How to Easily Track Your Time
As a Virtual Assistant, there are many ways to bill for your work – I charge by the hour. If you get paid by the hour, you need a rock-solid approach to tracking your time. It needs to be accurate, of course, but it can’t require too much effort either. In this episode of The RocketGirl Show, I'll share how to easily track your time.
TRANSCRIPT
My name is Belinda Wasser also known as RocketGirl. And today we're going to talk about how to easily track your time.
When you're a virtual assistant there are many ways that you can charge for your time. I decided a long time ago to charge hourly and as a result, it's critical that I track each minute that I spend working on client projects so that I can get paid for the work that I've done.
The way that I've decided to do that is Toggl. In the beginning, when I first started out 10 years ago, I used a spreadsheet, but I quickly saw that that was not going to work. So I did a little research and stumbled across Toggl. I like it for a couple of reasons.
Now one of the secrets for me to make sure I get all of my time track is I lump my work. So I say to myself, Okay, I'm going to work on this client. I do all the emails, all the work, whatever the project is, and I work on it until I am a stopping point or unfinished. I look at the clock and I add the time to Toggl. So by lumping the work and not doing five minutes here five minutes there and jumping all over the place. I make sure that all of my time is tracked.
Toggl is super simple to set up. All you really need to do is set up your project, set up your clients, put the time in. You can either add the time manually after each task or you can set the timer and it will just spend the time like a stopwatch until you're finished. So very easy to set up. It's in the cloud.
I love that because there's also an app on my phone. If for some reason I forgot to put some time down. I'm very careful about that, but if I did, I could add it from my laptop or from my phone right into the app. So it goes wherever I go. And I love that. It's free. The free version is what I use. It does everything I need, and I love it. So a big fan, and I hope you'll check it out. It's so important to track all of your time.
I had a question recently. People often ask me when a client is talking to you on the phone and giving you the work. Is that billable? And Yes, it is. So all of that time that you're working with your client, it's absolutely billable. So make sure you grab it every minute of it.
Before I go, I just want to invite you to my free online classroom. It's called "The Virtual Assistant Connection", and you can find it on Facebook. If you would like to join, type "The Virtual Assistant Connection" in the search bar at the top of Facebook, click the Join button, and I would love to welcome you into the group.
We have almost 13000 members, and there is a ton of information whether you're just starting out or you've been a VA for a long time like me. So please come over and check us out. If you're watching from YouTube, please hit the Subscribe button, so you'll be notified each time we go live. And no matter where you're watching from, if you would put your thoughts in the comments, I would love that. Until next time, I'm Belinda Wasser, RocketGirl Signing off. Bye-bye.
