Second Cup: Bill your time for a week

Figuring out where the time goes can help you spend it better

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is to try acting like a lawyer or an
accountant for one work week. Track your time and think

(00:27):
of yourself as billing it to different projects. The experience
will likely be enlightening and give you some ideas of
how to best spend your working hours. So I have
spoken with lots of lawyers and accountants over the years.

(00:48):
Many have told me about having to bill their working
hours to different clients. That means tracking their time, often
in small increments like six minutes that is one tenth
of an hour. These tend to be highly paid folks,

(01:09):
and six minutes for a five hundred dollars an hour
lawyer is fifty dollars still worth noting. I can tell
you from these conversations that basically no one likes tracking
their time in six minute increments. Now, I know that
often this distaste stems from billable hour requirements. Knowing that

(01:33):
you have to clock a certain number of hours can
lead to a loud ticking sound in your mind, especially
when you know that any time off is just borrowing
time from the future. But even in the absence of that,
or even if the billable hour target is quite reasonable,

(01:54):
it can feel like a pain. And yet I am
always telling people to try tracking their time for a week. Indeed,
every year I lead a time tracking challenge around this
time with thousands of folks tracking their time together. You
can learn more about that over at my website Laura

(02:17):
vandercam dot com. For a week, people act like lawyers
or accountants keeping track of their time. So this raises
the question, if no one who has to do it
likes doing it, why on earth are thousands of us

(02:37):
doing this to ourselves. The reason is that it is
incredibly useful. I suggest people try tracking all their time
for a week. That is all one hundred and sixty
eight hours of a week. But even if you only
track your working hours as lawyers or accountants do, you

(02:58):
will find some interesting thing. One thing, you will see
how many hours you actually work. Now, if you get
paid by the hour, you know this number. If you don't,
you may just go by an impression. We think forty

(03:19):
hours means normal nine to five in the office, but
it's only sort of true. Most people take breaks, Sometimes
people come late or leave early. Sometimes people have half days,
or holidays or sick days, it might actually be less
than forty when you average it out. This nebulousness happens

(03:43):
with higher numbers too. If you ever work late, or
check email on the weekends, or travel for work, you
might just assign some other number to this question. I
work fifty hours a week sixty eighty. We live in

(04:03):
a competitive world, and this number can quickly get inflated.
I once met a young man at a party who
told me he was working one hundred eighty hours a
week at his start up. That is a very impressive
number if you actually multiply twenty four times seven. I

(04:25):
used to think I worked fifty hours a week, and
then I started tracking my time regularly. I realized that
the average was a lot lower than that. These days,
I know it is usually around thirty five hours a week.
I work in the evenings, I work in the early mornings,

(04:45):
I work on weekends. But my work days are often
interrupted and end early due to kid stuff, So the
time does an add up nearly as fast as I
feel it does. If you track what you are doing
or working on during your working hours, you will also
find some interesting things. Many people try desperately to do

(05:10):
multiple things at once and wind up getting very little done,
or they keep getting distracted and find that a ten
hour work day contains less than seven hours of real work.
Sometimes people see that they spend the majority of their
time in meetings and not all of those meetings actually

(05:32):
needed to happen. I have certainly seen folks get a
fire lit under them to minimize meetings after realizing that
if they want to work forty hours a week and
they spend twenty five hours in meetings, then they have
a mere fifteen hours to do the rest of their jobs.

(05:53):
But in any case, when you know what your work
week looks like, you can make more rational choices about
what proportion of time you should spend on different things.
You can decide to spend a certain proportion on planning,
or on drumming up new business, or on meeting one
on one with direct reports. You may generally think you

(06:16):
should be spending more time on these things. But unless
you know exactly how you spend your working hours now,
you don't know if you are spending too much, too
little the right amount. Who knows, time tracking is just
data data. It's really another way of saying reality or

(06:40):
if we want to get all lofty the truth. I
believe that the truth sets us free. When we know
where the time is going. Now we can make more
rational choices about how we want to spend our time.
So yes, perhaps time I'm tracking is not a ton

(07:01):
of fun, though. I have been tracking my time for
almost nine years now, and that's all one hundred and
sixty eight hours of the week. It's enough time to
rival many lawyers or accountants. I find it absolutely fine.
I keep doing it because time is valuable. I want

(07:22):
to spend this valuable resource. Well, I am guessing you
want to do that too, So why not try acting
like a lawyer or an accountant for a week keep
track of your working hours and what you are doing.
If you are inspired, you can track all your time

(07:43):
working and non working time. It really won't take that
much time or effort, and you'll have data that can
help you spend more time on when matters and less
on what doesn't. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks

(08:03):
for listening, and here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to before breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas,
or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura
vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.

(08:32):
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