Count Your Hours to Boost Your Freelance Editing Business

I love data. And maybe because my first jobs involved punching a clock, I’m really good at tracking my time. But many freelance editors I talk with don’t track their time. Tracking hours takes effort. If you’re not billing per hour, why bother?

To that I would reply, Would you rather earn $20 an hour or $40?

Uncover your true hourly rate

It’s a silly question. Of course we’d all rather earn $40 an hour! But how do you know whether you’re earning that if you’re not tracking your time?

Let me share the example from my Editors Canada webinar, “Increase Your Business Profits with Data.”

A prospective client comes to you with a 400-page (100,000-word) manuscript for copy editing. They want it returned within two weeks, and they’ll pay you $2,000. Two weeks is a bit tight for the work, and you like to work no more than 40 hours a week. But you don’t have anything else booked for that time.

Should you take it?

First we look at your editing speed. For this type of project, your slow editing speed is four pages an hour, while your fast speed is eight pages an hour. If you estimate that you’ll be editing at about four pages an hour, this job will take you 100 hours. It will require you to work beyond your usual hours, and you’ll make only $20 an hour. Plus you won’t be able to take on any other projects while you’re working on this one.

However, if you estimate that you can edit it at eight pages an hour, the job will only take 50 hours, easily split over two weeks with room to take on other projects — and you’ll make $40 an hour.

That might be an oversimplified example, but it demonstrates the value of knowing some basic information about how you work. To decide whether you should take this job, you need to know your editing speed, and that means tracking your hours.

Discover where all your time goes

What about the unpaid time you put in running and promoting your business? If you’re putting in the time and getting your tasks done, you don’t need to track it, do you?

Let me give you a real-world example this time.

I used to just estimate how much time I spent on email. I didn’t think it could be much, maybe 10 or 15 minutes a day. But then I started tracking my email time specifically. It turns out that I was spending an hour or two on email every day!

Tracking my time gave me objective data that I couldn’t ignore. It pushed me to search for a better solution. I found a video on getting to a zero inbox and now spend 20–30 minutes a day on my email.

What could you do with an extra 30–90 minutes in your workday?

As my mother likes to say, nature abhors a vacuum. Without any restrictions, a project will fill all the available time you have. You might feel productive, but are you? Tracking your hours is the first step in evaluating how you’re spending your time.

Build your time-tracking habit

Tracking your hours is a habit you build over time. You may forget to time things at first. That’s okay! You can get better as you go.

Try this: track the time on your next project or for one client. Then put that data to use right away by calculating your editing speed or analyzing your work patterns. Use it to create more accurate estimates or a smoother schedule.

From there, track more paid time until you’re tracking all of it. Then move on to your unpaid time. Fine-tune the list of items you track until you’re satisfied. Keep checking your data and applying it to your business. As you see the results of using the data, you’ll be encouraged to keep doing it.

Choose your time-tracking tool

How you track your hours is up to you. I use the timer embedded in my accounting software, Zoho Books. It has a Chrome Extension that makes it easy to use, and I can pull my timesheets directly into invoices for hourly rate clients. Other accounting and project management programs offer this feature as well.

Or you might try one of the many time-tracking apps. In an informal poll, I found that Toggl and Clockify are popular among editors. Both have free versions, run on a variety of platforms and provide reports. There are even physical timers that connect wirelessly to apps, if that’s your jam. Or go old school with an Excel spreadsheet (download mine for free) or a notebook.

Play around with different tools until you find one that works for you.

Put your time data to work

Looking at objective data about how you spend your time can be a little startling at first. But doing so allows you to manage your schedule better, make more informed choices about the projects you take on and learn to work more efficiently.

And that’s worth your time.

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