Making every hour count (or how to stop counting)

For a girl who never wears a watch and doesn’t care much for num­bers, I’m obsessed with time. When you bill an hourly rate, of course, this is only to be expected—after all, the time = money equa­tion becomes far more self-evident when you know exactly what an hour is worth.

In theory, this focus on time should engender the ability to del­e­gate. If it takes you two hours to do some­thing that you could bill, say, $120 for, but you can pay someone $60 instead to do (regard­less of how long it may take them, and assuming that they’ll do it just as well, if you happen to be a con­trol freak like I am), it should make sense to start passing off tasks.

The problem is, when you have a pre­cise idea of how much that extra hour you spent sleeping cost you, you sud­denly start to believe that sleep is anthema to your busi­ness and well-being. Three years of run­ning a busi­ness full time have taught me, finally, that this is just a bla­tant lie.

When­ever I’m working, my com­puter is run­ning a little timer at the top of my screen. Basi­cally, every work-related task I per­form is recorded and tracked. This is great, of course, and absolutely nec­es­sary for this sort of work, whether you’re billing a flat rate or by the hour. (And losing these records is hor­rible! Just hor­rible. Note to self: do a back-up right now.)

The pro­gram I use (Billings) has a little Dash­board widget (Work­load) that dis­plays how many hours I’ve worked in a day.

My Dash­board widget. The filled-up red bars rep­re­sent hours worked; a full bar means I’ve put in over ten hours. (I have a lot of days that go “off the chart”.)

Super-handy, no? It really is! It’s a great tool to keep me on track, and to quickly (and visu­ally) check to make sure that I’ve put in enough hours to count as a full workday. The problem, of course, is that I’m sort of a worka­holic. There have been weeks where the chart has been entirely red. There have been weeks where that has been my goal, which I think may be even worse. (I often wish the bars would go up to 16 hours, but then I’d end up aiming to fill all those up, and I’d never get any sleep at all!)

So, how to fix the fix­a­tion with tracking every hour?

1. Take days off.

See how there’s a big old empty space in my week? That was an actual weekend, which I usu­ally don’t take (and will invari­ably not be hap­pening this weekend—but hey, it was nice while it lasted, right?)

If off-time feels like idle time, it may help to learn new skills while you’re not working. My weekend off, for example, was spent learning book­binding, which I’m now madly in love with. (A friend pointed out to me that some lovely texts are freely avail­able on Project Guten­burg and that I can simply pop over and down­load them. So now I’m plan­ning to design, print, and pro­duce my own hand-made copies of books I adore, like Can­dide and The Meta­mor­phosis and The Pic­ture of Dorian Gray—but that’s another topic entirely.)

Many com­pa­nies now are actu­ally allowing their employees to “day­light“, eschewing the tra­di­tional model of cor­po­rate pro­duc­tivity in favour of one that is flex­ible enough to allow for cre­ative endeav­ours that aren’t strictly related to the work at hand. Free­lancers and busi­ness owners are often more strictly goal-oriented, but it’s highly likely that your work will improve in the long run if you’re exposed to a wider range of ideas and processes, even if only due to random stim­u­la­tion.

I also find working on my own side projects (for fun and min­imal profit!) is bar none the most effec­tive way to avoid cre­ative burnout and the inevitable break­down of pro­duc­tivity, pas­sion, and per­son­ality that ensues.

2. Track hours for essen­tial tasks.

If you’re obsessed with hit­ting that “pro­duc­tivity mark” to the point at which other, life-sustaining type tasks are dis­missed, it may help to count them as work-time. Show­ering, eating some­thing that isn’t fast food, and doing yoga all count. (I keep meaning to start tracking these things—they may not be Bill­able Hours, but they’re nec­es­sary to the long-term func­tioning of my business.)

Things that keep you healthy and sane will, in the long-term, help with your pro­duc­tivity. That makes them pro­duc­tive hours, and if you can start viewing them as such, you’ll stop seeing them as time wasted.

3. Switch to a flat rate

The argu­ment for, and against, a flat rate has been made many times, so I won’t attempt to get into it, but I would say that it’s cer­tainly worth taking into con­sid­er­a­tion, and that whether or not it works for you will depend on your per­sonal style of work and billing. Per­son­ally, I always swore I’d never do a flat rate (again), but I’ve recently switched over and have found it’s made a world of dif­fer­ence. (I also once swore I’d never start my own busi­ness, so, there you are). Switching to a flat rate allows you to focus more on get­ting tasks done in an effi­cient manner, rather than counting every minute, and it means you’re rewarded for using your time well.

I also end up making more money this way(!), which is always an added bonus, though not nec­es­sarily a pri­mary moti­vator. My clients are hap­pier, as the esti­mates seem more firm this way (although in actu­ality they’re as flex­ible as they were when I was using an hourly rate). If I forget my laptop on the bus and lose all my tracked hours, the whole world doesn’t fall apart (quite so much, at least).

But most notably, my obses­sion with “this hour spent taking a nice walk in the sun­shine cost me how much?” is receding, and, unlike in hair­lines, that’s a lovely thing.

Tags: balance, business, productivity