Freelancers should aim for 20 billable hours a week, not 40. The rest goes to non-billable work like marketing and learning, which raises your rates and builds your business long-term. Trying to bill full-time is unrealistic unless you have another job.
20 hours per week. I find myself telling a lot of freelancers and contractor types that they should focus on being billable for 20 hours per week because they gotta spend the rest of their time doing other things so those 20 hours can become much more valuable sources of income and equity for them. So I actually find a lot of people are sort of looking for how they can fully bill themselves out and they say, well, I'm going to bill myself at like, you know, $80 an hour. And if I can get 40 hours a week, that's going to be, you know, 80 times $2,000 is $160,000 a year. And that's sort of my target for total income. And I gotta tell you, it almost never works out that way. It's very hard to be billable at a full-time rate unless what you really have is a job. So if what you want to do is building a practice, right, where you're going to be making, you know, high-end contractor rates, you're going to be spending more time studying, you're going to spend more time marketing and salesing and all of those things. So only bill 20 hours a week.
