100 dollars per hour

Earlier, I mentioned my rate of $ 100 per hour. I got dozens of comments with the general meaning of “getting so much immodest.” And no one said "work so little immodestly." For some reason, it is believed that you need to work at least 40 hours a week. Society has set us up:

• need to work a lot
• life must be hard
• time should not be enough.

“Welcome to real life. It sucks, but you'll get used to it, ”says Friends .

How much is my time?

Calculating your hourly rate is easy: we divide the salary by the number of working hours. If you get at least $ 10 an hour, you'll find tons of places to save.

For myself, I accepted a rate of $ 100 per hour, primarily due to the fact that I work part-time only in the mornings.

It's not worth it

It is worth finding out the price of your time, how you can score on unprofitable cases. Last week I went to the Stanislavsky Theater at the “Barber of Seville” and forgot a bottle of wine in the locker. Wine cost 287 rubles, go to the theater 15 minutes there and 15 minutes back. It turns out that with an hourly rate of up to 574 rubles, it’s profitable, otherwise it’s more profitable not to pick it up.

An example of squandering
Surprisingly, even large banks with a staff of qualified economists do not always resort to such an analysis. My friend received a call from Citibank asking to pay off a debt of ... 90 kopecks. According to the most conservative estimates, only a minute of the operator’s work on the phone costs one and a half rubles. Add the costs of the call center office, equipment, insurance, taxes. Add the work of the office, where a friend came to pay off the debt, the operators, in the end the cost of paper!

Here are examples of where you can save:

• I don’t go to self-service laundries , where you wait when you wash - this is a real time cemetery. On them you can hang a scoreboard with lost money. Some kind of jackpot amount, just the opposite.
  

• I order via the Internet instead of a trip around the city
• I choose the nearest store , not a cheap one. Out-of-town Auchans with traffic jams and bursts take up more time allotted by life than car accidents with human casualties.
• I ride the subway instead of the car (more on this in the chapter on the point of discomfort )
• I rent an apartment closer to work - with the temptation to find housing more quickly in the area is cheaper, in practice, the loss of time here is enormous! According to one study, people spending more than 40 minutes on the road should get 40% more to be equivalent to happy work.
• Hired a housekeeper
• Finally, life outsourcing : thanks to a service with caring secretaries, you can fix a car without taking off your slippers and many more things, with the mere thought of which your mouth becomes sour.
• I do not insure the car . You should see the unsurpassed speed and flexibility that car services provide for cash .
• Please provide examples in the comments. Karma is the least I have to thank you.

I write this article in my favorite Backpack system and submit it to layout to publish on the hub and the website of my company. In the nineties I typeset well and quickly; Now it’s unprofitable.

This is what this Backpack article looks like.

Work for an idea?

Work for an idea is a cover for free or poorly paid work. Ideas by ideas, but work must be paid in full. Not less than our hourly rate. It turns out that it is unprofitable to sell junk on molotok.ru: books, icons, alarms - at least until you put it on stream.

But that is not all. In accordance with the principle of 20/80, for 20% of the time they give 80% of earnings. The task is to isolate these 20%.

We deal with the user interface , icons , icons , and again the icons . This is what we do best. To get rid of poorly paid, unprofitable work, I consistently refused orders :

1. Once I refused a second customer order, which, with impeccable British correctness, requested five times a redrawing of the keychain.
2. Introduced a minimum order of $ 1,000 or 25,000 p. for the first call (for existing customers who need some trifle for a new version of the product, of course, there is no such restriction). We say on the site:
   

   For new customers, the minimum order is 25,000 p. This minimum allows us to serve our existing customers more efficiently. ”

3. He refused the second order from one of Gazprom's subsidiaries. A year has passed from the day the quotation was accepted until the receipt of money and the beginning of work. My account Anyone was not idle: we took part in several meetings on the other side of the city. Once at such a meeting I was given the opportunity to sign the minutes (on paper!) Of the meeting that took place a year ago. It became clear that for the year we did not quite move.
4. We do any graphic design for our clients: corporate sites, booklets and business cards. But with new customers, we start only with specialized things : we already know how to do them quickly. Before making a decision, the score was 1: 2, that is, in one case we got a satisfied client, and in two - we crashed into a cake, but the client was still unsatisfied and the interface, of course, did not order either.
5. I stopped (with rare exceptions) going to meetings . This happened after I went to Noginsk. It took half a day, and on the way back I was fined, then I was killed by KAMAZ. I spent 6 hours ($ 600), $ 700 + an hour of repair time. I lost $ 1,400 without earning anything yet.

The key point is not to go to meetings - not to ask if you can avoid the meeting, but to apologize for not coming. Like that:

Alexei,

Unfortunately, I cannot come to the meeting; I apologize. Please send screenshots of your system, or give access to the test version, and we will be able to offer you the procedure for further work and deadlines.

Sorry again! Thank you very much for understanding my desire to work for you as efficiently as possible.

Well, of course, you don’t even need to apologize if you are in New York. More about travel is in a separate chapter.

Have we lost revenue? Of course. Did you win by money? Without a doubt. Our account has less work than two had before, and designers do not need to read endless lists of changes. We save on salaries, office, we have less tedious work and more than the one for which we became designers.

I can not afford it

Sometimes everything seems to me to be demagogy. In the end, I can not afford to scatter wine and customers.

Life becomes filled with deeds. For example, I need to bargain hard with a shoemaker about the price of foam for cleaning shoes: I win 50 rubles at the first moment (profitable), and then an additional few minutes to get another 10 (unprofitable).

Things are getting bigger and bigger. Some are relegated to the background. Which of them? The most difficult or unpleasant. For example, I need to find a fashion seamstress to sew my invention: an ergonomic sports bag (I have no idea how to look for such people) and restore rights in return for the lost ones (gaevnya is my anti-utopia of organizing affairs).

Of course, this is wrong. Things are important: rights are simply necessary. It is not even converted into money; A taxi is not a replacement for a car in the desert of Namibia or in the vastness of Virginia. A bag is an invention that I treasure; hobby; brainchild. At least I want one copy myself, as a maximum to do business.

You need to throw away some others. What kind? I lower the bid and immediately understand what is needed. Is it nice to know: “Dude, have you overestimated yourself?” No; it’s much nicer just to bargain with a shoemaker and not bother with your head. Is it helpful? Oh yeah.

The decision to lower the bid is temporary. In the end, all decisions are temporary. “Everything is changing,” says Dr. House. “Everything passes,” say those who are more optimistic.

What doesn't count?

Oh, these are the most wonderful moments of life! Time with friends, with a beloved, with a child, sports. In my case, opera and concerts take many hours every month - even if you do not take into account that you still need to get to the Vienna Opera. I sit in front of Bruegel’s “Reapers” picture until I freeze (the tempera fades, so the room is kept low). My favorite sport - long-distance running - takes a breakthrough of time, but the pleasure of a morning run along the Stockholm embankments is priceless. For the sake of this, everything was started. A bottle and foam for shoes are resting.

PS Does anyone have a familiar fashion seamstress? Need to sew a sports bag.