While I was crunching my numbers for this last year, I found out that I only averaged 9 paid hours a week. When I first saw that how low that average was I was a little ticked, but that was only with about 9 months of freelancing fill time. I also realized that if I had even tried to double that (which would have been fairly easy to do) I would have grossed twice as much… Fortunately my frustration with myself cooled to a calm satisfaction knowing that I made enough money to survive without working 60-70 hours a week.

The 60% Percent Factor
One of the theories I came across recently states that a design firm should be able to bill 60% of all the hours it works. This is just over half, and while I am not sure how precisely this applies to freelancing, I think it is a good number to have and work towards.

I have never tracked my hours in terms of “billable vs. non-billable” but I am going to begin. I have a feeling I am not going to be able meet that mark right away since I am wearing so many different hats as a freelancer.

So what Is Billable?
This can bring up a moral question about what qualifies as a “billable” hour. I have met guys who don’t bill for meetings, I have also met guys who not only bill for meetings, but have a clause in their contracts that states there is a fee for “too many meetings.” I tend to tackle this one on a project to project basis. And it truly does depend on the client.

I think that for the most part, billing a client for the time it takes to process a large InDesign file, or push files to a website is a little bit much. However, there are plenty of people in the world who get paid to press one button… just not at the same rate as a graphic designer.

I tend to operate under the premise that anything that is core to the project and/or mentally or creatively intensive qualifies as billable. Wireframes, site maps, working up a IA, all of these things are crucial to a project and important keys to a successful project, so I have no problem including them in my process and asking to be paid for it and I think that is pretty standard across the board.

Moving Forward
I am currently tracking how many total hours I work in a week. I am also going to track two other things, how many hours I can bill a week and how many hours I spend wasting time on the internet (or other clearly non billable activities). I think that this last factor (how much time I spend wasting doing other stuff) is going to play a bigger factor than I want it to. I have a theory that one of the reasons I only averaged 9 billable hours a week is because I spent a lot of my time in the day doing other things besides billable work.

Anyone know of any good tools for tracking this type of information? Anyone feeling like setting up a cool/slick web app for doing this?

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