Essential Guidelines On How To Greatly Increase Your Billable Hours

If you work in an environment where you have to account for every minute of the day, then you will undoubtedly be well aware of how important it is to be efficient. In the world of small business, consultants and certain professionals often have to track their billable hours as they provide their services to a client and a recording of time spent is therefore critical. We categorise this according to the amount of time that we spend brainstorming or researching, or devoting to an issue that may be billed at a set rate, or even by reference to the physical amount of time needed to perform a task.

In any case, if you rely on billing clients according to the passage of time, you must become wholly efficient at time management. This skill is not something that we are “born” with unfortunately and is something that must be practised and fully understood. As human beings, we react to many different external stimuli and we often have complex lives, multi-dimensionally distracting us at any given moment. During all our waking hours our minds are “working overtime,” thinking and planning what we have to do at some future stage of our lives. It is far from easy for us to focus on being truly efficient due to all these complex thought processes and little wonder that we have to rely on time management software sometimes to help us fully understand what time management is all about.

Sadly, a typical workday is littered with non-billable tasks and other actions that quite simply can be referred to as wasteful. Some of us have a carefree attitude and quite frankly hate being told what we should be doing, but nevertheless you must categorise and prioritise if your income relies on billable hours.

Avoid unnecessary non-billable calls on your time. So many things could be classified as “optional,” but you should discard these elements if they take away from your billable time. Be careful when categorising requests on your time, as if they have anything to do with employee building relationships, or valuable client events, even though they may be “non-billable," such events or meetings could be very important indeed. These events could in turn develop into something quite valuable in the future.

You would be quite amazed if you used time tracking software to see how much more efficient you could become as a consequence of using this valuable asset. Focus on each box of time and you will be able to see whether you have used that time efficiently or not. Make sure you don’t make the same mistake again if find you’ve been extremely inefficient!

By consistently using online time management tools you will free up additional time for billable work. The software gives you an audible and visual cue and when it is time for you to move to the next task, you should never ignore this. Make additional time to complete this task later on if you find that you have not completed it – but just make sure that you do not make the same mistake again in future!