017: Where Does Your Time Go?
Time.
It’s the most precious and valuable resource that any of us have.
You can, of course, have a big house, the newest cars and the latest gadgets if you want to - all funded by the time spent at your job. But if your time felt like it was spent in vain, the novelty of these material goods will have soon worn off.
You can’t buy more time and we only have a certain amount of it to enjoy. So, like with all finite resources, it makes sense to build awareness of how we are currently using our time, to assess whether we are using it in the most effective way, and then choose to take responsibility (by perhaps making changes) so that we can use our time more effectively in the future.
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My January felt overwhelmingly busy. Every week, it seemed like I had too many activities to do in the time I had available.
I was struggling to keep up, spending more and more time on one project in the day, only to have another project move into the evening. It was overwhelming to say the least. Does any of that sound familiar to you?
I had a similar level of busyness in September and October last year. There was the same rising tide of panic that I was now feeling in January, in that I had too much to do with not enough hours in the day to do it. Back then, in Autumn, I stopped doing all of my wider business activities (marketing, networking, meetings, relationship building, business planning etc) to just focus on working through the project work.
However, as Michael Gerber will tell you in the E-Myth, focusing all of your time and effort on working in the business, rather than on the business, is a surefire way for your business to crash and burn.
BREAKING DOWN JANUARY
When January came to an end, I thought I would assess where all of my time went. I wanted to know, which activities did I spend my time on and how well did I use that precious, finite resource of time during that month.
Accounting for bank holidays and a day off, I worked for 20 days in January. After some careful deliberation and working back through my calendar, I calculated the following breakdown:
19% of time was spent on fee earning work
(that’s 3.5 days of time that was spent earning money - that doesn’t sound like a lot).23% of my time was spent on relationship building.
(In other words, meetings, catch up calls and networking events)
22% of my time was spent on preparing my articles, videos and content for The Natives.
And 36% was, wait for it, completely unaccounted for.
What? 7.5 days of my time was completely unaccounted for.
How can that be?!
EVALUATING THE TIME SPENT
At one end of the spectrum, you might work under the ‘solicitor’ method of charging for time. In that instance, time is broken down into tiny chunks and every moment of every day is billable to someone.
Sending an email? Charge for it.
Making a phone call? Charge for it.
You may disagree with me on this (and that’s OK if you do), but I think that not all time needs to be billable time.
It just has to be used for a good reason.
Take, for example, the 22% of the month I spent on preparing content (like this article) for you. Working on The Natives is where I feel my most creative and able to express my own ideas and voice. Hands down, this is my favourite activity to do each week - so it has a value well above and beyond just earning money.
Take also, the 23% of time spent on relationship building. Yes, this doesn’t earn an immediate income, but this is about building relationships for the future which may lead to work flowing my way (and me being able to flow work to others too) - and that’s really important. Let’s also not forget the importance of being social too!
But the 33% of unallocated time was a quandary. On further investigation, I realised that a significant chunk of this time was spent on what can only be described as ‘unpaid overtime’. It was time spent in excess of what I was billing for on a job in order to:
get the job done,
to deliver it to a higher standard, or
to do more than I promised (and therefore quoted) for the project in hand.
The thing is, that 7 days was spread out all throughout the month. A couple of hours here, 30 minutes there, half a day here. When blended into the tapestry of the month, it didn’t feel like a lot. But as a whole, it added up - and in a big, big way.
So, what were the knock on effects of this?
Well, for one, that’s seven days of time where I worked and didn’t earn any money (which is mad).
And two, it pushes future projects back or causes projects to bunch up (in other words, causing the sense of being overwhelmed - with too much to do and not enough time to do it).
BUILDING AWARENESS
Personally, I am not adverse to doing some ‘unpaid overtime’. For me, it’s part of delivering a service that goes above and beyond the bare minimum. Also, a big part of this time is actually about me pushing myself (and my creative limits) to return something that’s better than my initial effort.
I also value the impact this approach has on the relationships I have with my clients. I value each of them immensely (having weeded out of all of the people that were toxic for me) and feel that we are on a longer journey together than just a simple transaction of time for money.
But certainly, seven days of ‘unpaid overtime’ was too much. It’s not sustainable business-wise, could eventually harm my relationships or my reputation, and thinking of my article about Happy Money - doesn’t allow me to have a positive relationship with money.
With all of this in mind, it became clear that I needed to build a clearer awareness of where my time was going. This would enable me to do two things:
To see whether I had a good balance between the activities that were filling my time, and
To identify where the ‘unpaid overtime’ was (and on which projects).
This would then give me two insights:
To identify where I had under-priced for a project (so that I could improve my future proposals), and
To be able to make a clear decision of when (and why) I would choose to do ‘unpaid overtime’.
I wanted my ‘unpaid overtime’ to become a really conscious decision, rather than something that was getting habitually lost in the grey areas between other activities.
I also suspected that I was allowing ‘unpaid overtime’ to creep in just so that I felt busy. We are all trained from school to be working 9 - 5 and it’s easy to think that, if you aren’t ‘hustling’ for all of that time, then you aren’t being ‘successful’.
But my thoughts on this were now changing. I had decided that if I wasn’t making a truly meaningful contribution with an hour spent on ‘unpaid overtime’, I would rather spend that time doing something else, with my family or learning something new for myself.
TIMEULAR
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been using Timeular to track my time throughout the day. The system comprises of an app (where you track your time) and an 8 sided dice (sold separately) which, when turned to one of the 8 directions, will track the time spent on an activity you have specified. You don’t need to have the dice to use the app, but I have found it to be a particularly good physical action to do every time you change tack.
This has served three functions for me so far:
When plotting it against the amount of hours I have quoted for, it has allowed me to see precisely when a project has tipped over into ‘unpaid overtime’. I can then learn where I have not quoted a high enough price as part of a proposal.
I am able to assess whether I have the balance I am looking for between fee earning, relationship building and development generating work (my new name for time spent on The Natives, or for time spent on thinking or learning).
I am able to make a conscious decision of when and why I am doing ‘unpaid overtime’. It no longer becomes something I do to fill up my time just so that I have a perception of being ‘busy’.
So, where does your time go? And do you feel like you have the right balance yet?
James
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