Time Flies

But Who’s Paying for All Those Minutes?

Let’s talk about freelancing, shall we? Specifically, the slightly ridiculous business of being really good at your job, loving what you do, keeping your clients happy, and somehow managing to pay yourself less than you should.

Sound familiar?

As a remote-working freelancer, I juggle clients, projects, deadlines, emails, social media, websites, marketing campaigns and approximately 47 other things that all need doing yesterday. I love what I do. I get to be creative, solve problems, work with brilliant people and run my own little corner of the professional universe from wherever I happen to be.

There is, however, one tiny fly in the freelancing ointment.

Billing.

Not the actual sending of invoices. It’s working out what should go on them in the first place.

Because somewhere along the way, I decided that being a freelancer meant occasionally donating my time to clients, one five-second task at a time.

And so, Time Flies was born.

The Five-Second Task: A Freelancer’s Greatest Enemy

You know the one.

You’re halfway through making a coffee when a client emails with a quick question. No problem! You open your laptop, find the answer, type a response and send it.

Five seconds, right?

Well, perhaps if you’re a speedy typist with a photographic memory and the email magically materialises in front of you.

In reality, you read the message, check something, formulate an answer, type it, reread it and send it. By the time you’re done, your coffee is cold and you’ve forgotten what you were doing before.

Five minutes? Ten? Maybe more?

And when it comes to billing, what do you do with that time?

Nothing.

Because it feels too small to count. It seems a bit petty to put five minutes on an invoice for answering a quick question.

Except it isn’t just one five-minute task. It’s a website tweak, a social media adjustment, a quick email, a file that needs finding, a little problem to solve and a favour that will only take a moment.

Individually, they’re easy to dismiss. Collectively, they’re a sizeable chunk of your working week.

It’s death by a thousand tiny tasks. Except instead of death, it’s your hourly income quietly disappearing into the abyss.

Cheerful!

But I LOVE My Job!

Here’s where things get interesting.

When you love your work, it’s surprisingly easy to convince yourself that certain tasks don’t really count.

I’m not talking about deliberately doing a client a favour or throwing in a little bonus now and then. That’s a choice, and sometimes it’s a perfectly good one.

I’m talking about the everyday work that keeps a business ticking along: the research, planning, admin, troubleshooting, emails and thinking time that happen behind the scenes.

Because I enjoy what I do, I sometimes treat these tasks as though they’re hobbies.

I’ll happily investigate an issue, figure out why something isn’t working or make a small improvement because I want the end result to be brilliant. I’m interested in the problem. I want to solve it. And when I finally crack it, there’s a little internal fireworks display.

But here’s the inconvenient truth.

I was working. For a client. Using my time.

That time could have been spent doing something else. Going for a walk on the beach. Meeting a friend for coffee. Reading a book. Taking an afternoon off without promising myself I’ll finish work in just five more minutes.

Loving your job is wonderful. Treating your time as though it has no value because you love your job? Not so much.

As a freelancer, you’re the boss, the employee, the accountant, the IT department and the person who occasionally needs to have a stern word with themselves.

Unfortunately, I’m not particularly good at reminding myself that my time is money when I’m enjoying myself.

Keeping track of my time used to be a bit like reconstructing a holiday from a handful of photographs and a vague memory of what happened on Tuesday.

The Great Guessing Game

I’d work on one project, switch to another, answer a few emails, jump into a meeting, fix a website issue and return to the original project.

At the end of the day, I’d try to work out how much time I’d spent on each client.

About an hour on that newsletter, perhaps? Half an hour on the website? And what about those emails and the little problem I solved?

Was that yesterday or Monday?

Did it take ten minutes or forty-five?

Cue the mental gymnastics.

Freelancers become remarkably talented at estimating. We estimate project timelines, workloads, budgets and how long it will take to finish work before we can finally close the laptop.

But estimates aren’t the same as records.

When you’re consistently underestimating your time, your invoices reflect that. You charge for the obvious deliverables while absorbing the work that surrounds them.

