Being forced to track your time at work is a good way to see how unproductive humans really are …

How much time do you think you spend actually working while at work? I bet you would revise that estimate down if you had to track all your hours to individual projects, AND if you wanted to be efficient on how many hours you put into each project.

I’ve noticed that billable hours and non-billable hours are a bit like my budget - I think of some bills as “one time” or irregular payments, so they don’t make it onto my budget - but when you start tracking spending, it turns out that every month has one of those irregular, one-time costs. This month it was a dress for a wedding and getting my car serviced before driving to the wedding. Last month, it was buying the wedding gift, and for a few months before that vet bills kept throwing me off.

For example: yesterday I was at work from 8:45 am to 8:00 pm, but had only 7.5 billable hours from that time and almost 3 hours of non-billable time. I wasn’t especially productive yesterday (I decided to start the house search again, but this time within a broader area, so there were a whole lot of new houses to sift through). Some of those 3 hours went to time entry, where I put my hours from the last two weeks into our system - that always takes a little while. Some of the non-billable time came from my computer freezing, and me having to re-boot it a couple of times. So overall, I didn’t spend that much time looking at houses, but when added to the typical non-billable things that occur during the day, it seems like I just wasted the day away.

Today, I expect quite a bit of non-billable time, even though I’m super busy, because a group of us newer folks have been tasked with putting together some kind of media for recruiting. Nothing more distracting than having to look through hundreds of video clips to pick which ones to use, right?

So, I’m going to try to focus again on cutting down on my non-billable time, and… well, it’s hard to cut down on those non-budgeted items, and easier to cut down on the expenses that you KNOW you’ll have and can control, like groceries. That’s an ongoing process that I’ve been working on for a few months. Lower that bill is proving harder than I thought!

How much time do you spend productively working while you’re at work?