Wake up call

You're probably working fewer hours than you think. I know I was.

As someone who works for myself, there's no clock in and no clock out. For a long time I just assumed I was putting in solid hours because I was at my desk most of the day.

Then I started tracking with a stopwatch, pausing it every time I went to do any non work related stuff, and found out I was clocking around half of what I intended.

Bit of a wake up call honestly.

What I'm doing now

So I tried something slightly different. Instead of a stopwatch counting up, I switched to a countdown timer for 9 hours on my iPad clock app. This way I can see the exact time the timer will finish, and every time I paused it for a break, the finish time would creep later, which made me a lot more intentional about whether I actually needed the break.

Not saying this is the answer for all y’all solo creatives, it's just something that's been working for me lately and it felt worth sharing.