Health & Fitness Tools

Crucial Guidelines On How To Greatly Increase Your Billable Hours

30th April, 2010 - Posted by health news - No Comments

If you work in an environment where you have to account for every minute of the day, then you will undoubtedly be well aware of how important it is to be efficient. In the world of small business, consultants and certain professionals often have to track their billable hours as they provide their services to a client and a recording of time spent is therefore critical. Sometimes this is categorised according to the physical amount of time spent to actually perform a set task, in other cases the time that a professional delegates to research or brainstorming or simply paying attention to an issue is billed at a predetermined rate.

In any case, if you rely on billing clients according to the passage of time, you must become wholly efficient at time management. As human beings, we are not born with the ability to measure time naturally and must take time to understand and practice this art. We often get sidetracked by a variety of external things and as our lives are so dimensional and complex, distractions abound. During all our waking hours our minds are “working overtime,” thinking and planning what we have to do at some future stage of our lives. Our complex thought processes do not make it easy for us to focus on being wholly efficient when it comes to time management and we sometimes have to rely on external tools such as time management software.

Throughout each of our working days, a large number of non-billable tasks take up our time and often our actions can simply be said to be wasteful. Some of us have a carefree attitude and quite frankly hate being told what we should be doing, but nevertheless you must categorise and prioritise if your income relies on billable hours.

Avoid unnecessary non-billable calls on your time. So many things could be classified as “optional,” but you should discard these elements if they take away from your billable time. Be careful when categorising requests on your time, as if they have anything to do with employee building relationships, or valuable client events, even though they may be “non-billable,” such events or meetings could be very important indeed. You never know when something very valuable could develop from these events in the future.

You would be quite amazed if you used time tracking software to see how much more efficient you could become as a consequence of using this valuable asset. By formally focusing on each “box” of time you are analysing whether or not you have used that time most efficiently. Once you find that you have been inefficient, don’t make the same mistake again – as that would be almost criminal!

By consistently using online time management tools you will free up additional time for billable work. Audible and visual clues will be given by the software to tell you when it is time for you to move on and you should not ignore these guidelines. Make additional time to complete this task later on if you find that you have not completed it – but just make sure that you do not make the same mistake again in future!