Tracking your time Date Modified: January 2019 Document Author: Penny Duckworth

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1 Tracking your time Date Modified: January 2019 Document Author: Penny Duckworth Why track your time? More often than not we can go a day or a week and look back and wonder where all the time went and therefore feel ill-equipped to make changes because we don t really know what went wrong in the first place. Or we can look back at last months or quarters takings and wonder how it was possible to be so busy and yet not take in nearly enough cash to justify the hours. I don t agree with tracking every hour spent on every project, this only serves to promote projects which are not creatively excellent; those that inevitably take less time or; those that are done for clients who have the biggest budgets (and therefore typically the hardest to turn round to innovation). But I do see the value in tracking all the time you spend on your business periodically so as to measure, understand and hopefully adjust working patterns to increase the overall productivity of your business. Productivity, not in the sense of just getting more done with less turns of the wheel but in the sense of getting the most effective and creative work done for the best clients in a manageable amount of time whilst reducing the stress of running a business as much as possible. How to track your time - Prepare I recommend you track your time for 6 weeks. Noting down time in your day that you spend on the following: Client project work that you will bill for Client project work that you will not bill for Work that you can t attribute to a particular client project for example o New business activities such as networking, pitching, meetings, answering s etc. o Marketing activities such as social media work, portfolio or case study work etc. o General business administration, Myhours.com is a free tool online that you can use to do this. Before you start tracking your time you ll need to separate your work into Projects and Tasks. A Project is a labelled chunk of work normally indicated by having a start and end date and being assigned toa certain client. In addition to any client projects you are currently working on or will be working on in the next 6 weeks you ll need to add a couple of Projects that cover non-billable work for example you might want to label one project Generic Business Management and another New Business. Try to think about large chunks of work at this stage. Tasks on the other hand need to be a bit more specific, split up your workload into typical tasks, both in billable projects and non-billable projects, some tasks will cross over into both types of project e.g. Page 1 of 7

2 checking and responding or travel or meetings, this is fine. Pick some of the ones below and also list ones specific to your own work: Attending meetings or calls Travel Concept work Brief writing Strategic planning Social media management Artwork Invoicing and finance checking and responding Client management Research OPTIONAL: The next thing to think about if you can is how you currently charge your clients. In my experience many creative professionals agree a cost up front with their client based on the amount of hours/days they estimate will take to do the work multiplied by their hourly/day rate: Packaging Project estimate: 5 Days concepts 5 Days design 5 Days artwork Daily rate: 350 Total: 5,250 Some creative professionals offer different day rates for different tasks or types of work: Short film Project estimate: 2 Days 750 a day 4 Days 500 a day Total: 3,500 Note down what your current day rates are and turn them into hourly rates (a day is normally considered 8 hours). Make sure you note down which tasks have rates and which projects have rates, so in the example above the Packaging Project has a project day rate of 350 (hourly rate = 43.75) so this is a Project Based Rate. The Short Film Project has rates that differ for each task, i.e. a Tasked Based Rate : Filming has a task day rate of 750 (hourly rate = 93.75) and editing has a task day rate of 500 (hourly rate = 62.50). Remember this is not an invoicing tool or even a business reporting tool at this stage so if you complete a project during this tracking period and the total is not the same as the cost you charged your client, do not worry, this is meant to help you see the differences between your billing and your time and where the gaps are rather than accurately show how much money you are making. Please don t get hung up the money aspect, but it may be useful when analysing the tracking so keep it in if you can for the moment. Page 2 of 7

3 Ok, now you ve jotted down these lists on a piece of paper you are ready to start setting up Myhours.com and track your time. Any questions at this stage? Does your work seem too complicated to fit into easy terms like project and task? Please get in touch at penny@theproductivitybureau.com and I d love to help you out. Myhours.com how to guide Step 1 Go to Rather than clicking on the free trial option, I recommend scrolling to the START YOUR FREE ACCOUNT BUTTON. Then add your address and password. You ll then need to confirm your account via a link in an you ll receive. Once you ve done this you can log-in answer 3 basic questions to allow them to offer the most appropriate service for you: 1. Your country of origin 2. Your industry 3. If you d like the free trial (I d stick with the default No answer, you can always go pro later if you want) Step 2 Go to Manage>Tasks. This is where you can add all the tasks you have listed in your preparation. For task which need a Task based rate add it in here, if you chose not to add hourly rates it will still make sense during the analysing phase to indicate which tasks you can bill for an which you can t so add a nominal hourly rate of 1 for billable tasks. Don t forget to tick ADD THIS TASK TO ALL FUTURE PROJECTS : You ll end up with a task list that looks something like this: Page 3 of 7

4 Step 3 Now on to your projects. Go to Manage>Projects and add new projects based on the list you created in your prep. Select from the drop down whether it is a non-billable project or if the project is billed on a project basis (cost for total project divisible by hours spent) or on a task basis (cost for project is made up of several rates depending on the tasks). Even if you have not chosen to use exact figures here you should still differentiate between billable and nonbillable projects. Add these one by one. You should end up with a list of projects that looks something like this: Page 4 of 7

5 Step 4 Now you can start tracking! Go to TRACK on the top banner menu. You will see a page that looks like this: You have a number of different methods for entering your time. You can click the + Add button to enter the project and task along with the start and finish time of the work you have just done or you can start the timer and enter the details later. To start the timer click Now and then Submit. Page 5 of 7

6 Scroll down to see the timer in action. Click the red button at any time to stop the timer. When you have stopped the timer you can enter the details by clicking on the pen icon. Fill in the form with the details about the task. If you stop and go back to a particular task later in the day you can restart the timer by clicking on the play icon: Page 6 of 7

7 Here are a few tips when tracking your time using the timer: 1. Make sure you stop the timer when you have a break 2. Don t get hung up on it not showing exact times e.g minutes instead of an hour, for the purposes of this exercise that does not matter. 3. Make sure you become aware of when you are switching between tasks, this can be particularly difficult with task driven admin work where one minute you could be checking s and another checking Facebook. When in this task switching mode, it may be better to use the +Add tool and just estimate the amount of time you spent on each admin task Here are a few tips when tracking your time manually: 1. Don t leave it more than 1 day after doing the work to add your hours to myhours.com you ll forget and the task will become too daunting 2. Don t forget to leave gaps for when you had breaks and were not working 3. Again don t get hung up on your day adding up to the perfect 8 hours, most days will not This may be a daunting task to keep doing for 6 weeks solid but understanding how you use your time will be hugely rewarding not only for your personal time management but also for the future of the way you sell your creativity to your clients. If for any reason you are stuck or not sure what to do please get in touch and I d be very happy to help. Once you ve completed your 6 week time tracking challenge you ll want to analyse the information that you have gathered into some simple facts so that some actions can be taken to: 1. Understand the way you work on your billable and non-billable time better 2. Decrease your non-billable time and make room for more billable time 3. Understand how to work most effectively on billable time I ve created another how-to guide for analysing the data which you can find here: Penny Page 7 of 7