Author: Joey Robert Parks

End of last article: Some freelance professionals who track their time are clearly more productive than other freelancers, who also track their time, so what gives?

In previous blog entries, we learned:

1. Time is real. It’s not a metaphor.
2. Time moves forward, in front of you, never behind.
3. People who track time uncover lost bits of time along the way. They are called Time Pursuers.
4. People who don’t track time lose track of it and wonder where their day went. These are Time Followers.

It’s elementary, Watson.

By definition, if you track time during a project or throughout the day, you’re a Time Pursuer. While this is better than being a Time Follower (someone who doesn’t track their time), it doesn’t automatically give you more clues about how to better keep up with Time in the future.

Time clues are a messy thing. The more you take note of this time clue and that time clue – Yes: physically stop what you’re doing, write down what time of day it is, consider how far you’ve come and look ahead to how much you’ve got left to do – the more evidence you’ll have when you later review the clues you discovered.

Inside each time clue is an opportunity to make more money. The trick is in knowing how to open the clue and take advantage of that opportunity. The only way you can do that is track your time.

Some Time Clues & What They Mean.

Clue: For any given hour of billable time, you habitually spend a few minutes distracted. For example, hopping online and chasing down your latest Internet fancy of the moment. You do this often. You’re okay with this. It’s not like you’re losing sight of the Time path, just stepping off for a little rest in the shade.

Meaning: Add up those little moments here and there and you’d find passing on earning thousands more dollars a year.

Apply it: Forget about yourself for awhile. Spend 100% of that hour on your client. Schedule a break for later. You’re enjoy not working more and you’ll have made more money.

Clue: Checking emails always takes longer than you expect; Travel time to meet a client rarely includes packing up your things, getting out the door, finding a parking spot, etc.

Meaning: You’re relying on your expertise or ability to focus to do its magic “in the moment”.

Apply It: Track un-billable time as much as you track billable time. If an email can’t be replied to in less than five minutes, make a phone call.

Clue: A project or task took twice as long as expected.

Meaning: You overlooked something. Most likely, you didn’t include “Transitional Time” between phases of a project or task. For example, Drafting the initial Agreement, phone discussions, answering emails where a phone call would have been better, travel time to meetings, etc.

Apply It: Make a checklist of all the steps required to complete this type of project or task, including transitional items. My father has a formula for what it looks like: “Take your estimate. Double it. Add a third. And hope you’re half right.” Knowing how long it really takes to do a project or task will make new estimates creation much easier and more accurate.

Clue: At the end of the day, you don’t know where the time went.

Meaning: You prefer to be blissfully ignorant. 1. Imagine being able to show a prospective employer your billable efficiency. When a clock is running it helps you focus on the task at hand. Distractions like chat and web surfing tend to be pushed till later.

Apply It: Routinely review your time use. Experiment with tracking your time in different ways. Imagine being able to reduce client complaints because you include how your time was spent on a project with your invoices.

Here’s a personal example of my experience in pursuing time by tracking it (spurred on because I’ve been thinking about it much more as a result of writing these blogs).

Clue: Tracking Time is easy and makes me more productive. I’m a writer, so I track my time with the Mac version of Microsoft Word. It has a “Notebook” option that allows me to create tabs along the right side of any project. The very top tab is “Minutes”, which is where I track my time. The tabs below it are where I store my various drafts.

Meaning: I’ve got a method for keeping track of time that is easy, intuitive and doesn’t get in the way of getting the project started or transitioning from one phase of a project to another or to a different project altogether.

Apply It: Continue to use my particular tool for tracking my time, but keep my eye out for something more robust; a way to pursue time that is still easy and “instant”, but that yields far greater time clues than my current method.

NEXT TIME: In preparation for the next blog, I’ll be taking a closer look at the time tracking tool I’d most like to see.

(Phoenix wordsmith Joey Robert Parks is primarily a non-fiction ghostwriter. In the last six years, he’s written five books for successful, entrepreneurial types; including: a fashion designer and stylist who got his start working for JFK and Oprah; and a book on creative innovation for a high profile, multimillionaire philanthropist. To see how productive Joey is this very moment, follow him on Twitter or visit www.joeyrobertparks.com)

If you’re a freelancer in your chosen profession and you don’t track your time, you can count on one thing: you won’t be a freelancer for long.

