Your clients DON’T care how much time you’ve spent on something

* And if they do, we need to talk

I used to be all about time tracking.

A traditional Type A organiser at heart (bless me), I would spend HOURS (yes, hours) each week painstakingly planning out my calendar, adjusting my time blocks, moving my time blocks around, tracking where I spent every minute and recording it all like no one’s business.

I offered hourly rate packages to all my clients and onboarded every single one based on the amount of time I would allocate to them each week.

Then, each and every week, I’d allocate all my working hours out to each of my clients…

And I’d get to the end of every single week wondering why I still felt completely swamped.

ON PAPER, EVERYTHING WAS FINE.

On paper, everything should have been hunky dory. I was booked out to the amount of available hours I’d allocated to work, and I was pretty good at aligning what I thought could be done in the available hours I had and communicating that with my clients, so I couldn’t understand why the hell I was feeling so INCREDIBLY busy and working outside the hours I’d scheduled.

My time blocking plan NEVER went to plan – it always blew out, even if I had ‘perfect’ weeks where my girls were in childcare, no one was sick, nothing else interrupted it.

What was going on??

I was trying to work the way I’d been conditioned to work for the last 20 years.

BREAKING UP WITH THE OLD ME

I was equating the value I could provide with the time I was spending on something. So no matter how I felt day to day, whether I was at my most creative and vibrant or languishing in a productivity black hole of slumpy-mcslumperson, I would work according to what the time block said to do on my calendar. And I would hit the hours, and then feel like I needed to do more hours to catch up. But I’d be getting to the end of every day feeling so drained of mental energy, cheated because I felt like I was putting all these hours in, but then having to do more.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t spending those hours working, because I was. But I felt like everything was taking so much longer than it should have to do.

I was trying SO hard to manage my time, I was completely ignoring the most POWERFUL tool I had to actually deliver value without working all the hours.

My energy.

By filling my calendar with hourly blocks working away without any clear stop or ‘enough’ point when it came to what I was delivering, I felt like there was never an end to my to-do list, both for my clients and myself.

I was also ignoring the critical ingredient when it comes to creativity and brain function: REST.

FROM CHURN AND BURN EMPLOYEE TO BOUNTIFUL BUSINESS OWNER

Transitioning from an employee working for one company (or client) to a service provider working for multiple clients and trying to do this using the same hours-equals-value or dollars model I’d subscribed to AS an employee just didn’t work. Why?

Because as a service provider with the goal of delivering exceptional value to each and every one of my clients, I was giving myself absolutely no down time. In comparison, in my corporate role working for one employer, there would naturally be pockets of down time and pockets of busy time in each and every day. Yes, I was physically at work for more hours, but mentally, I actually had more ‘breaks’ in my corporate role than I was serving myself in my business.

I was listening to a podcast episode one day that completely opened up a whole new way of creating value for my clients WITHOUT burning myself into the ground in terms of my time and the hours I worked.

‘BUT I WORK BETTER UNDER PRESSURE, MUM’

The podcaster was talking about Parkinson’s Law – the concept that a task will naturally fill the time that we allocate to it. So this explains why we all say we work better under pressure, why we can magically finish an assignment or a presentation the night before it’s due, and why our time can expand and compress to accommodate huge life changes like having kids.

So I started playing with adjusting how much time I was allocating to each client and each task. I would set these little challenges for myself to complete things in less time, without compromising on the value that I was delivering. At first, I just played with how much time I spent on something, so adjusting the time I’d allocated to something by 15 minutes, 30 minutes, but then as I started to gain momentum on doing this and I realised how effective it was, I started looking at ways to optimise even further. I focussed on optimising the systems I used and the workflow I would complete around getting something done, and seeing what I could tweak to reduce the amount of time I needed to spend on something, WITHOUT reducing the value.

And guess what happened?

1)     I gained HOURS of time back

2)     I spent MORE time resting my brain and actually allowing myself the mental break I needed

3)     I actually delivered SHARPER results with MORE value because I was more rested, more creative and more focussed AND

4)     My clients didn’t care how much time I was spending on their tasks.

THE EXCEPTION TO THE RULE

To caveat this, there are two reasons why your clients WILL care how much time you spend on something, whether you charge by the hour or not:

1)     You’re not delivering value or completing the work they’ve requested in a fair amount of time (aka you’re either dicking around, or something’s not working)

2)     Your clients are micro-managers and you need to get new ones (HA – no, but seriously). This is not a 9-5. You are NOT an employee. You are a business owner providing a service, and if your clients are measuring your worth via the number of hours you put in instead of the true value you deliver, get new ones. (The obvious caveat to this is if you are performing services like covering call answering for a specified period, or you need to be available to do something within a certain time slot. Outside of this, nup).

If you feel like you’re working all the hours and time blocking, planning and productivity apps are just not helping, I hope this has given you some food for thought and helps reframe your perspective on how you can deliver EPIC value – without burning yourself out when it comes to your time. If you’ve enjoyed this post – please share it with a friend!