Have you ever asked yourself this question? As a freelancer, it’s easy to feel like you’re busy all the time. And yet, it can be hard to know where all that time is going, especially when it seems like your billable hours aren’t that high. The end of the month comes, you’re putting your invoices together, and even though you spent 50 hours/week at your computer, you’re getting paid like you spent 15 hours/week. What happened?
Your freelance work hours can be broken down into two types: those you get paid for, and those that you don’t. You probably want to maximize the former and minimize the latter.
One problem I’ve had in the past is that lots of little bits of time get spent here and there, and often I don’t bill for them. This problem is usually the result of distraction: I’m working on one thing, but then a squeeze a few minutes of something else in the middle because an email pops up…
Email and a Sense of Urgency
You probably check your email about 30 times a day, plus or minus. So, it can be common that you’re working on something for one client, and get an email from a different client (or a friend), and you feel like you should reply right away. The effect of that is, you disrupt work on the one project, and spend a little bit of time on another project, but it’s so little that you don’t end up billing for it. Lose/lose situation. And is your immediate response usually that important?
The Soft Tasks
Being self-employed, there’s some work that you just don’t get paid for. You probably keep a blog, or at least maintain your website, to market yourself. You read blogs or do research to stay on top of your field. Maybe you have a project that’s not paid, but it’s a portfolio piece, or it’s for a friend.
Even though you don’t get paid for this stuff, it’s still work. And, it’s worthwhile to keep tabs on just how much time you spend on these kinds of tasks. Keeping tabs on the “soft tasks” will help you know where all your time went. Maybe you’re spending too much time on these tasks? Maybe you’re not spending enough (when was the last time you updated that blog?).
It’s All About Staying On Task
The key to maximizing your time spent on things you’re actually getting paid for is to stay on task, and to know how much of your time is spent on things you don’t get paid for. Being self-employed, it can be harder to maintain structure for yourself. Helping yourself to build structure is a big part of what HourPatch does. When you’re going to work on something, schedule it. Even if you’re just “scheduling” it 5 minutes ahead of time. The act of drawing each little block of work time on your schedule is a commitment to yourself, that that’s what you’re doing right now. You’re not emailing other clients. You’re not catching up on Facebook. You’re getting things done.
Everything I’m doing that’s work-related falls under a Project in HourPatch. Each project for my clients is an HourPatch Project, but so is each of my Coffeeshopped projects. Even “Blogging” is a project. That way I respect each of my tasks equally: when it’s time to work on something, it gets my total focus.
Once you start to organize your schedule this way, it’s easy to see exactly how many hours you’re working per week. In fact, HourPatch shows you, right at the top of your schedule, how many hours you have planned for a week. So even though you’re self-employed, you can begin to treat your work more like a steady job. It’s key to maintaining your sanity, and your self-employed success.
Last week I launched a feature I’ve been wanting to add for a long time: You can now email your invoices to your clients from within HourPatch!
A handful of small updates went live today. As you may know, HourPatch gives you a calendar of your schedule that you can subscribe in Google Calendar, iCal, Thunderbird, or what-have-you. As of today, the notes you put in to your schedule’s time entries now come through in your calendar export; a small but very useful improvement. Calendar syncing should also be faster now.
