Many distractions interfere with billable hours | Apr 08th 2006
by Jacqueline Dooley
For the Poughkeepsie Journal
My home office is tucked into the corner of my spare bedroom. It’s on the second floor, nestled at the end of the hall. This remote location enables me to talk to clients and get work done in relative peace.
My husband, a full-time stay-at-home-dad, watches our two small daughters while I work.
It is nearly impossible for my 2-year-old to get me during the day without considerable assistance. My 4-year-old has learned how to shimmy over the gate at the bottom of the stairs, but she’s in preschool three days a week and rarely comes upstairs without asking.
So it appears I have conquered the most difficult aspect of work-at-home-momdom — disturbances from the kids. Except the problem is not them — it’s me.
When I started working out of my home, my then-1-year-old and I were joined at the hip. A lot of the decisions I made in setting up my business had to do with walling myself off from her. The term, “billable hours,” became my mantra. Where before I had been nestled in the iron arms of a large corporation and enjoyed a comfortable salary, I was now accountable for every minute I worked - or didn’t work. This was an eye-opening experience.
Back then, I tracked my hours in increments of 15 minutes and quickly learned how easy it was to fritter away the work day. It was not unusual for me to work three billable hours when I’d been upstairs for twice that. What was the problem?
Assess work habits
A deeper assessment of my work habits revealed two problems — temptation and procrastination. If you work outside the home, it’s hard getting into work by 9 a.m. on a Monday morning even when there are a fleet of people waiting for you. But the very fact that people are waiting motivates you to rub the sleep out of your eyes and get moving.
But what if there was no one watching to see if you came through the front door at 8:57 a.m.? What if the only people who really needed you at 9 a.m. were two little girls whose faces lit up every time you walked into the room?
Add to this the plaintive appeal of a 4-year-old who looks up from the picture she’s drawing (of me) and says, “I don’t want you to go upstairs yet, mommy. Stay downstairs for just a little while.”
Oh the agony. How can I explain billable hours to a child who thinks quarters are cool simply because they are round and shiny? It took over three years for me to learn the importance of sticking to a strict work schedule each day. I also learned that flexibility is key and, in fact, quite a large perk to the job.
Make up for lost time
I’ve learned that if I linger with the girls past 9 a.m. that I need to make up that time somehow. That could mean working until 5:30 p.m., or starting earlier tomorrow. It often means I must work at least a few hours on Saturday or Sunday — or both.
And it’s not only in the morning that procrastination and temptation rear their seductive heads.
The girls’ playroom is directly below my office and I can hear them all day long. Laughter I can live with, but it’s the crying that’s the hardest to ignore. There is inevitably a dramatic and heartbreaking explosion of tears at some point during the day.
I used to dash downstairs when this happened, but it just made my husband’s job more difficult. To avoid this, I invested in a good set of headphones. I now turn up the music and work through the intermittent domestic crises. It’s just as well — since, as you might imagine, drying tears is not billable.
– This above article was published in the Poughkeepsie Journal on Saturday, April 8th, 2006.