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In 1886, the Labor Movement won an important victory—the weekend was born, and along with it, the 40-hour work week. “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will,” was their slogan.
It’s catchy enough, but let’s break it apart with a modern eye. “Eight hours for rest”—okay, because of my electronics, it takes me about 45 minutes to fall asleep and 30 minutes to get out of bed in the morning. Do those 75 minutes come out of my “rest” time, in which case I’m still very tired? Or do they dip into my “what you will” time? Speaking of “what you will”—is that the same as leisure? Because eight hours of leisure each day seems nice, but when do I clean my apartment, commute to work, and pay taxes? If I’m running the numbers correctly, my “what you will” time is about negative 15 minutes a day, and I don’t even have kids.
But the most confusing part of this slogan is the “eight hours for work.” What does that mean? What counts as work? It’s simple in some cases: the time between when you punch in and out for the day. But I once sat through a job orientation for a part-time receptionist position in which I was told to punch out any time I checked my personal phone. Obviously, I didn’t do this, nor did I stay at the position long (I was becoming a receptionist in part because I loved phones). If counting hours even when I’m on the clock is tricky, though, how on earth am I supposed to do it as a freelancer?
Why To Measure Hours
Before I tell you how I track hours, I want to answer another important question. Why bother? What’s the benefit of tracking hours? First, a client might ask you to. But even when clients don’t require hour-tracking, I still do it. For myself. Quite simply, tracking hours tells me how much to charge.
I have a general hourly “rate” for different types of work. Of course, this is flexible. For corporate clients, I charge more. For publications that boost my resume, I charge less. For my mom, I charge nothing, because I’m still paying back some dental work she helped me out with seven years ago, but that’s neither here nor there. For most work, I have an idea of what hourly rate makes the job worthwhile. And therefore, when I’m negotiating pay, I need to know how much time I’m going to spend on it.
The Administrative Time-Cost
For freelancers who manage their own finances, tracking hours is not as simple as counting how long a project takes. I once accepted an assignment from a publication I’d never worked with before. The editor asked for my W9, which I sent. I then received an email from someone in Payroll at the organization asking me to answer 12 questions, including clips from recent articles and a link to my website. After that, they sent me a contract and a new organization-specific W9. I resent the first W9, but was asked to fill out theirs, on their specific contract site, which required a new login. After that, I was asked to input my banking information into their new Payroll website. Two hours later, I was able to begin writing my article. It took 90 minutes.
I learned from that mistake, and I now bake in time for administration. There’s no client for which total administrative time is zero. Sometimes, I’ve been asked to email new invoices for each piece for publications I work for regularly, even though I’m set up on a website that claims it automatically generates invoices. Sometimes, I’ve been asked to manually port my own data over to a different payroll application months after I did any work for the publication. Sometimes, I’ve had to send 14 follow-ups just to get paid $150. And all of this should count as paid work, because it’s certainly not leisure. Put another way, it’s anything but What You Will time.
Give Yourself Some Wiggle Room
So how to track hours? My tip for freelancers is this: estimate that you’ll spend about 25 hours per week on your actual projects, and pick an hourly rate that makes that feasible. That’s not to say you’ll only work 25 hours/week, but the time you spend finding new projects (over half of freelancers say project acquisition is the biggest hurdle they face), following up about payment, getting onboarded to new websites, building up your social media presence, and more can easily fill another 15 hours. Not to mention the three to five full days you’re going to need to do your taxes in March (or April, if you’re anything like me).
I came to 25 hours per week by tracking my own time. I had this vague sense that I wasn’t paid enough. It’s a familiar feeling known, I believe, as “Capitalism.” I used a tool called OfficeTime to figure out how I actually used up my time. It was here that I realized that even if I only spent five hours each day on my assigned projects, my freelancing duties easily hit 40 hours each week. OfficeTime allows you to start a timer and select the task you’re working on, then breaks down your tasks into categories and allows you to run reports on the data. It will even show pie charts, which are, in my opinion, the best kind of charts and the worst kind of pies.
Of course, you’re not always going to get the rate you want. Freelancers aren’t alone in this regard—few of us are paid what we’d like to be. To that end, I would recommend having both a target rate, and a “living wage” rate. This depends on where you live, who else you need to support, and your other expenses. And if, after trying to make freelancing work, you’re unable to achieve a living wage with 25 hours per week, you may have to accept that you’re either going to be working over 40 hours each work, or you might prefer a full-time job. Ultimately, though, I’d recommend not letting freelance cut into your leisure time too much. The Labor Movement in 1886 had a point—we need some hours of the day for What We Will.
