I was listening to some kids (ages 9-12 I guess) talking at the table next to me in Subway the other night. Their mother was talking about all they needed to do for the upcoming weekend and the oldest said confidently, “Don’t worry mom. It’s only Friday night. We’ve got plenty of time.” I loved the look on the mother’s face. Obviously she knew something they didn’t, but she played along in all seriousness.

“Oh,” she said. “So how long do you think it will take you to clean up your room?”
The girl’s eyes rolled around in her head.
“Mom! Not more than 15 minutes,” she said.
“How long did it take last week?” mom asked.
The girl frowned.
“All morning.”
“But it’s cleaner this time, so it’ll take less time?” the mother prodded.
At stake was a movie matinee apparently.
The conversation continued. The kids had been promised pizza and movie if they finished their chores, cleaned their rooms and finished their homework. If they didn’t get it all done, no movie. No pizza.
What was so fascinating about the conversation for me was how the mother kept coming back, not to nag, but to ask questions about time.

She reminded her children of the reality of time, not challenging the endless sense of time that children have, but getting them to look at how long things really took, not what they thought they took. Apparently her prodding worked. By the time the conversation had gotten around to taking out the trash the meter was clicking and at least the oldest girl had figured out she was going to have to hustle if she wanted to make that pizza and movie deadline.

Last year I started using a FREE app for Macintosh called TimeEdition (There’s a PC version too). It allows you to track your time on projects, clients and whatever else you have going, at least as long as you’re on the computer. When you leave the computer for a few minutes it will shut itself off after giving a warning beep.

I started using it to track how much time I spent on email, on phone calls, on video games, on client projects and on just surfing. I wrote down my estimates first, then started using the tracker. It’s fast and easy to use — trust me, if it wasn’t I wouldn’t be using it! I was stunned.

A client I liked and who had hired me on several ongoing projects began to send me periodic emails throughout the day. At first they were related to the current project, then they totally stopped being about the current project, but became about “possible” projects. I wasn’t charging her for the quick answers and comments, but I tracked it for a month. In 30 days I racked up a total of 12 hours, a little over 30 minutes a day every work day for a month. But no project came out of it, although she got a lot of work done herself by consulting me for advice on small items she then paid someone else to do.

It was more like some days were 10 minutes, some were 45, but looking at my print out, I could see she had nibbled away 12 unpaid hours of consulting and advice for free. It was not her fault — It was mine for allowing it to happen. I sent her the printout and told her that I valued her as a client and a casual friend and wanted to continue our working relationship, but the next month I needed a $1,000 retainer if she wanted to continue to use me to “tweak” her emails, or advise her on different marketing ideas. She was offended. She didn’t think “a few minutes here and there” was something I should charge her for since she was a client, even if they were non-project related. Normally I would have agreed, and did agree until I saw how those “few minutes” every day added up to about $1,200 worth of billable hours a month. She was getting more free time from me than she was spending in services each month. Now I knew why.

When I returned each of her emails the next month with a reminder of our conversation and an invoice, I honored my boundaries, but apparently she didn’t respect them or my time. So she disappeared. I wasn’t too upset since I had just reclaimed 12 hours of my life each month.

I thought about that when I heard the mother talking about a more realistic approach to time management. Even as adults most of us (especially creative types) really don’t have a realistic view of what something takes. I recently quoted a new client $35,000 for a full length business book he wanted ghosted. 250 pages, lots of resources, footnotes and interviews and about a year’s worth of time plus all my writing from scratch. He was stunned. He said, “I can get someone on Elance to do it for about $500,” he said. And I smiled. “And you’ll get a $500 job.” [Ghostwriting is NEVER about the money, always about the value. You may pay someone $500 to write a book, but if no one reads it, you lose money. If you pay $35,000 and the reading is so good that people can't put it down, and recommend it to all their friends, you got a bargain for the $35,000 price tag.]

People tell me that I’ll never have people standing in line to knock down my door to ghost write at that price. I remind them I don’t need people knocking down my door or standing in line. I need one person, not 100. I’m 56. I don’t think I have several hundred full-length books worth of time left in my life. So I don’t worry about lines. I wait patiently for the handful of people who get me, want my writing and value what I bring to the project in terms of life experience, writing skill and personality. And that? I have time for.

How do you invest, spend or piddle away your time? Do you know? How much time do you give away? How many billable hours are lost? How much time do you give yourself for your own projects? Time. Start thinking about it differently. You may not have as much of it left as you thought you did.