Re:Ask HN: How do you find freelance work?
by dahart on Thursday March 22, 2018 @08:41PM
(#16654079)
What @mgkimsal said.
It depends on the job and also on your philosophy and your contracting rate, of course, but I bill only for hours that I’m actually physically in my chair working on the project, and nothing else. Speaking with other contractors, this seems like the norm to me.
Even if you’re not working, a very enlightening and worthwhile exercise is to track your time to the minute at your day job and find out how much you’re actually working. I use toggl to track my time (which I’m not endorsing, use anything that’s tolerable and convenient enough, it’s not like time tracking is fun). Toggl stops tracking after a configurable x number of minutes idle, I use 5. I stop tracking while I’m emailing or reading hacker news. I also don’t track time spent billing; putting together reports on my time & progress and such.
If you’re like me or most people, you might be really surprised to find out that breaks and office chatter and surfing and lunch actually consumes 20%-40% of your work day.
It depends on the job and also on your philosophy and your contracting rate, of course, but I bill only for hours that I’m actually physically in my chair working on the project, and nothing else. Speaking with other contractors, this seems like the norm to me.
Even if you’re not working, a very enlightening and worthwhile exercise is to track your time to the minute at your day job and find out how much you’re actually working. I use toggl to track my time (which I’m not endorsing, use anything that’s tolerable and convenient enough, it’s not like time tracking is fun). Toggl stops tracking after a configurable x number of minutes idle, I use 5. I stop tracking while I’m emailing or reading hacker news. I also don’t track time spent billing; putting together reports on my time & progress and such.
If you’re like me or most people, you might be really surprised to find out that breaks and office chatter and surfing and lunch actually consumes 20%-40% of your work day.