At six years and counting, I think I’ve finally got freelancing down. Every time before this – this is my fourth time as a freelancer – I lasted about a year before my cash flow ran out and I ended up punching the clock for someone else’s pleasure. All because I wasn’t smart with how I handled time. I see that now.

Time has a flow, but unlike cash, it doesn’t rise or fall; it’s steady. Everywhere in the world, there are 24 hours in a day. Money comes and goes. Sometimes you have more. Sometimes you have less. (Well, more or less.) That’s why the cliché “Time is Money” is wrong. Time is not money. And as much as I like the implications, time is also not a river.

Before we can really talk about why time tracking is important to freelancers, we have to get a good look at this thing we’re all chasing and call it by what it really is. It’s not some clever metaphor or a list of things that all start with the same letter. Time is time.

Who’s Tracking Time?

I usually call myself a freelancer, but independent is probably closer to the truth. According to the all-mighty Webster’s, an independent is 1: not dependent; 2: not affiliated with a larger controlling unit; 3: not requiring or relying on something else; and 4) not looking to others for one’s opinions or for guidance in conduct.

When the very definition of how I see myself contains the idea that I don’t have any management issues to deal with because I’m an independent (or freelancer or self-employed; they’re interchangeable), it’s tempting to think it’s true.

But you know the truth. As a business owner, freelancers deal with decision-making, problem solving, goal setting and organizing every day. Sure, non-freelancers face those things, but they usually have the option of delegating those responsibilities to someone else. For freelancers, it’s something we can never get away from. Get better at managing yourself and you’ll instantly get better at managing your use of time.

How to Uncover Lost Time

Tracking time works best when it’s a conscious act. That’s doubly important to a freelancer because it’s a significant step in learning to anticipate distractions and teaching yourself to instinctively work around them. In my previous blog, I said, “Time tracking is important because it uncovers lost time.” Here’s how: That first post took me five hours to write. Because I tracked my time (in writing) and was conscious of where it went (and why), I was able to avoid those distractions and complete this post in four hours.

If I hadn’t kept track of today’s writing distractions (Twitter, email, phone calls I should have kept shorter) as well as the amount of time those things ate up, at the end of the day, I’d be at a loss to explain where all my time went. If I hadn’t kept track of my non-work time (“un-billable time”) and if I’d hadn’t done it in writing (like some casual way in my head), I wouldn’t have recognized these specific distractions when they came up and therefore, I wouldn’t have known how to handle them. You can’t avoid something you don’t know about, right?

The Heart of Time Tracking

Right now, you’re spending X minutes reading this blog. What if you could come away with three times as much time as the time you’ll invest reading it? A tongue twister, for sure, but it doesn’t need to be a head-twister.

You can uncover the most time by tracking time with your head (what we’ve covered so far) and your heart. Which brings us back, like some odd strain of time-travel, to where we started:

“If you’re a freelancer in your chosen profession and you don’t track your time, you won’t be a freelancer for long.”

Think back to why you chose this particular profession. Because that’s where your heart was, right? If you don’t want to track your time now, it’s either because it feels like a step backward or because you had a bad experience with it in the past. If uncovering more time each day sounds like a step backward, it might be time to consider a new profession. As far as recovering from bad experiences goes, that’s perfectly understandable. I used to hate doing it myself. Then someone told me something I should have known: If you don’t know where your business is spending its time, who does?

Which is well and good for a freelancer who is…oh, I don’t know, a writer…but what about other industries? Are the skills for tracking time the same in every profession? They are. And yet some freelance professionals who track their time are clearly more productive than other freelancers who also track their time, so what gives?

Next Time: What Time Tracking Clues mean to Consultants and Web-related Professions.

(Phoenix wordsmith Joey Robert Parks is primarily a non-fiction ghostwriter. In the last six years, he’s written five books for successful, entrepreneurial types; including: a fashion designer and stylist who got his start working for JFK and Oprah; and a book on creative innovation for a high profile, multimillionaire philanthropist. To see how productive Joey is this very moment, follow him on Twitter or visit www.joeyrobertparks.com)

As an independent wordsmith, I’m well acquainted with working in non-traditional work places; for instance, my main office (home) and the other locale’s I frequent (coffee houses).

