I thought I was billing about 70% of my working hours.

The real number was 41%.

I ran a simple experiment: I tracked every working hour for 60 days. Not just billable work. Everything. Client calls, proposals, admin, marketing, chasing invoices, fixing scope creep I should have charged for, social media, reading newsletters that somehow became two hours.

Here is what I found.

Where the hours actually went

Billable client work: 41%

Proposals and sales calls (mostly unpaid): 14%

Admin and invoicing: 11%

Context switching and recovery time: 9%

Fixing things I should have charged for: 8%

Marketing: 7%

Everything else: 10%

I was working 45-50 hours a week and billing about 18-20 of them.

The things that surprised me

Context switching has a real cost. I knew this in theory. But seeing it as a block of time in my own data was different. Every time I jumped between a client project and a proposal and back again, I was losing 15-20 minutes of productive focus.…