I thought I was billing about 70% of my working hours. The real number was 41%. I ran a simple experiment: I tracked every working hour for 60 days. Not just billable work. Everything. Client calls, proposals, admin, marketing, chasing invoices, fixing scope creep I should have charged for, social media, reading newsletters that somehow became two hours. Here is what I found. Where the hours actually went Billable client work: 41% Proposals and sales calls (mostly unpaid): 14% Admin and invoicing: 11% Context switching and recovery time: 9% Fixing things I should have charged for: 8% Marketing: 7% Everything else: 10% I was working 45-50 hours a week and billing about 18-20 of them. The things that surprised me Context switching has a real cost. I knew this in theory. But seeing it as a block of time in my own data was different. Every time I jumped between a client project and a proposal and back again, I was losing 15-20 minutes of productive focus. Over a week it adds up to almost a full day.…