This post has been sponsored by Time Doctor.
People are notoriously bad with two things: time and money. When it comes to running a home business this can spell disaster, and quick.
Regardless of what you are working on and how you are billing, it is imperative that you track how you are spending your time.
Are You Invoicing Your Clients Correctly?
This is the most obvious reason for tracking your time. Many freelancers bill their clients hourly. Estimating your time can be dangerous. Even a difference of 3 minutes per day adds up to 90 minutes per month. Just as you wouldn’t want to work for an hour and a half for free, your client probably doesn’t want to pay for an hour and a half you really weren’t working on their project.
How Could I Lose 3 Minutes?
This brings us to another reason to track your time spent online. Some applications like Time Doctor will give you a little nudge when they detect you are on Facebook or checking your inbox when you are supposed to be working. Sneaky distractions is one of the biggest reasons you should track your time. Hey, it happens to the best of us.
Are You Staying Focused?
Sometimes just the thought of someone, or something, watching over our shoulder helps keep our focus. Once you take back those 3 minutes per day wasted on Facebook – you may find it is way more than 3 minutes – and you are more focused, you may find the time to get started on those secondary projects or passive income opportunities you have been putting off. That means more money.
Time Doctor is a remote time tracking application built specifically to track remote employees’ productivity. Unlike other apps that just have screenshots, Time Doctor tracks your actual productivity so you can improve how productive you are at particular tasks. Visit the site to learn more about how it can help your freelance business.
Are You Getting Paid Enough?
A lot of freelancers get paid by the project and therefore don’t feel it is necessary to track their time. This couldn’t be further from the truth. While $50 per article sounds great, that isn’t the case if it takes you eight hours to research and finish the piece. Always track your time on project, even if you aren’t billing hourly. This can help you make sure you are staying profitable. If you aren’t, adjust your rates accordingly.
Is It Time to Delegate?
If you track your time and find you are doing everything you need to do and are still falling behind, you now know it is time to delegate.
If you aren’t tracking your time spent online you are more than likely losing valuable minutes and in turn money. You have to train yourself to be your most productive and profitable.
How could tracking your online time help you?
Kate says
Hi Angie,
I’d like to suggest Fanurio which is a time tracking and billing software application, highly appreciated by freelancers for its intuitive interface, flexible timer and ability to produce detailed invoices.
Fanurio is not free but it has a free trial. It costs 59 USD (which means about $5/month for the first year) and you can use it for life.
I know that there are many freelancers who prefer to use a desktop application in order to keep their data on their own computers. Since Fanurio is a desktop application, it integrates very well with the platforms it runs on. On OS X, you can easily access timers from the the menu bar and from the dock icon menu. On Windows, you can start a new timer or control the active timer from the thumbnail toolbar or from the tray icon. You can also use global hotkeys to control the timers from within any running application.
Fanurio is used by many freelancers not just to track time but to bill their clients as well. Fanurio can export invoices to HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word 2007, OpenOffice OpenDocument and other formats so they can be printed or e-mailed. Invoice templates can be created manually, with a visual editor (Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Word or OpenOffice) or with the built-in template editor.
I hope this helps.
Catherine Cairns-O'Keefe says
Thank you for this great article. I started getting work as a freelancer nearly 13 years ago – and continue to freelance now. I totally agree with the importance of staying focused and tracking time. I find working in small blocks of time – such as 30 minutes or 33 minutes – helps me stay focused well. But I need to be careful the “break time” afterwards doesn’t extend too long. The “work in 33-minutes blocks of time” is something I learned when I was studying copywriting. It’s a productivity technique that the legendary copywriter, Gene Schwartz used.
Angie Nelson says
Interesting, Catherine! I may have to try that.