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Productivity

Planning and tracking tools for people who bill for their time: working out a rate that actually covers your costs, and adding up the hours you have already worked.

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Overview

About productivity

If you sell time, two numbers decide whether the business works: what you charge for an hour, and how many hours you can genuinely bill. Most people who go independent get the first one by looking at what they used to earn and dividing by 2,080, which produces a rate that quietly loses money from the first month.

The reason is the second number. A salaried year contains paid holiday, sick leave, training and a great deal of time that is not billable but is still paid. Working for yourself, none of that is covered by anyone else, and neither is the time you spend on sales, admin, invoicing and the work you do not win. After all of it, many freelancers bill 60–70% of their available hours. Pricing on 100% is the most common and most expensive mistake in independent work.

These tools make both numbers explicit. Work backwards from the income you need to the rate that produces it, with holidays, business costs and tax set-aside included: then track the hours you actually bill so the assumption gets tested against reality rather than staying a guess.

Start here

Free

Hourly Rate Calculator

Almost every pricing problem an independent worker has traces back to a rate set too low at the start. This works backwards from your target income, factoring in time off, business costs, tax set-aside and a realistic billable percentage, and shows the hourly and daily rates that follow: plus how much the answer moves if your utilisation slips.

Open Hourly Rate Calculator

What it does

  • Target take-home income as the starting point
  • Accounts for holidays, sick days and admin time
  • Includes business costs and tax set-aside
  • Hourly and daily rate outputs
  • Billable-utilisation sensitivity

3 tools

All productivity tools

Plan, track and price your time.

Why they help

What makes these productivity tools worth using

  • Start from the income you need

    Work backwards from take-home pay to the rate that produces it, rather than forwards from a number that felt about right.

  • Unbillable time counted honestly

    Holidays, sick days, admin and sales all consume hours you cannot invoice. Leaving them out is what makes a rate look adequate and behave otherwise.

  • See how sensitive the rate is

    Change your assumed billable percentage and watch the required rate move. The relationship is steeper than most people expect.

  • Hours added up without a spreadsheet

    Start and finish times with breaks, totalled by day and week, including shifts that cross midnight. No formula to copy wrong.

  • Hours priced as you go

    Tracked time converts straight into a billable value at your rate, so the gap between what you worked and what you invoice stays visible.

  • Exports that go somewhere useful

    Get totals out as CSV so they can go to a client, an accountant, or straight into an invoice, instead of being retyped.

In practice

How these tools get used

Three situations these come up in, written the way they actually happen.

  1. A developer going independent

    Setting a first rate that actually works

    You have a target take-home figure and a former salary to anchor against. Factoring in unpaid holiday, software costs, insurance, tax set-aside and a realistic 65% billable rate produces a number noticeably higher than the naive salary-divided-by-hours calculation, and one that still leaves you solvent in a quiet month.

  2. A consultant

    Deciding whether a day rate is worth it

    A client offers a fixed day rate for a three-month engagement. Converting it against your required hourly rate, and accounting for the work you cannot take on while committed, shows whether the security is worth the discount.

  3. An agency

    Turning a month of hours into an invoice

    Timesheets arrive as start and finish times with breaks. Totalling them by week, applying the overtime threshold and multiplying by the client's rate produces the billable figure that goes straight onto the invoice, without a spreadsheet anyone has to maintain.

FAQ

Productivity questions

The things people most often want to know before they start.

The rate calculator is for setting a price before the work, from the income you need and the hours you can realistically bill. The timesheet calculator is for adding up hours that have already happened. Project profitability is the one that closes the loop, taking a fee you actually charged and the hours it actually took and telling you what the job paid per hour.

As a loop rather than a list. You set a rate at the start from an estimate of billable hours, record what the work really took as you go, then check finished jobs against the rate you meant to earn. The second and third steps are what make the first one better next time: a rate set from a guess and never revisited is the most common reason a freelancer works more and earns the same.

Project pricing rewards you for working efficiently and gives the client certainty, but only if the scope is genuinely clear. Hourly suits open-ended or exploratory work. Either way, you need to know your hourly number first, because it is what tells you whether a project fee is acceptable.

Multiply by the hours in your working day, then decide whether to discount. Many people offer a small reduction for a committed full day, but be careful: a booked day usually blocks other work, so the discount is not free.

Almost always because the hours were longer than the quote assumed, not because the price was wrong. Revisions, calls, email and the admin around a job are real hours that rarely appear in an estimate. Comparing the two figures is the point of having both tools: the gap tells you whether to raise your rate or to scope more tightly, and those are different problems with different fixes.

You should include a set-aside for it. Working from gross figures and dealing with tax later is how people end up short at the deadline. Treat it as a cost that comes out before the income you actually keep.

At least annually, and whenever your costs or demand change materially. Rates that stay fixed for years quietly lose value to inflation while your experience increases.

Keep exploring

Other tools people tend to need alongside these.

Get started with productivity tools

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