The word "rush" can bring about bad connotations. For me, I immediately think of a Canadian band, a radio hate monger, and then I get a Paula Abdul song stuck in my head. But by far the worst rush is the kind associated with jobs. Although every project has a deadline, not every job can be labeled a "rush job." They’re a special bunch, as special as the bullies in grade school who knocked the wind out of you for entertainment.

In spite of the title, they aren’t simply jobs that have to be completed in the same amount of time Dennis Hopper gave Keanu Reeves in Speed. (115 minutes.) Any project that’s a labor-intensive, hour-devouring gig that’s only given a week or less can be considered a rush. Just because a week is a lot of time (168 billable hours,) that doesn’t mean that it’s enough to write all of the text for a page-heavy website. So whaddya do? Cry, because you need the money but you can’t say no? Say no, and eat a can of beans for dinner? Say yes, then passive aggressively do the work naked, with FUCK Y’ALL written on your knuckles?

You don’t have to go through that much trouble. Many copywriters have chosen to have a little client-training tool in their arsenal called a "rush job fee" or "rush charge." The latter sounds like a conservative talk show host playing football, but it’s far sweeter than Limbaugh being pummeled by Polamaltu.

Earlier this week we were emailed by a client who wanted help on a project and needed a list of taglines in a matter of hours. The details of the gig were confusing, and the parameters for the taglines were more rigid than Gwyneth Paltrow’s diet. We were also working on two other projects at the same time, along with crafting a proposal. Were we willing to put all of those things on hold to help out a previous client who was in a jam?

I am too much of a people-pleaser to make these decisions on my own. Simon deftly pointed out that, if we were in too much of a hurry, the quality of our work would suffer. What’s more, if we agreed to the flat-rate the client was offering, we were basically selling ourselves for less than we were worth, and at the expense of both our work and our regular non-rush clients. Simon set his jaw. A line was going to be drawn. Like Dr. Phil always says, we need to set boundaries. It was time to permanently establish our rush rate.

There are a few arguments for a rush charge. For one thing, it serves as a bit of a detriment to those clients that might otherwise abuse the fact that they can call you at 4:45 on a Tuesday afternoon and ask for a press kit by the end of Wednesday. Certainly if they’re charged your rate and a half, that will (hopefully) put a little speed bump on their racetrack as well as sweetening the stress-filled deal for you as a writer. A freelance copywriter has the privilege of setting their own rush rates, though I’ll go out on a limb like an adventurous kitten and say that marking rates up by 50% is standard. It’s like time-and-a-half for employees in the retail world. Some writers only charge 25% more, others make the hike depending on the size and scope of the project, while still others just refuse to take any time-pressured gigs on principle. Another interesting angle I’ve heard is not charging a rush fee at all. That, by charging extra money, you set the precedent that a sum of money will coax you into pushing your other clients’ deadlines back. Some writers say that this allows them to use their schedule as the only guide as to whether or not they’ll accept a project from a frantic speed-demon of a client.

From my point of view, everyone should want to charge a rush fee. The hasty precision required to get a rush job done rivals that of a field surgeon (from what I’ve seen in  reruns of M.A.S.H.) and the amount of stress that those jobs cause practically demands that you mandate an extra half of a paycheck. Otherwise you would have to ask yourself, "What’s in it for me?" If the answer was only the inklings of an ulcer, most people would just say fuck it, and refuse the work. Again, I’m too much of a work-hungry sop to have learned to charge a rush fee on my own. If I hadn’t worked in a team I probably would have just accepted rush jobs for a flat rate, or worse, my standard rates, and I would have ground my teeth down to tiny nubs with regret. I learned the seemingly counterintuitive rule over the years that, because I need the work, I have to charge a rush fee. If the client really needs the job to be done well, they’ll pay it. It’s that simple.

The main factor to consider for rush jobs isn’t simply scheduling, it’s our relationship to the client. Admitting this is a bit like admitting that I flirted with one guy just to meet his friend, but there are two categories of clients that can automatically get rush jobs from us. If a previous client who we have a longstanding relationship with calls us up and asks for something with a laughable turnaround time, we think about the jobs we’ve worked on together. If they’ve been exciting, and have turned out in a way that doesn’t make us want to take a broken Michelob bottle to our eye sockets, and especially if working with them has been drama-free, we’ll say yes to the mess. The other group of instant affirmatives are rush jobs that turn us on. If I’m called to work on a project that includes writing copy for an iPhone game featuring an Erasure song and jumping unicorns, I will say yes, even if I only have a matter of hours to pen that shit. (That actually exists, by the way.) Other fantasy examples would include being brought in on W+K’s incredible Old Spice campaign or working on anything with Steve Nash. In reality, actual projects of ours that have been rush jobs have included an AIGA article, a display book for a renewable resources organization, and assorted taglines for a bunch of different companies. The one thing that they all had in common was that they were so enjoyable, the time would have passed that quickly anyway.

There’s one rule of thumb you should keep in mind if you’re considering you’re rush fee: no two-timing. What I mean by that is that it’s like dating. You don’t flake out on someone you’re seeing at the last minute just to go out with a girl who has bigger boobs or a faster car. Don’t bump already established projects or put work on hold just for a job that could potentially pay you more in a shorter span of time. That isn’t fair to your current paying clients who aren’t such divas that they demand work on the spot. Be discerning. It’s one of the better perks to being freelance, other than wearing only underpants while being on a conference call.

Now you try to get Paula Abdul out of your head.