It's tough to run a service business.  You know, the kind of businesses most of us are in or the kind of jobs, for those of you who aren't self-employed, have.  Even the kind of businesses where maybe you have a product to sell, but it's wrapped in a lot of service.  What's so difficult you might ask?  You work too often for too little.

The fact is that unless you're an attorney or a CPA you probably don't run time management software like Timeslips, TurboLaw, Clio and others.  And as a result you aren't and really can't bill clients in that fashion.  If you could, it'd give you the discipline you need to stop the bad habit most in our line of business have - unintentionally working for free.  Yep, we all do it and we're really good at rationalizing why we do it.  We tell ourselves things like "it's ok to do this, it's ok if I spend this time now, it'll pay off later, all my peers and competition does it like this, it's what's expected."  The bad news is we're fooling ourselves so we don't even address the problem.  It's even worse news when we don't even recognize that we're doing it.

While they don't' realize it, clients buy your expertise measured in blocks of time and so you are always constrained by the number of hours in a day.  Within reason everyone has the same number of hours - the earth moves around the sun for everyone at the same rate.  I'm not telling you anything new when I suggest that you need to run your firm like a "business" and not have people stealing from you, and worse yet, you can't be the one doing the stealing.  And of course that's exactly what you're doing if you don't pay tight attention and quit giving your "product" away.  It's not easy.  But you can stop the flow of stolen time; primarily by having the discipline to track your time.  You can do it to whatever degree you are comfortable, but the more detail the better.  I guarantee you'll be surprised what you see and you might even be freaked out enough to do something about it.  I suggest tracking very broadly by coming up with just a few categories of how you spend your time and then racking those things in 15 to 30 minute increments.  If you do it for a week you'll know how to make adjustments.  Do it as a habit and you'll become ruthless about it and the result is you'll either make more money or have more time to do non-work activity.  It's not my opinion.  It's a fact.  But don't expect that you'll read this, be motivated to stop stealing from yourself and be fully reformed.   My experience is that you'll be religious about tracking at first, followed by being pretty good at it which is soon followed by boredom and a feeling of "knowing/not needing" so you'll stop.  That's to be expected.  Just recognize the pattern and jump back into measuring  sooner rather than later.  Your losses will be less damaging.

So enough of the talk, how about a suggestion of how to do it?  Pen and paper is easy and portable and if you email me I'll send you a simple form.  If you like something more technical I might suggest something simple like  OfficeTime or Toggl.  It doesn't matter how you track.  It matters that you do track!  Good luck with stopping the thievery.