And remote working adds another layer. When your entire working world lives on one screen, switching between clients takes seconds. Your brain is doing a relay race between projects, and remembering to record every lap doesn’t always make the cut.

The result? You can finish a busy day feeling as though you’ve achieved an enormous amount, yet still struggle to explain exactly how much time you’ve spent on each client.

Being busy and being paid fairly aren’t automatically the same thing.

Enter Time Flies

Eventually, I realised I needed something better than my memory, my best guesses and a vague sense of guilt whenever I added another line to an invoice.

I needed a way to capture the work as it happened.

Not a complicated system that required me to stop every five minutes, fill in a form and document my entire existence before I could get back to the job.

Because let’s be honest. If tracking your time becomes another job in itself, you’re probably going to avoid doing it.

I wanted something that understood the reality of freelance life: the constant switching between projects, the little tasks, the interruptions and the work that happens in the background.

And so, Time Flies started taking shape.

The idea is simple: make it easier to keep track of the time you actually spend working, without relying on your memory to reconstruct the day after it’s already disappeared.

It’s being built around the real frustrations of freelancing because those frustrations aren’t theoretical for me. I’ve lived them.

I’ve been the freelancer who forgets to count the five-minute task, rounds down because it feels more reasonable and remembers the obvious work while overlooking everything required to get there.

Time Flies is my attempt to change that.

Not by turning freelancers into obsessive timekeeping robots, but by giving us better visibility over where our time goes and helping us make more informed decisions about how we charge for it.

Because fair billing shouldn’t require a photographic memory.

Your Time Has Value, Even When the Task Is Tiny

One of the biggest lessons I’ve had to learn is that the value of a task isn’t necessarily measured by how long it takes.

Sometimes, a client asks a question that takes two minutes to answer because you’ve spent years developing the knowledge and experience needed to answer it.

Sometimes, a website fix takes five minutes because you already know exactly where to look.

The client benefits from those minutes, but also from the expertise that makes them possible.

That doesn’t mean every two-minute task needs to become a separate invoice line. How you bill depends on your agreements, pricing model and relationship with your clients.

But it does mean you should understand how much time you’re spending, even when you ultimately choose not to charge for every minute individually.

There’s a difference between deliberately giving a client a little extra and accidentally giving away hours because you haven’t counted them.

One is a business decision.

The other is a leak in the bucket.

And if you’re running a business, it’s rather useful to know where the leaks are.

More Control, Less Guesswork

For me, the real promise of Time Flies isn’t about squeezing every last second out of a working day.

It’s about having control.

It’s knowing how long a project actually takes, understanding which clients require more support than expected and spotting the difference between a profitable project and one that’s quietly eating into your evenings.

It’s being able to make decisions based on something more substantial than a hunch.

Maybe I decide not to charge for a quick favour. That’s fine. But I want that to be a conscious decision, not an accidental habit.

Most importantly, I want to finish work knowing that the time I’ve invested has been accounted for. Not necessarily billed down to the last second, but recognised for what it is: time spent working.

Because the goal of freelancing isn’t to work every waking hour. It’s to build a business that allows you to earn a living, enjoy your work and have a life outside it.

Preferably one involving sunshine, a beach and a coffee that hasn’t gone cold while you answer an email.

So, Why Time Flies?

Because time really does fly when you’re having fun.

It flies when you’re deep in a creative project, solving a problem or chatting to a client about an exciting idea. And it flies when you’re answering those supposedly insignificant little questions that somehow occupy a surprising amount of your working day.

But just because time flies doesn’t mean it should disappear from your accounts.

Time Flies is being built for freelancers, remote workers and digital professionals who want a clearer picture of their working hours without adding another layer of admin to an already busy day.

It’s built from lived experience, a fair amount of frustration and the realisation that loving your job shouldn’t mean undervaluing your time.

I’m building the tool I wish I’d had all along. One designed to help me keep track of my work, understand my time and take back a little more control over my business.

And if it means fewer undercharged invoices, better business decisions and more guilt-free walks on the beach?

Well, that’s time very well spent.

Time Flies. Your time counts.