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9 Tips to Bill Time Accurately and Boost Your Bottom Line
Image: Wes HicksDoes your business bill time for each project? If so, you’ll know how important it is to track your time accurately. You need to know exactly how much time a particular project takes so that you can quote and invoice correctly, and you need to have a clear sense of whether you’re working productively or if there are more hours you could be billing.
There are countless businesses that operate this way. Those in the legal profession will be all too familiar with this approach, as will accountants, consultants and creatives, including copywriters, designers and developers. Freelancers across industries, who account for 36% of the workforce in the US, as well as agencies, regularly break their work down into hours and bill their time accordingly.
But even if you’re familiar with logging your time, are you sure you’re maximizing your billable hours? Are you working smartly and efficiently? Could you be billing more for your projects and boosting your bottom line? We’re here to offer some handy tips on making your time work for you, and to answer your questions, too.
Take a look at our comprehensive list of tips to help you bill for time — and develop a more successful business while you’re at it.
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Google Calendar Time Insights: A Comprehensive Guide
Image: Gaining VisualsHow much time do you spend in meetings every week? For many of us, it’s more than we would like to admit. But if you want to know for sure, it’s best to use a dedicated tool, like Google Calendar Time Insights. With the information this feature offers, you can assess whether meetings are occupying too much of your time, and make the necessary adjustments so that you can stay focused, improve your productivity, and enjoy a better work-life balance.
According to this article, 78% of workers believe their meeting schedules are chaotic, with 38% blaming upper management and 16% blaming their direct manager. An incredible 64% of employees are only excited about meetings when they’re well-planned, which isn’t always the case. If left ungoverned, meetings can often become long, tedious and unproductive, pulling people away from completing actual work.
Does this mean that all meetings are pointless? Absolutely not. Some are critical. Others add value, even if they’re not essential. And sometimes it is just nice to have a conversation with and bounce ideas off other humans, especially if you work remotely.
To stay productive and get the most value out of your work, however, it is important to determine how much time you’re spending in meetings, and to know which are important and which, quite literally, could have been an email.
Google Calendar Time Insights can help with this. It’s a simple tool that helps you track meeting times. Let’s take an in-depth look at how it works.
(Want to get some of your questions answered straight away? Simply skip to our frequently asked questions section at the end.)
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Screen Time for Mac: Everything You Need to Know
Image source: Damian PatkowskiBeing aware of how we spend our time can help us be more productive and focused. By revealing patterns of behavior, it can also help us to find a balance between the time we spend on different activities. But how do we know where our time is going? Using a time tracking tool such as Screen Time for Mac is a useful place to start. (But, it’s not the only option!)
Screen Time was an iPhone and iPad feature first, but it’s been available across all Apple devices, including Macs, for some time. Mac Screen Time first came out with macOS 10.15 Catalina, and has continued to be available on all subsequent versions, including macOS 11 Big Sur, macOS 12 Monterey and macOS 13 Ventura.
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The 4 Day Week – Halfway Trial Results and Participating Countries
There is a lot of talk around the six-month trial of a 4-day work week in the United Kingdom. The trial is run by the 4 Day Week Global Foundation who funds research into 4-day week practices, the future of work and workplace wellbeing. The UK trial is in partnership with Autonomy and 4 Day Week UK.
What is the 4 Day Week?
The 4 Day Week Global Foundation is a not-for-profit community established by Andrew Barnes and Charlotte Lockhart. It aims to “provide a platform for like-minded people who are interested in supporting the idea of the 4 day week as a part of the future of work”. A future where workers get an extra day off per week with no reduction in pay. This is based on the 100-80-100™ model. Which stands for 100% pay, for 80% of the time and a commitment to maintain at least 100% of the output.
The UK Trial Halfway Results
The UK 6-month trial kicked off in June 2022 and will conclude in November 2022. The full pilot programme started in February this year with information sessions and a call to sign up. More than 70 UK organisations signed up for the 6-month trial with the halfway point results published last month. Some of these results include:
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Time Management & Mental Health – Create the work-life balance you need
In support of this year’s World Mental Health Day theme ‘Making Mental Health & Well-Being for All a Global Priority’, we have a unique roundup of articles to help you create a healthy work-life balance and build the life you want.
You may be a freelancer, consultant, entrepreneur, part of a team or manage a team – whoever you are, life is busy. Our lives actually seem to be getting even more and more busy; and it’s getting more difficult to keep on top of everything we need to do.
Did you know that time management isn’t about getting everything done, but rather about getting the important things done? Psychology Today refers to time management as “a skill necessary for achieving a better quality of life. By managing your time in a more efficient way, not only will you get the right things done, but you’ll also have enough time to relax, de-stress and breathe more freely.”
Discover how you can improve your time management skills for a better quality of life with this collection of Timing articles.
- Timing Management Tips: How to Work Less?
- Time Scarcity Can Be Beaten! Here’s How to Break Free
- Mental Health Challenges as a Freelancer — and How to Cope
- How to Recognize Toxic Productivity With Time Tracking
- 10 Ways to Overcome Time Anxiety Using Time Tracking
- Why (and How) You Should Schedule Time For Your Relationship
These articles include tips on how to work less, understand what some of the biggest time management challenges are, as well as helpful references and apps that can help you create the life you want.
