When I was a kid I wanted to be rich.  Not a football player, not an astronaut; rich is what I wanted.  I grew up in the era of Gordon Gecko, Alex P. Keaton, and that bad ass Scrooge McDuck with the swimming pool full of money.  Of course, there are people who tell you that money doesn’t buy happiness.  Ironically, only my broke buddies say that.  That’s like having a fat person tell you running is bad for your knees.

But, I have to admit that, to a certain extent, they’re right: money doesn’t buy happiness.  It buys all sorts of other crap that usually just ends up sitting around gathering dust.  I remember when I first had enough disposable income to buy something fancy.  One of my first extravagant purchases was on a high-end watch – pretty ironic since I’m never more than 5 feet away from four clocks at any given moment.  It looked good, but keeping time wasn’t really its forte.   A $20 Timex could’ve done the job, and adding a few zeros to that figure didn’t make it any more accurate.   Hell, for the price I paid for it, it better be able to turn back time.  But hey, it’s a status symbol.  People need to see how well I’m doing.  Or do they?  Who am I trying to impress?  My broke buddies don’t care.  My business associates have even nicer ones, crusted in enough jewels to make Liberace drool.  Maybe that gold digger at the club will give me some luvin’ if she sees me sporting a flashy time piece.  Great, that’s just what I need, some parasitic plastic playmate.  Now that we’ve checked off all the possible uses for the damn thing besides telling the time, what good is it?  It’s too nice to wear every day, so it now sits in a safety deposit box gathering dust.   I see it every six months when I put my renewed insurance papers in there.

All is not lost.   My childhood mentors were right about the importance of money; I just overestimated how much happiness would cost.  Take the purchase I made at the Maricopa Animal Care & Control department.  For $25 I bought a little black cat.   She’s an ordinary house cat that likes to play with string, stare out the window at birds, and shed on my nice clean folded clothes.  She was a hundredth of the cost of that fancy watch, but that little cat makes me happy every day.  No one’s ever going to be impressed with my mutt of a house cat. The only thing the gold diggers would get out of her is an allergy attack.  Yet I’d have to say she’s the best purchase I’ve made with my new found “wealth.”

Utility and cost are not always equal.  If you make your life about chasing after money, ask yourself: what exactly are you going to buy with it?  I’d advise against fancy baubles… unless of course you’re up for some gold digger luvin’.

I’m a firm believer that caring about the welfare of your customer is the number one priority.  If you truly want them to succeed, you are going to do everything in your power to achieve that goal. That way you spend your time analyzing and solving problems, not just counting up billable hours. In my field it’s pretty easy since I treat clients as though they are part of my own portfolio. With this philosophy in mind, it’s hard not to look at your client and advise them in ways that are outside the scope of your job when the company starts to struggle. Needless to say, this is the absolute WRONG thing to do. For starters, the client pays you to fill a function and only that function. If you go beyond that, you run the risk of looking like a complete idiot since you as an outsider don’t understand all the ins and outs of their business. Because of the complexity of any business, you could miss the mark entirely.  Your advice, although well-intentioned, could be just plain wrong.  That’s especially awful if it’s your job to be the one with all the right answers. Even worse, implicating an individual or methodology as the source of the problem can cause some hurt feelings (that could be someone’s pet idea you’re trashing).  You are treading in an area where you aren’t the star and you can cause all sorts of problems that you aren’t capable of fixing. And finally, you aren’t getting paid any extra for giving advice in an area where you have a strong likelihood of being wrong.  You could be hurting your client and, even worse, you are spending your precious time without compensation.  If that doesn’t drive the point home, I don’t know what will.

So when it comes to consulting, care about your client, do what they hired you to do, but keep your opinions about how they should run their business to yourself. You’ll be a much happier and wealthier consultant.

