How I’m spending my (indie) time so far

I’m a couple of weeks into indie life and things are going pretty well. It may be a side effect of having done most of my work on the side for so long, but I haven’t hit any real surprises yet.

Sure, there’s stress about workspace and finding the right balance between work and home life, but except for being late for a phone call today, nothing’s really come off the rails.

I’ve been interested in where my time goes, so starting last week, I have been tracking it with an iOS app called Hours.

Hours can be incredibly fine-grained for billable hours, but I’m using it to track my time in big buckets. I’m less interested in how much time any one individual task takes me as I am in where chunks of time go. I ran an export of my hours last week and the results can be seen here:

My work falls into four main buckets: Relay FM, this website, consulting and freelance writing. For those bad at math, I exactly clocked 38 work hours from Monday, August 10 to Saturday, August 15.

There are no real surprises in this chart to me. The hours break down about how I felt they would break down, with Relay FM taking up about half my time and everything else going down from there. I suspect that consulting number will shrink as I wrap up some stuff for my former employer, but for now, I think this balance works. It’s a decent reflection of where my income is, which is encouraging. If I was spending 50% of my time for 15% of my income, I’d be worried, but so far, so good.