Tracking Hours = Freedom?
July 4th, 2011[ Office Gossip ]
I read The Good Life and How to Get It this weekend. Over the years I’ve read a whack about Great Harvest and how the Wakeman’s ran it. One of the things they discuss in this article that I’d forgotten is how they painstakingly tracked hours, down to the minute.
Having spent years consulting and having to track every minute in order to bill clients, I’ve come to view tracking hours as jail and not having to track hours as freedom. In recent years I haven’t had to track anything beyond what I deem as success and I love it. Tracking hours feels like a massive step backwards.
Reading again about how the Wakeman’s track hours got me rethinking all of this. I have a multitude of hats I wear these days. Most of those hats are my own, which is lovely. The problem with those lovely hats is that it’s tough to know when to take them off. When you work for someone else, you spend a lot of your time striving to ‘get home’. When you work for yourself, it can be easy to just keep working.
In the Wakeman’s case, they track hours in order to limit how much they work on their business. It forces them to have lives beyond work, be productive when they are working and create business systems that don’t rely on them.
I prefer tracking history and making small changes over time rather than creating prescriptive budgets. To that end, I’m starting a new experiment today where I track my hours on anything resembling a business. Once I have a month or two of data, I will review and based on that set some annual limits for myself as to how many hours per week I will work on my various projects/businesses.
If it works, it will force me to not ‘put in hours’ in my own businesses, create systems that don’t rely on me and build sustainable companies. My guess is I’ll lose patience with tracking hours before I get that far but I’ll let you know.
Tracking hours as a means to freedom, who knew?