Frantic. That’s the name of the song where I pulled that quote and, besides being a damn good song (yes, I was one of a handful of people that liked St. Anger), there is a pretty important message in those lyrics. Whether you are a business owner like me or work for someone else, the idea of doing more with less isn’t just a catch phrase, it’s a reality. There are only 24 hours in a day and the To Do list grows every week. If you want to get a hold of a schedule spiraling out of control, I propose you do an audit.  That’s right: those five letters that cause so much fear when uttered by the IRS may in fact be a time saver when you do one yourself.

Like you, I was getting buried in tasks. I literally work from a half an hour after I wake up to an hour before I go to bed. If you’ve ever been brushing your teeth and reading your e-mail at the same time, you are in the same boat as me. So what do you do about it? The first task is to simply keep track of what you do and how much time you spend doing it for one week. This is the time to get anal retentive. Detail, detail, detail. The goal here is to get a realistic picture of what your day looks like, so be brutally honest. Once you have your list, it’s time to get organized. After, looking over my list I saw some patterns emerge, and was able to group my activities into 4 categories. Some of you will have more and some will have less. To help you get started, here are mine:

1. Money Making
2. Research
3. Maintenance
4. Personal

Money making is pretty obvious: my activities that directly generate revenue. For me, it’s performing SEO for clients and my own affiliate business. Research is the stuff you need to do to stay a head of the game, whether this is reading industry news or researching new ways to do your job better. Maintenance is the routine crap you do every day that isn’t sexy but needs to be done to keep the ship afloat, like washing dishes, going to the bank, etc… And finally, personal time is just what it sounds like. Think of it as investing in your relationships, with phone calls, e-mails, or a social networking site.
For this next step I use a spreadsheet program. MS Excel is great, but you can get an equally useful and free spreadsheet program at Openoffice.org. Create a little matrix like this:

Now that you have a list you can sort that hour column from greatest to least, which will put your most tim-intensive task on top. This is the map of your daily life. If you are like me, you may have seen some disturbing patterns emerge. For instance, I found out that I spend over 3 hours a day on message boards and social networking sites. Ouch! If you read my article about the economic advantages of time management you would know that I’m throwing money down the drain. Hey, I like looking at my friends’ pictures from their trip to Alaska, but am I willing to forgo thousands of dollars in lost productivity? I think not.

If you did this correctly, it will be a true eye opener as to how your time is really spent. Once you see just how much time you allocate to your daily activities, you can adjust accordingly. Life comes at you pretty fast. If you don’t reduce the silly stuff to its proper proportion you’re going to end up, well, Frantic.

The first step in becoming more efficient is to figure out what your time is worth. For most of us that’s pretty easy. I take my daily earnings and break that down into the number of hours I devote to the project. Notice I said hours devoted to the project not worked. For instance I need to write a link bait article but first it takes an hour in research, then I spend an hour writing, and finally another half and hour clearing it with the client’s legal department etc… so I’ve spent 2 hours on a project of which only 1 hour was spent creating the final product. Even if you aren’t self employed the equation is just as simple. Say you get an hourly wage of $10 an hour or $80 a day. You spend two hours commuting back and forth plus you lose another hour for lunch so that 8 hour work day is in reality an 11 hour work day. So, you effectively make $8 an hour before taxes.

With this theory in mind lets make these numbers interesting. Say you generate $50 an hour as a programmer. Everything that you do that isn’t programming costs you money. For instance instead of programming you run to the bank and pick up some office supplies. This is the type of work that $10 an hour person could be doing. By running these errands you have effectively lost $40 running errands. If you had outsourced that labor you would have increased your companies revenue by $40 instead of running those errands which only added $10 in value.

Of course you can’t work all the time, and even a workaholic like me even needs some down time, but knowing what your time is worth is the first step to allocating resources. Yes this is a simplistic view and there are a whole bunch of factors like taxes, expenses, etc… but the idea is just to get you to start thinking about your time in relation to dollar value. Because if you don’t know how much your time is worth, how do you know if you are losing money on a project?