The Year I Thought I Was Fully Booked

I Was Turning Down Work

Somewhere around March I started saying no to new projects. Not because the rates were bad. Because I was full. Every week felt packed. Every Monday started with more tasks than I could comfortably finish. I told myself this was the good version of the problem.

I turned down three projects I remember clearly. Two of them went to other freelancers I know. Both of those freelancers told me later the work went well.

The End-of-Year Accounting

In January I sat down to do my taxes. I pulled up my invoices for the year. I added them up.

The number was lower than I expected. Not catastrophically. But enough that I sat with it for a while, trying to figure out what had happened.

I had been fully booked all year. I had felt busy every week. I had turned down work. And yet the revenue didn't reflect any of that.

The Investigation

I started digging. I had some time logs, scattered across different notebooks and apps. Not consistent enough to be reliable but enough to get a rough picture.

What I found was that I had been very busy, but not very billable. A large portion of my time that year had gone into things that didn't show up on any invoice. Proposal work for projects that didn't close. Revisions that had technically been covered under flat-fee agreements I had underpriced. Client management for one large retainer that had quietly expanded to fill most of my available hours at a rate I had set the previous year without reviewing.

I wasn't underworking. I was misallocating. Fully booked with the wrong kind of busy.

The Retainer That Ate the Year

One client in particular. They were steady, they communicated well, and the work was interesting. I had renewed the arrangement every quarter without looking closely at the hours.

When I reconstructed roughly how many hours they had consumed, I was looking at the majority of my working year. The rate I was charging them had made sense at the start. Over time, the scope had expanded and the rate had not.

I had been turning down new work at better rates to protect capacity I was already selling too cheaply. That is a specific kind of business mistake. One you can only see clearly in hindsight, unless you're tracking the hours in real time.

What Tracking Changes About This

The problem isn't that I was busy. Being busy is fine. The problem is that I had no visibility into what my busy was worth.

If I had been logging hours to each client throughout the year in Time-Trak, I would have seen the retainer problem by quarter two at the latest. The hours report would have shown the drift. I could have renegotiated before I gave away eight months of underpriced time.

The fully-booked feeling would have had a number attached to it. And that number would have told me whether I was actually in a good position or whether I was just filling my calendar with activity that wasn't profitable.

Fully Booked Is Not a Business Metric

I learned that year that feeling busy and earning well are not the same thing. You can max out your capacity and still underperform financially if the capacity is priced wrong or going to the wrong clients.

The only way to know the difference is to track where the hours actually go, and then look at what each bucket of hours produced.

I was fully booked. I just wasn't paying attention to the rate I was actually working at. Those are two different problems. Only one of them feels bad in the moment.

The other one waits until January to introduce itself.

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