Surviving

One of the things I’ve struggled with since transitioning to freelance work is walking that balance between time I’m spending on directly billable work, and time I’m spending on developing new ideas and new lines of business. As of late, I’ve been pretty good with tracking my time on all things (not just billable hours), but I’ve often played with how best to visualize how things are going in any given month.

A while back, I developed a “Dashboard” for myself to give me answers to some common questions I regularly ask. Here’s a snapshot taken late in the month of April.

The main feature of this display is the bar chart (although the most important feature for me is the “x days left in the month” displayed at the top). The bar chart shows billing progress throughout the month; so as I log more billable hours, the grey area grows and the white area shrinks. I’ve defined two “modes”: “survival mode” which is the number of hours I need to bill in a month in order to ensure that my expenses are covered, and “growth mode”, essentially anything above survival mode that gets banked and can be invested in other areas of the business.

If you scrutinize this chart, you’ll notice that with 4 days left, I’ve still got about 3 hours left to bill in “survival mode” (which I’ll quite easily make). That’s actually not that big a deal; April isn’t going to be a huge growth month for me — the large plateau area in the middle of the month was time I spent writing and working on other projects. The figures under the headings “Other Projects” and “MGIH” aren’t quite accurate; I’m still trying to get into the mindset of logging ALL of my working hours, and so I missed a bunch.

But that’s really only looking at the trees in the forest. I need to be able to see how I’m doing over the course of the year. Directly below this section, I’ve got a “sticker chart” which gives me a quick view of how things are going. The majority of the months are filled with grey boxes because I have no time-tracking data for them. The check-mark from last month indicated that I achieved “Survival status”. The “pie chart” from this month popped up when I hit the half-way point on billable hours. I’ve got a different “sticker” for significantly exceeding “survival mode” — but I haven’t seen that in the past two months (hopefully soon!).

My dashboard is web-based, but I run it in it’s own Fluid browser so that I keep it open 90% of the time. In the near future, I’m planning on integrating it into my Basecamp account through the API — maybe having it post weekly “snapshots” so that I can look back and see historical progress. I haven’t quite thought that part through entirely yet.

Update: Yeah, I did just fine this month. Final graph: