Very satisfying day
For once I’m not going to complain about not having a productive day or not getting through as much as I’d wanted. Today was a good day! I planned out my day carefully, choosing A, B and C tasks for the day (A being essential, B desirable and C nice to get done) and worked through them. I think this is the first time that this has ever happened but I got through everything on the list and even made a start on some things I had earmarked for tomorrow. How satisfying is that?
I think the secret was that I’d estimated how long each task would take and planned 4 hours of billable work. I must be getting better at this because for once things took less than I’d estimated rather than more. So, even with interruptions I still managed to get through everything. I’ll have more days like that please!
All in the planning?
Following on from my post yesterday, I actually found it very easy to do my allocated 4-hours billable work today. Why are some days easier than others I wonder? Maybe less interruptions or maybe it was all in the planning. The last thing I did yesterday afternoon was plan out what what work I would do today, with an estimate of how long it would take. Turned out to be pretty easy to achieve my goal, even with starting the day with a couple of hours of training (though I did start mightily early).
Is that going to be the secret - planning it all the day before and working at it until the 4 hours are done?
Wasting my time?
I had a bit of a revelation at the weekend. I worked out what our turnover would be if we both did 4 hours of billable work a day at our standard hourly rate. Bit of a shock because it was around three times what we are actually bringing in. That’s not good is it? Though in some ways it’s encouraging because it means that we do have the capacity to bring in much more with just the two of us working on the business.
So, what are we doing so wrong that we’re not bringing in that much? In an 8-hour working day it should surely be quite straightforward to work 4 billable hours, shouldn’t it? We always seem very busy but are we spending too much time on admin, or is it that we’re just so bad at quoting that we end up working for much less than our hourly rate? That’s what we need to work out.
Based on my findings we’ve started tracking much more closely how much of our day is spent on work that we can class as billable. So far we’re finding that in a normal working day it can be quite difficult to do the required 4 hours - quite a bit of time is spent preparing quotes for prospective clients, which we can’t charge for, and then there’s the necessary admin tasks and keeping on top of emails. Still, I’m not giving up on the 4-hour target, I think we need to work on our efficiency and make sure that we actively aim for that every day. Hopefully this will have a knock-on effect to how quickly we get things finished and our general project management (yep, back to the project management again!).
Let’s see if we can make a breakthrough!
