61: I tracked every minute of work time for a year. Here’s what I learned.

The Business of Fitness Podcast

Five things you'll learn in this episode:

1. How tracking every minute of work can transform your time management and life quality.
2. The importance of balancing billable and non-billable hours for business and personal success.
3. How to optimise your work schedule for deep, meaningful productivity.
4. Strategies to increase your hourly rate while reducing overall working hours.
5. Why time is your most valuable resource and how to prioritise it effectively.

Episode transcript:

In 2024 I worked for 1,433 hours and 25 minutes, averaging 27.5 hours a week over six different task types. This is my review of that year of work, and the lessons we can all take from it.

But before we talk time, let’s talk about money.

Tracking your finances is a non-negotiable for building a financially successful business.

You should at least be tracking revenue, expenditure and profit from your business, and business health metrics like number of enquiries, number of new clients, client departures, and overall growth rate.

But you know that.

And money isn’t the only asset you’re trading in. You’re also trading in time. When your business is young, you’re time rich but money poor – you use your time to earn money. When your business is more mature, you’re money rich but time poor – you should use your money to buy back your time.

The management consultant, Peter Drucker, told us, ‘What gets measured, gets managed’, and I wanted to better manage my time – knowing that how I spend my time is a direct influence on the quality of my life.

So for every day of 2024, I tracked every minute of work I did.

The results were pretty revealing, so I’d like to dig into the numbers.

But first, some background info to give you a bit of context to better understand the numbers.

First and foremost, I’m a Dad and a Husband. I’ve got two little girls, who in 2024 were four and two. Our four year old was in Kindy three days a week, our two year old is with us full time – with some really valuable support from the grandparents. We’ve never used daycare. My wife is a Director in a very successful Employee Relations and HR Consultancy.

I work two full days a week, and two half days. That leaves me with three full days and two half days per week with my kids. Hopefully this bias of my time towards my family will tell you what my values are and where my priorities lie. This arrangement didn’t happen by accident. This is my 19th year as a business owner, and it hasn’t always been so ‘balanced’. In the early years I was working seven days a week. The hard work through my 20s and early 30s is what earned me the freedom I now have. Three years before we were planning to have kids, I intentionally re-engineered my business to ensure I could be the best Dad I could be. I’m now benefitting from that planning.

We have a two week holiday every Christmas, and do four two night mini-holidays a year. I also take three ‘deload weeks’ per year, where I don’t do any client facing work, but focus on business development, writing, and any other little ‘non business side projects’ I’ve been thinking about (like writing a series of children’s books to help instil the values we believe are most important in our kids).

I do my absolute best to make my time with the girls as intentional as possible. They do organised gymnastics classes, swimming lessons, rock climbing and dance, plus all the other stuff little girls do. I’m proud to be heavily involved in all this. At risk of gender stereotyping, half the week, I’m a ‘stay-at-home-mum’. And I love it. Two of my highlights of 2024 were teaching our four year old to ride a bike, and being in the water for swimming lessons with our two year old.

My wife works three days a week, but also works a lot in the evenings. She’s the heart of our family, and is completely and utterly extraordinary as a mum, wife and business person.

I currently run three main businesses, with a few side projects here and there. Check out episode 53 of The Business of Fitness Podcast ‘The four Es. A framework to build fitness businesses’ to learn about how I manage my businesses and projects.

The first business is Range of Motion, a vehicle for my face to face Exercise Physiology and Coaching work. We have a 300sqm facility in Osborne Park, Perth. I work one-on-one with NDIS participants who rebate the cost of their consults through the NDIS. My rate for these is $167 an hour, and I do about five hours of this a week. My Personal Coaching sees me working primarily two or three on one with clients, where I earn $240 an hour for five hours a week. We also had long-term subleases set up with around 15 businesses and sole traders in 2024.

The second business is my main source of income, Dan Williams Business Consulting, where I mentor business owners. I cap this service at 30 businesses at a time, and usually have a waiting list. My hourly income here is $280 an hour, though I do spend a lot of time outside these one-on-one consults communicating with and helping these businesses. This is about 7.5 hours of my week.

The third business is Jibberjab.Digital, my digital marketing agency that creates and distributes content marketing and does website building and development for a wide range of industries.

Ok, let’s dig into the numbers and how I spent my business time in 2024.

