Bending Time: Making More Money From Less Time

By Tom Evans

If you are engaged in the creative industry and charge by the hour, there is a fundamental limit to your annual turnover based on your hourly rate.

Let's say you could work for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and 48 weeks a year and you charge $50 an hour. If you were lucky enough to have 100% client bookings, you could earn $96,000 a year. This is not a bad level of income but you might burn out in the process.

This also leaves no time for client acquisition, any admin or even a tea break! Those that are lucky enough to have a full client diary end doing their admin and marketing in the evenings and weekends and end up becoming their own employee.

Now there are some conventional ways out of this quagmire:

• You can outsource your admin
• You can of course put your hourly rate up and do less hours for the same turnover
• You can take on other consultants, train them in your methods and take a percentage of their earnings
• You can even write a book, or design an e-product or three, and make money while you sleep

There is though a radical and fundamental way to get more done in less time and, as a result, become more profitable. This method is initially useful where you are billing for work commissioned by the client and not in face-to-face meetings. When you get confident in the techniques though, you can even pull this trick off in client meetings too!

It's a common misconception that time is fixed. If you've ever been in a waiting room with nothing to read, minutes can stretch into seeming hours. Conversely busy weekends can fly by and Monday come around all too soon.

What and how we think directly affects the perceived passage of time. Spend time fretting about the past or worrying about the future and you will at least half your efficiency and output right now.

On the other hand, when you 'get in the zone' however, you can double, triple or quadruple your output. So, rather than increasing your hourly rate, you can keep it the same but do more of the same work in less time. The client will be happy too, not least as the quality of the work we do when we are focused increases several-fold.

The techniques are simple and involve learning to access the meditative state but with your eyes open.

So how can you use possibly use this in face-to-face interactions?

Well something amazing happens when you switch your internal time clock, the 'clocks' of people around you also switch to match yours. So, for example, if you have a non-chargeable sales or project scoping meeting, you can reach consensus in half the time. This way you can get back to billing work more quickly. •

Next: Seven Steps to More Writing Time »

Renaissance Man and Imagineer Tom Evans is the author of four books and counting about creativity. More »

6/26/12