Notice the title of this entry. It’s not about how to be productive. Anyone can be productive, if they so desire, every now and again, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. My objective is to show you how to stay productive once you get there.

In Rise of the Creative Class (a personal favorite), author and sociologist Richard Florida wrote, “We are becoming a society in which Creative Class people literally live in a different kind of time from the rest of the nation.”

Who is this “Creative Class”?

If you can identify with the following quote – from later in Florida’s book – you’re part of it: “While Creative Class people do tend to work long hours, many other factors contribute to the feeling of being crunched for time…The big news about time [is that it] goes deeper than simply working more…We now try to pack every moment full of activities and experiences—at work, at home and at leisure.”

From where I sit, (Lux Coffeebar, if you must know), these are the things that cause me to be most productive in my mobile office:

(1) Account for my surroundings

• The local coffee joint has distinct advantages and disadvantages to working out of the home. Think of the cell phone commercial with the little time clocks in the trash. Pretend those little clocks are spread out all around your home office or moving around you at the coffee house. When you talk to someone longer than you should, you’re wasting time.

(2) Anticipate Distractions

• Make decisions before you get to your home office (or wherever) about where you’re going to sit. And yes, even if you’re in the bedroom, that’s still before you get to your desk.
  • If it’s at home, think about the kinds of things that are likely to beg for your time: the laundry, that new album you wanted to check out on iTunes, updating umpteen social media outlets (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and any number of other noisy distractions. For me, even too much silence can be a distraction.
  • If you’re at a coffee house, think about all the options you’ll be presented with about where to sit. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never been to this particular place before. Sit by the door (or facing it) and you’ll want to look up every time someone comes in; sit near the counter and you’ll be well-placed for shouts of , “Americano for Chris!”
  • You know where the productive spots are, just like you know the best place to sit in a movie theater.

(3) Be Proactive

• The average time tracker says, “I have an hour to fill. I’ll work on project X and see how much I can get done.”
• A better time tracker says, “In one hour, I want to have completed this, this, and that, and this. And I’m going to spend this much time on each part. And I’ll check it off as I go and adjust the schedule in the moment. But I’m going to do it all in one hour.”
• The difference is subtle, but significant.
  • It’s all about your motivation for tracking time at all. One person figures, “I have an hour right now. I’ll have another hour later.” The other person thinks, “I have an hour right now. I might have an hour later. I might not. I better use my time wisely while I have it on me.”

(4) Know when to say ‘No’

• To people around you.
  • Say you have a significant other and he/she likes to chitchat throughout the day, but you’ve got a project that needs 100% of our concentration. Let him/her know you’re going into hyper-focus mode – or opt for a nonverbal method like putting on your headphones. (When I’m working in a public place, about a third of the time I’m wearing headphones, I’m not actually listening to anything. Ha!)

• To Yourself.
  • There’s a difference between changing my mind about how long it will take me to do something and changing my time range because I’m tired of making decisions.
  • Don’t confuse “self-employed” with “freedom from commitments”.

(5) Track The Time

• It’s called ‘tracking’ because you’re actively looking for clues about where The Time, somewhere out there in front of you, is headed.
  • It’s not called ‘following’ because that’s passive and lets time make decisions for you.

• Time Trackers discover lost time.
  • They literally “find time” to do more work, because the act of tracking time helps them right then; in the very moment they need it most. Ever hand write a note and then — because of the very act of doing so — you realize you could probably just throw the note away?

The first four steps have one thing in common: They’re all decided and acted on before hand. Only the last one takes place in the moment.

I’d elaborate on that, but right now, my time’s up.

Next time: Why Time Tracking Is Important For Freelancers.

(Phoenix wordsmith Joey Robert Parks is primarily a non-fiction ghostwriter. In the last six years, he’s written five books for successful, entrepreneurial types; including: a fashion designer and stylist who got his start working for JFK and Oprah; and a book on creative innovation for a high profile, multimillionaire philanthropist. To see how productive Joey is this very moment, follow him on Twitter or visit www.joeyrobertparks.com)