The Week I Found Out I Was Wrong About Everything

I had a theory about my workweek. I thought I was spending most of my time on billable client work, with a small slice going to admin and a little to business development.

I was confident in this theory. I had built a rate around it. I had planned my capacity around it.

Then I actually measured it.

What Made Me Do It

A bad month. Not a catastrophic one, just a month where the revenue did not match the effort. I had been busy. The work had been real. But the invoice totals did not reflect what my body remembered about the month.

Someone suggested I track everything for a week. Not just client work, everything. Every task, every email session, every "quick call," every time I sat down to plan or reorganize or think. All of it.

I used Time-Trak and created two simple categories: billable and non-billable. Then I just ran the timer.

What the Data Said

By Wednesday I was already uncomfortable.

The non-billable pile was much larger than I had expected. Not a little larger. Significantly. I was logging time for client email management, proposal writing, invoicing itself, internal planning, tool maintenance, and what I can only describe as administrative drift. Time that had no home and no invoice line.

By Friday I had a full picture.

Billable work accounted for about 54 percent of my tracked hours. I had assumed it was closer to 75.

The gap between those two numbers was the gap between what I thought I earned per hour and what I actually earned when I counted all my hours, not just the ones I sent to clients.

The Specific Surprises

Client email was the biggest shock. I had never counted it as its own category. I treated it as overhead, invisible. But it was not invisible. It was just unlogged. Across five clients, I was spending close to five hours a week in email threads alone. Almost none of that was billed.

Revision rounds were the second surprise. I had a client I billed by the project. Every round of revisions I marked as included because the project felt ongoing. When I logged them separately, I realized I had done four revision rounds in one week that would have added up to nearly three hours. On a fixed-fee project, those hours just vanished.

The third surprise was the gaps. Time between tasks where I was technically working but not tracking anything. Not breaks exactly. Just the friction time of switching from one thing to the next, deciding what to do, checking in on something half-finished. That time added up to almost two hours over five days.

What I Changed

I stopped guessing what was billable and started logging everything, then deciding afterward.

For client email on hourly clients, I now track it. I am not apologetic about it. When you hire someone for their time, the time they spend thinking about your project in their inbox is time.

For fixed-fee projects, I still track. Not because I bill it hourly, but because now I know what those projects actually cost me. Next time I quote something similar, I have data instead of a feeling.

I also built a non-billable category in Time-Trak for internal work. Proposals, admin, invoicing. I track it so I can see the real cost of running my practice. That number feeds my rate decisions. If I spend ten hours a month on admin and I want to account for it, I need my billable rate to cover it.

The Uncomfortable Part

The week of tracking did not feel good. Seeing the numbers was not satisfying. It was clarifying, which is different.

I found out that the story I had been telling myself about how I worked was wrong. I was not the focused, mostly-billable freelancer I had imagined. I was someone bleeding time in small amounts across the whole week.

The good news is that once you can see it, you can change it. The automatic screenshots in Time-Trak helped too. Not for client accountability in that case, but for my own. Seeing what was actually on my screen at 10:40 AM told me more about my habits than I wanted to know.

Track one week. All of it. Then look at what you find.

Track your time, bill every minute.

Time-Trak is a native Mac and Windows time tracker with a floating timer, automatic screenshots, and one-click invoicing.

Free during beta.

macOS + Windows · Floating widget · Auto screenshots