When Your Billable Work Is Slow
Has your billable work slowed down? Are you starting to feel a little anxious? Maybe a lot anxious? (If you’re fine now, but you know this feeling all too well, keep reading…)
If you don’t have a plan for addressing that slowness yet, that’s likely contributing the anxiety. Here’s one for you to consider:
First things first. Decide if you actually need and want the hours. To do this, you have to have an understanding of what you’ve billed to date, what you have left to bill to meet your hours requirement, and how much time you’ve got to realistically get those hours in. (If you don’t have a way of doing this easily, read to the end.)
Sometimes you don’t actually need the work, and you can chill out a little bit - your brain is just so conditioned to be scrambling for hours and to measure your worth by how much you bill that it is always going to panic a bit when you’re slow. Even if there’s no need for panic.
Sometimes you will need the work. If you do need the hours, I want you to have a plan of attack. Not only will that ease the anxiety, but it will make it much less likely that you overask and get too much work or underask and continue to panic because you’re slow.
Ask yourself these questions - it’ll take you five or ten minutes max:
🔹How much work do you need? How many hours? Over what time period? (I.e., “I have 20 hours over the next four weeks until discovery kicks off in my big case” is very different than “I have zero work and nothing in the hopper”)
🔹Who do you want to ask first? (You know who your favorites are…) Who is a last resort? Who is in the middle?
🔹Based on the first question, how do you want to message the ask? (Clearer is better - e.g., “I have X hours over the next few weeks” or “I need two new deals”)
🔹How many asks do you want to make at a time? 1? 2? 4?
🔹How much time in between asks? 4 hours? 12 hours? 24 hours?
🔹How many asks do you want to make of your favorites before you move to the next group?
🔹How do you want to make the asks? In person? Phone? Email? (If you’re really slow, I’d put them in email even if you are asking some other way - so that you have evidence that you asked on a regular basis but there wasn’t any work. Just in case you need to explain why your hours were low at some point…)
Use these answers to create your plan and then implement it.
If the above was helpful at all, this is a small taste of what I’m covering in my free webinar Billing Your Time - Tuesday December 12, 2023 at 1pm EST, part of my free monthly Survival School for Associate webinar series.
My goal is to help make billing your time easier and help you generally feel better about working in a billable hour model.
I’ll be giving you a customizable spreadsheet that will help you track how many hours you’ve billed and what you have left for the remainder of the year, along with lots of other strategies and mindset shifts.
You can sign up to attend (and get the replay and the spreadsheet) here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_LX3EcXgGQRSClMTfjuJpjg
