually urgent. It feels urgent to the client because they thought of it. It is not urgent in any objective sense.
The Solopreneur AI Toolkit includes prompts for writing professional boundary-setting messages and resetting communication patterns. EUR 12.
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