I don’t know if I’m alone out there or not, but I don’t like to give an hourly rate for my work to clients. I do have a good idea of what I want to be getting each hour (millions of Dollars), but I feel safer when communicating the price of a project as a fixed fee, or a fee between X and Y. As a consequence, I do tend to either overwork myself (more common), or underwork myself, and checking up on my pricing policy is becoming a habit.

This is easily done by taking your fixed fee, and dividing it by the hourly fee you’d like to see from similar projects. As a result, you will get the time you should spend overall on the project to get exactly the fee you wanted. To track how I’m doing, I use a great little Adobe Air application called Klok. The application is a great time tracker, I shall have to do a long review soon, but to showcase just this feature, I’ll use the Project Summary page.

As you can see, you can enter the estimated amount of time the project will take, and also your hourly fee. You can then see a bar filling up as you spend more and more time on the project, and better still, you can see the worth of the project rising. The goal on your end is to minimize the project worth because this means you have worked less on the project as expected (which means your hourly rate was higher than the one you input initial). Obviously this isn’t a “let’s see what I can get away with” game, but you might want to consider a different hourly fee, or package cost in the future.

On my end, I use the data mainly to find out how well I can estimate the time of work needed on a project. When sending a client a quote, I do work with an hourly fee in the background, so if my hourly fee is $100, and I think the project will take me 20 hours, I send a quote of $2,000. The problem with fixed fees is that if I work 25 hours, I cvan’t send an invoice for an extra $500. I still try not to give hourly rates, so I am prepared to work more, but since I am actively monitoring my performance, the times I estimate have become pretty accurate.

Do you have a similar way of measuring how much time it takes you to do things? Let us know right now!