Tweaking My Work Week: Wildcard Mondays
Because I do the mercenary geek-for-hire thing doing wholesale consulting, I've got lots of formulas for how many billable hours to plan for, how many I need in order to cover the bills, etc. For instance, I typically project an average of 156 billable hours per month.
That comes from:
(52 weeks x 40 hours) - (8 holidays x 8 hours) - (18 days of sick/vacation/personal days x 8 hours)
Tack on a few hours for doing paperwork and the like as well as the overhead time of unbillable travel to the client site, etc. and it ends up being a pretty busy schedule. However, take a month like June and the billable hours got out of hand. In order to keep all of my client projects moving forward, I racked up 215 billable hours for June.
While on vacation, I decided that this just plain has to stop. Sure, I made really good money for that month, but at what cost? I was too busy to do much of anything else but work. I was stressed out, constantly tired, missing days at the gym, etc.
Fortunately, in order to get their IT budget back on track for the rest of the year, my main client was also wanting me to cut back on hours, asking for a cap (rather than average) of 148 a month for the rest of the year.
That sounded great to me. The only trick was to figure out how exactly to make it work. See, I've *tried* to show up, put in 8 hours and leave. It just doesn't work. Stuff comes up and needs to be dealt with, people schedule meetings at the end of the day, etc. Combine that with the fact that Shelly and I are carpooling and she often works 9+ hours a day herself and a 9 hour day becomes the standard pretty quickly.
I had a couple of options. First, I could just take longer lunches to turn the day into only 8 of the hours being billable. I don't like that approach because I've never liked taking a long lunch. It breaks up my rhythm.
Second, I could just "punch out" at 4:00 and not work on their stuff. Unfortunately, because I'd still be on site, I know from watching it happen that if I'm busy just reading feeds, or writing for this site, even if I'm not billing the client, someone who doesn't know that (and won't bother asking) will complain to the higher-ups at the client that "one of the consultants is just browsing the web". That leads to questions of why they're paying me, etc. Best just to avoid it.
Third was to just embrace my "natural" 9 hour day and switch to a 4 day week. With a half hour tweak here and there, it'd come in right at 148 every month. And, I'd get an entire day every week to work on my own stuff. Believe me, I've got a LONG list of stuff to work on with that time.
When I suggested the 4 day week, everyone seemed OK with it and figured I'd just do Friday. However, I've never really minded coming into the office on Fridays. People are generally in a much better mood than any other day of the work week. Plus there's free donuts and bagels. If I'm going to be onsite 4 days a week, I didn't want to skip out on Fridays.
Mondays, on the other hand, I could do without. People constantly complain about Mondays. They're still "attached" to the weekend, which can let you keep going on something you started on Sunday afternoon and the week always seems shorter when you don't have to work on Monday.
So, for the rest of 2008, I'll be in my home office on Monday's, working on my personal projects. With no commute, I'll effectively have from the time I get up at 5:00am until about 6:00pm or so to charge through things.
Given that several of the things on my list will result in non-consulting cash flow if they are successful, I'm hoping to bootstrap this whole thing into a permanent cut in consulting hours. We'll see.
August 3rd, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I work full time from the home office, i feel like your opposite… sometimes I wish I could just go to an office one day out of the week… three kids and the wife at home don't allow for a very office like home-office…
(ok, let's be honest, sometimes I wish I could go to an office 5 days out of the week… lol, but not all the time… )
Good luck with the success of those Monday projects.
August 4th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
I think that the key is if you can work out some sort of balance. I worked at home for ~9 months back in 2003 and definitely saw both the good and the bad there as well as in spending 50+ hours in a cubicle farm.
You need uninterrupted thinking time, you need time to bounce stuff off of others, you need time where others challenge your ideas, etc.
I also came to grips with being on site quite a while ago. It often is exactly how I deliver the value that makes it worth hiring me for a project. I can actually talk to users and watch for the stuff people don't think to mention that actually dramatically affects the outcome of a software project.
At the same time, I need more time to explore technologies that I'm not ready to try out on client work as well as time to learn and just tinker.
This is already starting to feel like a pretty decent balance.
August 5th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I read posts like this a lot, with people cutting back, or people working for themselves more, and I wonder about how people actually get into consulting. It sounds like something I would like to do, but also something that comes with a lot of overhead (taxes, tracking billable hours, etc). The idea of actually having time to work on my own projects is quite the carrot though.
August 6th, 2008 at 11:15 am
First, I make a distinction between "retail" and "wholesale" consulting. The wholesale consulting I do is often just called "contractor" work. There's nearly universally a company between me and the actual client.
Retail consulting is more direct where the client hires you directly.
Most of the people I know in the wholesale end of things started out at one point as an actual employee of one of the middlemen consulting companies.
I did as well. I worked for Analysts International as an employee from 1999-2003. They farmed me out to several companies including 3M and Wells Fargo.
After that stint, I stopped being an employee (for all but 11 months) since. Now I set up contracts for projects between my company (I'm the only employee) and the middleman.
There is a bit of paperwork to getting going, but it's not terribly difficult. The time tracking can vary in its detail depending on the project and the billing, etc. doesn't take much time really.
August 20th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Just realized that I never explained the name Wildcard Monday. The idea is that, in poker, if you're dealt a Queen of Diamonds, that's what it is and you have to play it as such. However, if Queens are wild, you can make that card into whatever card you'd like. So, these Mondays aren't Saturdays. They aren't Sundays. They aren't holidays. They're wild cards. And, I'll be playing them as such.