A few years ago, I felt I was becoming a bit of a slacker, and so decided that it would be fun to track how much time I’m spending on what. I installed free software that would have me fill in how I spent every 30-minute segment of the day.
What a bad, bad idea.
For one, it actually takes more work to do that than the actual work itself. Second, you have to remember to keep jotting it down. And finally, it’s not fun. It makes work WORK. Part of what I love about my job is that for the most part, I feel like I’m doing what I like. I get to talk to interesting people, I get to read a lot, and I get to write about things that I think matter. To me, those are all things I enjoy. Most of the time, I zip through my day. It doesn’t feel like I’m working, I’m not looking at the clock hoping to stop. It’s just an extension of my life. But when I have to sit down and track every 30-minute segment– THAT feels like work.
It would really make me dread the day. Who knows, in the long run, it might have been good for me. But I didn’t like it.
For freelancers, I don’t think these systems work. Mostly because it doesn’t matter how much we’ve worked or not worked. We don’t get paid by the hour or the day, so it doesn’t matter if we’ve worked a 90-hour week if we haven’t met our income or productivity goals. And if we’ve only worked 10 hours but finished everything on our to-do list and made our money for the week, there’s no reason why we can’t go out and play. Our income is typically not dependent on hours worked or articles submitted, and hence measuring it by that standard doesn’t work.
Then, of course, we’re writers and journalists.
When I was leaving the one and only full-time job I’ve ever held (I worked for a magazine), they were instituting a policy of having you email your boss at the end of every day stating what you’d accomplished that day. While that sounds great in theory, it doesn’t actually work. It might work if you do it yourself because you know how much work went into finding a source or scheduling that interview, but when you put it in an email, it simply reads: scheduled interview. It looks like you’ve done nothing, when you’ve actually spent weeks negotiating with the PR people to get the interview with that CEO who’s done nothing but grunt through your one-hour interview.
When you say you wrote an article, it doesn’t accurately depict the time you may have spent to research, uncover statistics, or check every single fact to make sure it’s correct.
Journalists, whether or not they think in a linear fashion, certainly don’t work in a linear fashion. The whole story is a mess of research and interviews until it comes together. It doesn’t work sequentially. Some of us write while we’re reporting, some of us won’t start until we have all the transcribed interviews, notes, and research right in front of us.
So expecting to give an update (to yourself or your boss) on sequence-by-sequence progress is pointless. It’s also ignoring the fact that many of us usually need to step away from a story–get a drink or take a long walk in the park– to figure out a structure or a particularly challenging beginning. That’s work too. But it’s not something you can put on a timesheet.
My timesheets make me look like a slacker even though I’m one of the most productive people I know.
I haven’t yet worked out a perfect system for freelancers (me, basically) for tracking productivity, but I do have to keep a tab on my income. I have a monthly goal, and if I think I’m going to go below that number, I really need to push harder and do intense work (likely marketing). If I’m hovering around or above my medium, I’m fine but I can do better. And if I’m near my target, I can (and should) probably take the rest of the month off and go enjoy myself. (Or maybe finish those assignments.)
One of the things I love about freelancing and journalism is the ability to structure my time and day according to my convenience. It’s not always like that– I do have deadlines to meet and editors breathing down my neck– but I can create my own measures of achievement rather than be bogged down by someone else’s idea of what is considered a productive day.