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The fact is that unless you’re
an attorney or a CPA you probably don’t run time or project management
software like Timeslips, Zola, Toggl, Mind42, Rescue Time or others. And
as a result you aren’t and really can’t bill clients in that fashion; if
you could, today’s tech tools could help solve the problem. Maybe. At least
they’d go a long way towards giving you the discipline you need to stop the
bad habit that most in our line of business have – unintentionally working
for free. Yep, we all do it and we’re really good at rationalizing why
we do it. We tell ourselves things like, “it’s okay to do this,
it’s okay if I spend this time now, it’ll pay off later, all my peers and competition
do it this way, it’s what’s expected.” The bad news is we’re
fooling ourselves, and we don’t even address the problem. It’s even
worse news when we don’t even recognize that we’re doing it. We steal from
ourselves.
The image here isn’t to have
you guessing if they are on their mobile devices, it’s from the movie To
Catch a Thief – the glamorous 1955 Alfred Hitchcock movie that reminds me
how easy it is to have things taken from us right under our nose. Time is
like that. As you know if left unattended it disappears. While they don’t
realize it, clients “buy” your expertise measured in blocks of time and you
are always constrained by the number of hours in a day. Within reason,
everyone has the same number of hours – the earth moves around the sun for
everyone at the same rate. I’m not telling you anything new when I
suggest that you need to operate like time is a product and not have people
stealing from you. I’m not even enlightening you to the fact that the
problem is you’re probably stealing from yourself – you’re the one doing
the stealing. But I am sharing that I have to remind myself of the
potential for thievery all the time, and maybe you should too. Fact is when
we don’t pay serious attention and give our “product” away, we
are the victim.
It’s not easy. But you can
stop the flow of stolen “goods” by having the discipline to track your
time. You can do it to whatever degree you are comfortable, but the
more detail the better. I guarantee you’ll be surprised at what you
see and you might even be freaked out enough to do something about
it. I suggest you start tracking your working time as simply as
possible by coming up with just a few categories of where you spend your
time and then tracking those things in 15 to 30 minute increments. If
you do that for a week, you’ll know how to make adjustments. Do it as
a habit and you’ll become ruthless about it and the result is you’ll either
make more money or have more time to do non-work activities. It’s not
my opinion. It’s a fact. But don’t expect that you’ll read this,
be motivated to stop stealing from yourself and be fully
reformed. My experience is that you’ll be religious about
tracking at first, followed by being pretty good at it, which is soon
followed by a feeling of “knowing/not needing” so you’ll
stop. That’s to be expected. Look out for and then recognize the
pattern and jump back into measuring sooner rather than later. Your
losses will be less damaging.
So enough talk, how about a
suggestion of how to do it? Pen and paper is easy and portable. And if
you email me I’ll send you a simple form. If you like something more
technical, check out some of the top apps. It doesn’t matter how you
track. It matters that you do track! Good luck with stopping the
thievery.
As always, please send any
comments to me at Brenda@RealWired.com.
See you next week!!!!
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