Every day of the year, I tracked the time spent in six different areas:

• Billable Client Facing: Working with clients (either Exercise Physiology/Personal Exercise Coaching through Range of Motion or Business Mentoring as ‘Dan Williams Business Consultant’) in a one-on-one capacity either face to face or over video calls.
• Jibberjab Billable: Billable work for my digital marketing agency, Jibberjab Digital.
• Paid Consulting: Business consulting work for other businesses.
• Events Billable: Paid seminars, workshops or keynotes that I either run myself, or have been contracted to run for other companies, agencies or organisations.
• Non Billable On: Deep work where I’m working ‘on’ my business – increasing the value of my business as an asset. Business development work. This is non billable work, but it increases the future earnings potential and/or makes my future work more productive and time efficient.
• Non Billable IN: This is the day to day ‘admin’ type work in my business. Things like client communication, email responses, business meetings etc. The stuff that doesn’t earn me money directly, doesn’t necessarily move the business forward, but the stuff that I need to do to keep the business operational and ensure my clients are being well serviced.

Here are the numbers, we’ll start with a bird’s eye view and then zoom in.

In 2024 I worked for 1,433 hours and 25 minutes, averaging 27.5 hours a week.

• 47% of my work time was billable client facing work.
• 26% of my time was on business development, deep work where I’m working ‘on’ my business.
• 14% of my time was working ‘in’ the business, where I wasn’t directly getting paid.
• 6% of my time for billable work for Jibberjab.Digital, my marketing agency.
• 4% of my time was running events or speaking at events.
• 3% of my time was paid consulting.

I want to make particular mention of the 26% of my time spend doing business development. I’m using this time to develop and exploit my current businesses, while also exploring new ideas by creating ‘minimal viable products’ to ‘test the waters’ on new business ideas.

This is the area I see lacking in most of the business owners I work with. It’s the deep work I’ve done over the last (almost) two decades, that has allowed me to engineer my life as it is today. The punchline is, you’re probably not doing enough deep work. A two to three hour block of deep, focussed, uninterrupted work done once or twice a week will change your business and your life.

57% of my total time was directly income generating billable through either client facing work, digital marketing, paid consulting, and events. The remaining 43% of my time was non-billable, where I was working ‘on’ or ‘in’ my business.

If we want to talk about time freedom, which is something a lot of people seem to want, there was an almost exact 50/50 split between what I call ‘synchronous’ work and ‘asynchronous’ work. Synchronous work is work that must be done at a certain time, like scheduled and recurring client consulting appointments. Asynchronous work is work that can be done anywhere, at any time, like building a website or business development. I spent a lot of time in cafes in 2024!

Paul Graham, the founder of start-up incubator ‘Y-Combinator’ wrote a great essay called ‘Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule’. He defined a ‘Maker’s Schedule’ as something used by creators like programmers, writers, and designers who need long, uninterrupted blocks of time to focus deeply and produce meaningful work. A ‘Manager’s Schedule’ on the other hand is used by managers, executives, and team leaders who organise their day into hour-long slots for meetings, calls, and check-ins.

I’ve got an almost perfect 50/50 split between these two schedules.

The average work time per month was just under 117 hours. But there was a fair bit of variation there. There were four months where I was knocking on the door of 140 hours a month, or 32.5 hours a week. While this is still below what is considered ‘full time work’, it was usually because I had extra consultancy work, or was running two-day events.

There were also some outlier months with much less work. December had only 69 hours of work, but that’s to be expected considering the time of year.

Of more interest to me were August and September. For these two months I ran an experiment. I intentionally cut my work hours back drastically. My billable hours remained the same – so my income didn’t drop, but I averaged just 89 hours work per month over these two months – or a fraction over 20 hours a week. I did less ‘deep work’, as I wrestled with the seemingly conflicting feelings of ambition versus contentment. This experiment was a big success, and shows that I can work 20 hour weeks without compromising financial success.

I want to briefly share some of the things I do with this data on a month-by-month basis.

Every month, I track the KPIs in my business – those key metrics that allow me to ‘health check’ my business. I track things like the results of my marketing, number of clients, number of consults of different types etc. I also look at basic revenue, expenditure and profit numbers, which I take from Xero, my accounting software.

That stuff is all pretty standard, but there are two extra metrics I look at that fit into this discussion of time usage.

The first is average income per hour. I always want the worst-case number here, so I divide total profit after tax by the number of both billable and non-billable hours I work. I talk about this in episode three of the podcast, ‘Your REAL Hourly Rate: The True Cost of Running a Fitness Business’. This number is the best measure I have of how effectively I’m using my time from a financial perspective.

