Episode 42: Our Relationship With Time
In Episode 42, Sam dives into our relationship with time, individually and collectively as an industry. This episode follows on from Episode 41 about the false beliefs we have, so if you haven’t listened to the previous episode go and do that first.
Sam covers why time is our most precious resource as accountants and business owners, and what’s right with our attitude towards time in our industry. Plus, why you don’t need to throw away your timesheet but rather tweak how you’re using it.
Sam explores the ‘hours for dollars’ mindset and how it’s holding us back, as well as the different types of time that we should be tracking and valuing over and above the chargeable client hours. She explains a practical exercise you can do to better value the next hours you spend on CPD, plus how you can use your timesheet proactively and leverage the great data that it provides.
Listen to an excerpt
What we cover in the episode
Our relationship with time and why it’s our most precious resource
What’s right with our attitude towards our time in our industry
Shifting our ‘hours-for-dollars’ mindset to a leveraged, ‘work smarter not harder’ mindset
Why you don’t need to throw away the time sheet, but rather tweak the reason you’re using them
The problem with only valuing one type of our time: chargeable hours
The different times of time that are important to track and value
The reason you should track, value and leverage your growth and development time (i.e. CPD)
A practical exercise you can do to better value the next hours you spend on CPD
Rethinking our chargeable client time and considering hourly charging vs. value charging
Why professional services industries have a tumultuous relationship with timesheets
Using timesheets proactively and leveraging the great data they provide
Shifting our mindset with time by tweaking the focus and relationship with timesheets
The series coming up on time over the next 6 weeks
Quotes
“Time is actually our most precious resource and it's one thing that we can't replace. We have a finite amount of time. But all our other resources such as money, money can be made and lost. And you can make more of it. And all our other resources can be bought in from other things. But we ourselves personally only have a certain amount of time.”
“I believe that the hours-for-dollars mindset is the biggest block that we have. And if we can [shift it], it actually helps us get through some of the other blocks. Our relationship with time is such an interesting one.”
“Our attitude towards time and tracking our time gives us a really good example that our time is important and valuable, that we have actually been developed the skill to be able to track our most important resource (time), which many business owners or people in different careers don't fully understand.”
“We’ve gone to the effort of jumping out of our comfort zone a little bit [at a conference], but then we don't do the next follow up because we're not tracking it. Also [there’s] that mindset of getting back from something that is non chargeable, and then jumping straight back into chargeable work to make the time up, so we're not leveraging the time that we've actually saved, and the value of that from a growth perspective.”
“What's right with us [as an industry] is we have the ability to actually value our time, and we have the ability to track it, it's just that we really are doing that with only one type of time and that is the one that we can actually charge money for. And we we limit our success to that.”
“As with a lot of things in life that we have bad relationships with, if we start thinking about what the initial purpose of the timesheet is, what the real purpose of the timesheet is and how we might be able to re-look at this in our everyday habits, we can change our relationship with them and actually get a lot more value or leverage off our timesheets.”
“In our consultancy practice, we don't use timesheets per se, but we use a project management tool. And every time we go to a client, we track how much time [things take] and what really worked and what didn't. So we can go back at the end of the week and have a look at what we're learning from this.”
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