Why track non-billable time?

Maybe you’re actually spending too long doing the books, and you really need a bookkeeper? Maybe you’re spending a lot of time on Twitter, and you need to start measuring the return on that investment? Maybe reading and replying to emails as they come in is really inefficient. Perhaps you should set aside a solid hour per day, just for emails, and keep your email client closed for the rest of the day?

Whatever the case, if you’re not tracking your non-billable time, you can’t make any informed decisions. As the saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Tracking non-billable time is tricky

Tracking time for non-billable tasks sounds easy enough; it’s just like tracking project time, right? Well… not really. In practice, it’s actually a little tricky. The trouble is, you do these tasks on and off, all day long. They tend to feel small, they usually happen without warning, they strike at just about any time of the day, and there’s no telling how long they’re going to take.

All of these factors make non-billable time hard to track.

For example, you get an email from a colleague about a conference, and you jump right into reading and replying to it. Do you stop timing the job you’re on? Do you time how long you take on the email? It seems so trivial, when it’s likely to take only a few seconds. But we all know emails can take a lot longer than expected. And even if it takes only a minute, 30 emails later, you’ve lost half an hour!

Or a TweetDeck notification pops up, with a link to an interesting article. You click the link, scan the article, and decide it’s something your followers will be interested in. Twitter’s all about immediacy and adding value, so you immediately do an old-style retweet and add your 2-cents’ worth about the article. This whole activity might end up taking 10 minutes, but when do you decide to start tracking it? By the time you realise you’re going to spend a bit of time on it, you’ve already spent most of it.

Or you get a phone call from a big prospect. You want to impress, so you need to be 100% focussed on the call. The last thing you want is to be figuring out how to time the call in your time tracker.

You have to have a good system

The only way to effectively track these sorts of ad-hoc non-billable tasks is to ensure you have a system already prepared, and that it’s easy to use.

And I don’t just mean a good time tracker. Yes, a good time tracker is vital, but you need more than that. You also need a systematic approach to using that time tracker.

Structuring your projects properly

When that big prospect calls, you need to know exactly where your Quoting timer is, and that you can click it without even thinking. You need all your non-billable tasks already created in Yast, and they have to be structured clearly and logically.

Here’s how I approach my Yast Time Tracker setup…

As you can see above, structuring your time tracker projects like this also gives you a great overview of total your hours. So after you’ve been timing your non-billable tasks for a month, you can easily and accurately see how long you’ve spent. How long on each task, and how long all up.

Single click timer start

This is one of my favourite Yast Time Tracker features: The ability to start a timer with just a single-click — even if another is already running.

Go to Settings to enable this feature. Once enabled, you can simply click on the Play button next to any project, and its timer will start. If another timer is running, it will automatically stop.

Conclusion

I’ve been a freelancer for 9 years. In that time, I’ve spoken with a lot of people about time tracking and time tracker tools. Most have tried at least one time tracker, but never stuck with it. To me, the tracking of non-billable time seems to be one of the main reasons for this. There’s no denying, tracking non-billable time is tricky. But that’s just the nature of the beast. There’s plenty of tricky stuff in every job; you can’t just ignore it ‘coz it’s tricky! In any case, it gets easier. In fact, with Yast Time Tracker, and the right system of use, I’d say tracking non-billable time is a breeze!

From the conversation that followed, it became clear Glenn was already something of a Yast power user. He was doing things with Yast we’d never thought anyone would do, and had feature requests we’d never imagined.
So when we decided to introduce guest bloggers to our blog, Glenn was the first name that came to mind.

Please welcome our first guest blogger… Our biggest critic, and Yast’s most nagging, detailed oriented, compulsive problem finder: Glenn Murray. We think you’ll enjoy his thoughts (and rants) as much as we have.

(As an aside, Glenn’s a bit obsessive when it comes to finding and dissecting productivity apps. He commits to one only when he’s convinced it’ll do what he needs, and that it’s worth investing time in. So we’re very pleased that he loves Yast, and has been a user for nearly 2 years. We take that as a good sign that our time tracker is one of the best out there.)