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10 Ways to Improve Poor Time Management
Poor time management is detrimental to productivity and brings more stress to work. It is proven to affect work-life balance and relationships with colleagues. Statistics show that the average person tries to solve this problem using 13 different time management methods.
Timing, our automatic time tracking tool for macOS users, helps you overcome this issue. It records your time down to the second and helps you become more productive and efficient.
With Timing, you get reports on your activities which allow you to identify distractions and take measures to improve your time management. To start tracking your time automatically, without having to remember to start and stop timers manually, download Timing today and use a 30-day free trial to test all features.
Today we will discuss the signs that tell if you fall victim to common time management mistakes. We will also give you ten tips to fix these issues, become more productive and efficient, reduce stress, and improve your overall well-being.
We will also explain how time tracking helps identify time management problems and provides data-based insights on potential improvements. Finally, we will present nine ways Timing enables you to combat poor time management.
Before we share our ten tips to improve your time management, let’s explain why that is important.
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10 Ways to Overcome Time Anxiety Using Time Tracking
Modern-day urban life can be hectic. Millions of people are constantly busy and always in a hurry. They race against time, which can have long-term effects on their physical and mental health.
A typical response to this situation is to feel overwhelmed, stressed out, and worried that there is not enough time for what we want to do. It is called time anxiety, affecting more or less everyone juggling multiple professional and personal activities.
Good time management is an antidote to time anxiety. To manage your time, you must first understand how you spend it throughout the day. Automatic time tracking tools, such as our Timing for macOS users, provide detailed reports of your activities. With Timing, you don’t have to remember to start, pause or stop timers since it records your time automatically.
You can track time to the second and use the recorded data to identify distractions and productivity issues in your daily work. Timing helps you understand where your time goes and gives you complete control over the deep-level data you can’t gather with manual time tracking. What’s best, you can download Timing and start a 30-day free trial today.
In this article, we’ll discuss the reasons for time anxiety and how it affects your mental health. We’ll also explain how time tracking helps you overcome time anxiety and focus on meaningful activities. Before we share our tips for overcoming time anxiety, let’s define what it is.
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Why (and How) You Should Schedule Time For Your Relationship
Time tracking is for work… right? Think again. While it might seem unromantic to schedule time with your significant other, it can actually be the opposite.
Do you remember the early days of your relationship, when you would move earth and heaven to make a date work? It didn’t matter if you were tired from work, just back from a trip, or had something else that mysteriously ‘just happened’ to get rescheduled, if you were really excited about someone you would make time to see them. What about now? Do you still make time for your partner?
As February is the month of Valentine’s, it’s a good excuse to think about your lovelife — whether you subscribe to the idea of Valentine’s Day or not. Regardless if you’ve been together six months, a year, or married for ten, chances are you’ve fallen into a rut or five. Particularly if you live together, chances are you’re spending a lot of time in each other’s company without actually being together. Overtime, this will naturally lead to dissatisfaction in and the breakdown of your relationship.
Aside from not wanting to lose your loved one, why is it important to work on being happy and present in a relationship? Well, studies show that when you’re in a fulfilling relationship, everything in life is better — from your performance at work to your cardiac health. We’ve come up with five different ways you can schedule time in your relationship, for a happier relationship and happier life.
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How Deep Work Can Help Increase Your Productivity
In our age of constant distraction, true productivity is never quite within our reach. This is a huge issue for knowledge workers, who are often distracted from their main tasks by administrative work, emails, chat notifications, and, of course, social media.
But what’s the answer to this issue? According to writer and computer science professor Cal Newport, the solution is ‘deep work’. Newport believes that by reducing or eliminating ‘shallow work’ and prioritizing ‘deep work’, we can regain our lost focus and improve our productivity, skills, and even our happiness.
In this article, you’ll discover how deep work can benefit your professional and personal life and how you can implement a deep work strategy. As an entrepreneur, you’ll learn how deep work can help your business grow and develop, and if you have employees, these tips can be passed down to benefit your whole organization.
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RescueTime vs Freedom – Who Wins?
Productivity is vital in the 21st century, and it’s not a secret that people aren’t as productive as they could be. A Gallup study conducted just a few years ago showed that 53% of employees did only the bare minimum required by their job position.
Also, one clear conclusion from the pandemic’s impact on our lives is that remote work has become more important than ever. In today’s remote working environment, people struggle with distractions that affect their efficiency during the day. That makes it more and more challenging to complete all their work in time to meet their deadlines.
Distractions caused by social media and other web services are one of the leading causes of productivity issues. Luckily, there are ways to curb all this negativity. One easy fix is using time tracking software to ensure your team is working at maximum efficiency.
Timing, RescueTime, and Freedom are some of the popular solutions in this niche. It’s time you found out more about them!
You can start with Timing, our time tracking solution for Mac users, which is enjoyable to use and respects your employees’ privacy while helping you see how they spend their work hours. Activate a free 14-day trial we’re currently offering, and start tracking!
Now, let’s explore RescueTime and Freedom and see how they stack up against each other.
