Where Does the Time Actually Go?
When I started out I did the maths everyone does. Number of clients I could see, multiplied by the session fee. It looked doable. It might even keep pace with the salary I had given up.
What I did not count was everything else.
Did that one catch you out as well?
Because as well as doing the work, you have to grow the thing and you have to run the thing. Nearly all the overwhelm I see in people working for themselves comes from juggling those three. We know we are good at the work. We did not bank on the rest of it being ours too.
So. Do you know where your time actually goes?
Most people do not. Most people reach the end of the day wondering where it went and what they have to show for it. If you want to change that, start by writing it down for a fortnight. I can almost promise the result will surprise you.
The benchmark I use as a starting point is roughly half your time doing the work, a third growing, and the remainder running. Those are not laws. They are a place to stand while you work out your own.
Once you know which of the three pots your hours are going into, you can start moving them deliberately.
A note on how I think about an hour.
There are 1,440 minutes in a day. I sometimes ask people how differently they would spend them if each one cost a pound. Most people answer that question quickly, and then go quiet, because they have realised they already are handing something over.
Now a warning, because this is the part that gets misused.
Making each hour count does not mean filling each hour. This is not another stick.
It is not a waste of time to stop. It is not a waste of time to rest, to unwind, to watch four episodes of something if that is what your system needs. It is not a waste of time to spend an afternoon learning how to do something and then decide not to do it. All I am suggesting is that you know where it went, so that you are choosing rather than drifting.
For people in our line of work there is one more thing I would add to the tracking.
Hold a session properly and it takes something out of you. If your log says ninety minutes, and the truth is that you were no use to anyone for the rest of the afternoon, then the real cost of that session was not ninety minutes. Record what it actually took. Otherwise you will plan a week that looks reasonable on paper and leaves you flattened by Thursday.
Two more things and then I will leave you to it.
The first is that early on you will not be good at all three. You will need to spend more time growing than the benchmark suggests, because you are learning as well as doing. I certainly did. I knew nothing about marketing a small practice and the learning curve took far longer than I had allowed for. So flex the numbers while you are on the curve.
The second is consistency, which I bang on about, because it makes more difference than anything clever.
If you only go looking for clients when the diary is empty, and ignore it when the diary is full, you will experience your working life as a cycle of feast and famine. If you leave the admin until January you will experience January as a wall. Small and steady beats heroic and occasional, every time, and it is kinder to live with.
Four questions to take away.
Do you know how your hours split across doing, growing and running?
How does that compare to roughly half, a third and the rest?
Can you move any of it on purpose?
And are you doing a little of each every week, or lurching between them?
That is it. No system to buy. Just a fortnight of writing it down and then an honest look.
