Would You Pay for All of the Line Items?
My wife owns a company, which at the moment has 2 employees — herself and me. She also writes about freelancing on the web. So, when we’re not talking about what’s for dinner, what chores need to be done, or where our child is (seriously, she was just right here a second ago!)— we talk about the murky business of doing freelance work. And it is really, really murky.
What makes it murky is that it’s often so hard to figure out what things are worth. It’s a wild west out there, with some people who do great work and others who just do…work. And the prospective clients who are receiving pitches only tend to see the number of dollars that each are asking for their work. In many cases, money talks more loudly than anything else.
The talks my wife and I have about pricing her work have got me to thinking about, well, what I always tend to think about — personal productivity. A key part of personal productivity is time management. The better you can manage your time, the more of it you have. The more time you have — then theoretically — the more productive you are, because you can slot more tasks into that time.
While talking about pricing work for a prospective client, inevitably the conversation gravitates toward the question of how much money will be made per estimated hour of work. Doing that is key in deciding which jobs are worth chasing, and which aren’t — which clients are worth keeping, and which ones are a drag on earning potential. To find that out, I’ll usually just ask some probing questions about the job in order to tease out potential line items, and how long they would take. It’s standard itemization, bringing time and money together into one central bit of text.
Go Invoice Yourself
All of this breaking down of work got me to thinking — what if we were to invoice ourselves for the activities that we did each day? Would you agree to pay for each line item on your own invoice?
To me, the self-invoice seems like an awfully effective way to motivate yourself to make better choices about how you spend your time. Think about it. If you received an invoice with the following line items, would you pay it?
- 25 min — watching “neck and back cracking videos on Youtube”, with headphones in.
- 35 min — going down Wikipedia wormhole, through the following entries: Steely Dan→Michael McDonald→Billy Crystal→Oliver Stone→Scientology→Cults
- 25 min — reading through chain of comments on Facebook stemming from a really idiotic and baseless “crooked Hillary” meme by an old high school friend. May have responded in a purposely sarcastic and provoking tone to one comment.
- 35 min— looking through that old Livejournal account where I swear I wrote a killer sonnet about Zoot Suits that was totally hilarious. It’s here somewhere…
- 25 min — copywriting
- 55 min — unexpected snack/watching an episode of Stranger Things
I believe the answer would be a firm “no”. Now that’s not to say that there is no value in watching Stranger Things. I believe there is value in that — and other activities what would undoubtedly pop up on a self-invoice. But, the challenge is when these things are done during time that you had allotted for work, rather than leisure.
Schedule Time…Especially for Play
What’s that you say? You don’t really allot time for work and leisure? That’s actually part of the problem. I am terrible at this, but ever since I read Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit, I have understood just how important setting aside time — especially for non-work stuff — can be.
Most of us who have a lot to do find ourselves acting as if we’re stealing time when we do leisure activity. We’re essentially sneaking it in, so we feel guilty about it, thinking I should be doing this other project. When that happens, we lose the benefits of play and leisure because we don’t allow ourselves to feel okay while we’re doing it. What that does is to make us want even more leisure and play, because we failed to get the full benefit from our last session. The cycle often continues for a while.
Two Invoices
So, while the example invoice above is one that you’d probably never pay if someone else gave it to you under the pretenses of work, perhaps it would be just fine as example of a play invoice.
So perhaps a great way to start keeping yourself accountable for your time is to make two invoices: a work invoice and a play invoice. The former is for stuff that you’re doing with your projects — both for others and for yourself. The latter is for stuff that you do to take a load off, stay sane, and recharge — you know, to actually enjoy some semblance of a life.
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