Time Tracking, A Breakdown Of How I Spent My Time In A Month

Back in July, I was reading Brutally Honest, A terrific book on creative business practices by Emily Ruth Cohen. (If you’re past the beginning stages of building a creative business and are looking to take things to the next step, this is a book I would highly recommend.) In one of the chapters, Cohen talks about the benefits of time tracking and how everyone should do it. I don’t know about you, but the idea of tracking my time sounded like a real pain, but I’m always interested in collecting data about my business so I decided to give it a shot. During the entire month of August 2022 I tracked EVERYTHING. And the results were surprising.

I’ve decided to share them with you here with the hope that it will help to clarify what sort of tasks go into running a creative business and how much time I spend on each of these in a month.

CLIENT WORK 47%

When most people imagine freelance work, they assume it consists primarily of drawing all day long. This is not the case. Although this was the category where I spent the most time, actually doing work for clients only made up 47% of my time.

STANDARD BUSINESS TASKS 9.8%

I spend a fairly large amount of my time doing what I consider to be standard business tasks. For me, this includes email, invoices, budgeting, creating contracts, setting up appointments and things of that nature. These are also the least enjoyable parts of my day. It ain’t fun, but it’s got to get done.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AND SERVICE 9.1%

I spend a good chunk of time each week serving on the Salt Lake City AIGA Board as the President of the chapter, working as the co-host for Creative Collaborative and also running the Utah Lettering Club. This is all community work that I do in order to further the design, lettering and creative communities and I don’t get paid for any of it. The fact is, being involved in the community can be time consuming, but it also helps you stay engaged in what’s going on, and can make you a key player in your industry and has lead to a lot of really great job opportunities and projects.

MARKETING 7.8%

As a creative, I believe firmly that marketing is one of the best ways you can spend your time. For me, marketing includes creative instagram posts, writing blog posts (such as this,) creating pins for Pinterest and sending mass emails. Marketing is often dating to some people, but it’s the best way to attract new clients. I found that I spent about 3-4 hours a each week working on marketing tasks and I certainly consider it to be time well spent.

PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL PRODUCTS- 6.6%

One thing I’ve been trying to work on more is creating more physical and digital products under the Type Affiliated brand to use as an additional revenue stream. The tricky thing about making physical and digital products (that no one is paying you to create in the beginning,) is that you have to MAKE TIME. This is something I’ve struggled with for years, when I have paying client work that needs to get done, but it is worth having your own products as an additional source of revenue. For more info on having multiple revenue steams, check out this post.

CLIENT OUTREACH 4.5%

I spent about 2 hours a week doing client outreach. This is when I do research on potential clients I’d like to work with and then spend time reaching out them. Sometimes this is done online and other times if it’s a local client, this involves me doing outreach in person. Although I’m at a place where most of the clients I find reach out to me, it’s still beneficial to actively pursue your dream clients and make sure you’re putting in the work to reach out to get the work you want. (For more ways to do client outreach, check out this post! How to Get Work As A Freelancer)

ERRANDS 4.3%

As a freelancer, sometimes you have to run errands! More me this included trips to the post office, printers, and hardware stores for murals supplies.

DRIVING 3.2%

Some months I spend a lot of time driving, some months not as much. This particular month I was working on a mural that was about a half hour drive from my house so I did spend several hours traveling as part of work.

ONLINE CLASS FEEDBACK & MARKETING 2.5%

Teaching online is another one of my revenue streams, and a pretty good one as well. In the last work year, my online classes made up 13% of my revenue for the year which is cool considering they only use up 2.5% of my time. I spend time each week creating feedback lessons for students as well as marketing the classes. (Which you can find here if you want to learn hand lettering!)

FUFILLING ORDERS 2.1%

Remember those physical and digital products I mentioned earlier? Well not only do you need to create them, but with physical products you also have to spend time packing and shipping them. This time can also include some customer support and inventory management.

TYPE AFFILIATED BRAND 1.7%

Creatives are constantly complaining about how they don’t have time to update their website or work on their own brand, which is why I schedule out a little time each week to work on building the Type Affiliated brand. This can include updating my website, working on my brand identity and working on client workflows and systems. Spending a little time making sure your own brand is cohesive and functional goes a long way.

PAST CLIENT SUPPORT 0.7%

Lastly, I spend time every month doing past client support. This includes checking in on past clients to make sure they’re pleased with the work I’ve done for them, checking in to see if they need anything else and sending thank you gifts to past clients once a project is completed. In the last calendar year, 56% of my clients were returning clients which is HUGE. Getting repeat clients is so much easier than finding new ones, so it’s important to make sure your taking the time to check in with your past clients, it can make a huge difference when it comes to getting more work from a single client.

SO WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

I tell you all of this for one main reason: TO CONVINCE YOU TO CHARGE MORE FOR YOUR WORK. When you are a freelance artist, you spend your time doing a mixture of billable and non-billable work. For example, client work, fulfilling orders, and online class feedback are all billable tasks, meaning that I am actively making money while I do them. However, the other 51.6% of my time is spent doing non-billable tasks. These are things that are important and necessary for growing a business BUT THAT YOU DON’T ACTUALLY GET PAID FOR.

So considering that about half of your time as a freelancer is spent doing work you don’t get paid for directly, you need to make sure that you are pricing your billable work accordingly to make sure you’re accounting for all the time you spent doing back end work to get that client in the first place. THIS IS WHY YOU NEED TO RAISE YOUR PRICES.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, I wasn’t to excited to try tracking my hours, but now I’m hooked. Tracking my hours taught me a lot about how spending a short time on some projects can make a big difference in the effectiveness of my overall business. And how other tasks take more time and might not be as profitable.

Have you ever tracked your hours? What did you find? If you have comments or questions about his post, I’d love to hear them! Leave them below in the comments. Also for anyone who is interested, I tracked my time using a program called Dubsado (this is the same program I use for my invoices, contracts and client management as well.)