What I’m learning from time tracking

I’ve long said that I’m really disciplined about tracking where my money comes from and goes to, but I’ve consistently failed at doing the same with my time. How much do I work? How much of that is billable? Where is all my time going? Honestly, who knew? Certainly not me! 

My issues have been:

• Forgetting to turn the timer off. This sounds basic, but I’m being honest: I was always leaving the timer running and ending up with “Accounting: 14 hours” in my time log. 
• Not really seeing the value. I think this was the bigger problem. 

What changed 

This is an unlikely shift, so stick with me here. In June, I took a couple of classes through the American Literary Translators Association summer course series. Both were great, and I particularly enjoyed “How to make a living as a literary translator,” taught by Julia Sanches. In that class, Julia showed screenshots of her Toggl dashboard and talked about the value of seeing where her time goes, plus the ability to calculate an effective hourly rate on any project. 

Honestly, it was at that moment that I thought, respectfully, if a highly creative literary translator can do this and sees value in it, surely I can do it and surely there would be value in it. I decided to give it another try and really commit this time. 

Five weeks and what I’ve learned 

I revived my dormant Toggl account and got to it, creating projects for various tasks and clients that I regularly work on or for. This is an important part of the process, because you want to really think about what data you’re looking for. Do you want to measure billable and non-billable time? How much time you work for a specific client? Translating versus proofreading your own translations? 

Results so far:

• I hate it less than I thought I would. How’s that for a compliment??? Now that I’ve used it for five weeks, it’s become more of a routine and less of an irritation.
• If you bookmark Toggl on your toolbar, the icon turns purple when it’s timing. This helps me remember to turn it off. Additionally, turning it on and off just gets more automatic the more you use it.  
• Toggl helps me remember to take breaks. For better or for worse, you can’t pause a timing session, you can only turn it off. This is kind of annoying because you have to start a whole new session, but on the positive side, it tells me how long I’ve been sitting (currently 29 minutes which means it’s about time to walk around for a few minutes). 
• Just like looking at your financial data, you’re bound to find some surprises. I’ve always said that most of us can name our top three clients. But what about the fourth and fifth? Or, even if you closely track your income and expenses (I do), some things will be higher or lower than you would have predicted. Last year I made almost $6,000 from book royalties. I’m not going to quit my day job and live off that, but it paid for some nice vacations! And I spent more than $7,000 on subscription-based software (Zoom, Thinkific, Gusto, QuickBooks, web hosting, Google Workspace, podcast hosting). If I add up that and my office rent ($500/month, so $6,000 a year), it’s more than I earned in my entire first year of freelancing! Time tracking is likely to give you some shockers as well.
• One shocker for me: At least in the summer, I work less than I would have expected. Partially, this is expected, because conference interpreting drops off a lot in the summer, and even court interpreting slows down because a lot of people are on vacation. I’m really interested in getting some averages over time: how many hours a week I work, how much of that is billable, etc. It’s already kind of fascinating! 

The takeaway: try it!

I’m too new at time tracking to have any big-picture insights, and I feel like July and August are very skewed because I’m doing less translation and interpreting, and more of my own stuff.  For example, in other months this year I’ve interpreted for week-long conferences, where I would have had 30+ hours of just interpreting. I think it will be at least October until I can draw some meaningful conclusions. But in the meantime, I’ve already learned a lot.

My immediate takeaway: try time tracking (using Toggl, Clockify, or just your phone time and a spreadsheet) if you want to see where your time is going!