How to Manage Your Time Better So You Can Get Paid More
Do you know what your time is worth?
I’m going to guess you probably don’t.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Unless you’re a consultant or a lawyer you’ve probably never had a reason to track your time much less measure the monetary value of it.
In fact, according to one poll, just 17% of people track their time.
I’m one of those people.
Time tracking wasn’t taught to me in school and it isn’t a skill I learned on the job. It’s something I had to teach myself once I became self-employed.
Whether you work for yourself or work for the man, time tracking is one of the most important skills you can develop.
By knowing what your time is worth, you’ll become better at prioritizing tasks, knowing when to delegate assignments, and better at managing your workflow overall.
This article will dive into time management. It will recommend adopting a system to help you manage your time not just so you can become a more efficient worker today but so that you can become a more employable worker in the future.
Time is your most important asset. If you don’t know what it’s worth, you can’t allocate it.
When you think about how you participate in the economy, everything is a function of time. You sell your time to an employer who pays you a wage. You then use your income to buy things. That money, in turn, is used to compensate the people who produce the goods or provide the services you buy.
Money is an infinite loop around work and consumption.
Unless you track your time, though, you likely have no idea what it’s really worth.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
Let’s by the end of the year you’ve worked 1,800 hours and earned $50,000. Dividing the income you earned by the time you spent working, your hourly rate is around $27.78.
Compare that to your friend who makes $100,000 but frequently works after hours, logging on average 80 hours per week. Assuming your friend works 50 weeks out of the year at that pace, they’d be on track to log 4,000 hours by the end of the year. Divided by their salary, that’s only $25 per hour.
You might think your friend is better off because they earn a higher salary. In reality it’s you who is better off. You earn more per hour than they do.
When you understand what your time is worth you can allocate it. A job that requires too much of your time lowers your hourly rate, devaluing your time in the market. This can be a signal for you to look for a different job. That job doesn’t necessarily have to pay more but it can be a job that uses your time more efficiently.
By learning how to manage my time I could allocate it better. Once I did that I quadrupled my rates.
Before you can allocate your time you have to measure it. In this article, I share how I use time-tracking software to do just that. I record every task I do, the client the task is for, and whether or not it’s billable.
Once I started seeing what my time was worth I could start allocating it more efficiently. I outsourced some of my administrative work to a virtual assistant while saying no to clients who couldn’t afford to pay me at my current rate.
Over time I implemented strategies to increase my rates. Because of that, I’m making 4x more today than I was making just last year.
I’m launching a workshop to teach you how to do what I did. It doesn’t matter whether you work for yourself or work for someone else, I think you can make more than you’re making now.
Here’s a sneak peek at what the workshop will cover:
- The tools and systems you can use to capture your time
- How quantifying your time can help you increase your rates
- How to use time blocking techniques to effectively prioritize how you allocate your time
- How to use time management to figure out tasks you can eliminate and delegate so you can increase the impact of your time
That last point is the most important. As new AI-powered tools come online you’ll need to know how to effectively manage them. But if you can’t manage yourself how will you possibly be able to manage an AI agent down the road?
More than half the workforce in the U.S. will be freelance in the next three years. If you don’t think you need to learn how to manage your time now, there’s a good chance you’ll need to soon.
The nature of work is rapidly changing. There’s a very good chance that the type of job you have now isn’t going to be the same job you have in the future.
According to the CEO of Fiverr, more and more work can be done remotely, decreasing the need to fully staff an office-based workforce. Instead, the workforce of the future will be distributed and largely self-employed.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it will come with some significant challenges. Not only will you be competing against a global workforce, but you’ll be competing with AI agents too.
If you don’t learn how to manage yourself now, you won’t know how to be a competitive candidate in the future.
You might think this is easy but if you’ve spent your entire life working for someone else, you’ve never developed the skills you need to manage yourself. Day One as a self-employed freelancer will be the hardest day of your life.
In November 2019, I walked away from a “successful” career in Washington, DC. For the first three years of being on my own, I didn’t know how to manage my time. I felt like I was going around in circles, chasing short-term income-generating opportunities just to keep myself afloat.
I made hardly any money as a result.
This is what my calendar looked like just two years ago:
Looks pretty empty, doesn’t it?
I had no idea how to manage my time, much less prioritize it. And because I didn’t know the value of my time I couldn’t advocate for myself or identify higher earning opportunities that would help me improve my quality of life.
Only through trial and error did I finally become disciplined enough to learn how to manage my own time. Today, my calendar looks like this:
Through this process of managing my time and quantifying it, I’ve been able to negotiate my rates and increase my output. I’m now more efficient and productive than I’ve ever been. This gives me the ability to say yes to projects I’m excited about while saying no to projects that aren’t a good use of my time.
I want to teach you how to do the same so you can cultivate time management skills for yourself.
Instead of spending years trying to figure it out on your own, I want to give you my system and processes in less than 45 minutes.
Enrollment for How to Manage Your Time and Double Your Rates is open but seats in the workshop are limited. Click this link to reserve your spot.
Hope to see you there.
