Ask HN: How do you manage freelance projects when clients only want to email?

I've been developing websites for businesses for a few years now, and like many freelance web developers, the people I work for are not particularly tech savvy. As such, email has been the prime way of communicating project updates, content, and feedback back and forth. This of course becomes quite messy with multiple email threads titled "updates" or "following up" making it hard to find information. Am I alone in this? I use task management software for my own side of the project, but that still leaves me to interface with the clients by email.

Is there a better way to do this?

You will not escape email with small clients generally.

A couple of my methods:

1: create a weekly summary document, summarize all email and verbal decisions and status in this document and email it to them. Keep it short.

2: Make sure you summarize any decisions that were made in an email chain. Do this an an email back and ask for their confirmation, this avoids misunderstandings. Because sometimes what they asked for after having it summarized and documented doesn’t sound so good. Also gives you a place to find scope creep and change orders. This will help feed your summary document.

In your weekly status document, keep it as short as is reasonable. Use color codes for things on track and things blocked and highlight why. E.g green is all good, yellow means delayed and red means stopped for some reason. Don’t reorganize the summary document, create a template and keep it the same during the project.

Doing this is a little bit of work but it so pays off. It also helps you stay on track and helps you see if the scope creep is getting dangerously high.