Helpful Ideas On How To Greatly Increase Your Billable Hours
If you work in an environment where you have to account for every minute of the day, then you will undoubtedly be well aware of how important it is to be efficient. Many small-business consultants and professionals work on the basis of billable hours, where they have to provide a certain set of services to a client and record the amount of time that is spent. Sometimes this is categorised according to the physical amount of time spent to actually perform a set task, in other cases the time that a professional delegates to research or brainstorming or simply paying attention to an issue is billed at a predetermined rate.
In any case, if you rely on billing clients according to the passage of time, you must become wholly efficient at time management. This skill is not something that we are “born” with unfortunately and is something that must be practised and fully understood. As human beings, we react to many different external stimuli and we often have complex lives, multi-dimensionally distracting us at any given moment. During all our waking hours our minds are “working overtime,” thinking and planning what we have to do at some future stage of our lives. Our complex thought processes do not make it easy for us to focus on being wholly efficient when it comes to time management and we sometimes have to rely on external tools such as time management software.
Sadly, a typical workday is littered with non-billable tasks and other actions that quite simply can be referred to as wasteful. You might be a rather carefree spirit and hate being told what to do or feeling the pressure in this respect, but you must be able to prioritise and categorise if you rely on billable hours for your income.
Avoid unnecessary non-billable calls on your time. So many things could be classified as “optional,” but you should discard these elements if they take away from your billable time. Be careful when categorising requests on your time, as if they have anything to do with employee building relationships, or valuable client events, even though they may be “non-billable,” such events or meetings could be very important indeed. You never know when something very valuable could develop from these events in the future.
If you use time tracking software you will be amazed at how much more efficient you will become with this valuable asset. Focus on each box of time and you will be able to see whether you have used that time efficiently or not. Make sure you don’t make the same mistake again if find you’ve been extremely inefficient!
By consistently using online time management tools you will free up additional time for billable work. The software gives you an audible and visual cue and when it is time for you to move to the next task, you should never ignore this. If you find that you have not completed the task in question, make additional time for it later on – and once again, make sure you do not make the same mistake in future.