The second thing I track is a basic psychology battery, the ‘satisfaction with life’ scale. I pose myself five statements, scoring each on a scale of zero to seven. I then add the scores together to subjectively measure my life satisfaction. The statements are:

• In most ways, my life is close to my ideal.
• The conditions of my life are excellent.
• I am satisfied with my life.
• So far, I have gotten the important things I want in life.
• If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.

As I see it, success in any of my KPIs is worthless if I have a low satisfaction with life score.

Ok, let’s look to the future.

Based on all this data, I want to talk about some changes I’ll be making in 2025, then I’ll move onto my recommendations for you.

Firstly, I’ve added some time-categories. The new categories are:

• Client Facing (billable)
• Jibberjab (billable)
• Consulting (billable)
• Events (billable)
• Business Development (deep) (non billable)
• Working In (shallow) (non billable)
• Content Creation (non billable)
• Client Facing (non billable)
• Other

Secondly, I’ve set some target KPIs for time usage.

I want to reduce my average monthly work from almost to 120 hours to 110 hours.

64% of my time will be client facing billable work, 10% will be business development work, 7% will be working in my digital marketing agency, 6% each will be given to shallow work in the business and my own content creation. The remaining 7% will be split between consulting, events, non billable client facing work and other non classified work.

But all this is secondary, as my priority will be remain on living a full and good life, with my family at the absolute centre of that.

Let’s move on to what I think you should you be doing to optimise your own time. I spoke about this in length in episode five of The Business of Fitness Podcast, ‘The Time Management Meta Skill To Stop You Drowning in Business’. But here are some of the highlights.

Most business owners can probably simplify into three main uses of time. 1) Working in the business with billable hours. 2) Working in the business doing admin tasks. 3) Working on the business.

They should then tweak the dials on each of these three main uses of time to optimise their output.

Firstly ‘working in the business with billable hours’. Our priority here should be to increase our hourly rate, to earn more for every minute or hour worked. And as part of this, we should reduce the total hours we work, or at least earn ourselves the choice and freedom to do this. Ultimately, we want more money for less time – nothing groundbreaking there.

Next, ‘working in the business doing admin tasks. For this use of time, we want to build systems to automate the tasks in this category as much as possible. There is no direct financial return for the hours we spend on admin tasks, so we obviously want to turn the dial down here. The asterisk on this is that no one should be able to tell we’re spending less time on admin. The whole point of systemisation is to be able to automate processes so they are still done as well as, or actually probably better than they would be if you were grinding through each individual step yourself.

And finally, working in the business. We want to turn this dial right up to ten. Remember, these are the tasks that increase the size of the asset that is our business. Not only that, but by having time for big blocks of deep, focussed work, we can optimise the other two big uses of our time. We can build a business with a high hourly rate and systemised admin tasks.

So to summarise. You want to work less billable hours in the business at a higher hourly rate; you want to work less admin hours by automating; and you want to work more ON our business.

I want to leave you with a quote from Oliver Burkeman in his remarkable book, 4000 weeks.

‘What’s really morbid from this perspective is what most of us do most of the time instead of confronting our finitude which is to indulge in avoidance and denial. Rather than taking ownership of our lives we seek out distractions or lose ourselves in business and the daily grind so as to try and forget our real predicament. Or, we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves we don’t get to choose at all, that we must get married or remain in a soul destroying job, or anything else, simply because it’s the done thing. Or, we embark on the futile attempt to ‘get everything done’ which is really another way of trying to evade the responsibility of trying to decide what to do with your finite time. Because if you actually could get everything done, you’d never have to choose among mutually exclusive possibilities. Life is usually more comfortable when you spend it avoiding the truth in this fashion. But it’s a stupefying, deadly sort of comfort. It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.’

If you enjoyed this, you’ll also enjoy the following, they’re some of my most popular articles and podcasts on topics similar to this one:

• The four Es. A framework to build fitness businesses. Read the article | Listen to the podcast
• How measuring APM will instantly increase profits (without more members). Read the article | Listen to the podcast
• The time management strategy the top Fitness Professionals use. Read the article | Listen to the podcast
• The True Cost of Running a Fitness Business: Your REAL Hourly Rate. Read the article | Listen to the podcast
• How PTs can earn $100k/year in 20 hours a week. Read the article | Listen to the podcast