100 dollars per hour

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

• need a lot of work
• life must be difficult
• time should not be enough.

“Welcome to real life. It sucks, but you get used to it, ”they say in the TV series Friends .

How much is my time?

It is easy to calculate your hourly rate: we divide the salary by the number of working hours. If you get at least $ 10 an hour, you will find a lot of places to save money.

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

It's not worth it

It is necessary to find out the price of your time, how to score on unprofitable things. Last week I went to the Stanislavsky Theater at The Barber of Seville and forgot a bottle of wine in the storage room. The wine cost 287 rubles, 15 minutes to go to the theater and 15 minutes back. It turns out that with an hourly rate of up to 574 rubles, the business is profitable, otherwise it is more advantageous not to take it away.

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

Here are examples of where you can save:

• I do not go to the self-service laundry , where you wait when it is washed - this is a real graveyard of time. They can hang the 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 cheap. Suburban Ascans with traffic jams and queues take more time allotted by life than car accidents with human victims.
• I ride the subway instead of the car (more about this in the chapter about the point of discomfort )
• Renting an apartment closer to work - if you are tempted to find housing more spaciously in the area is cheaper, in practice the time wasted is enormous! According to one study, people who spend more than 40 minutes on the road should receive 40% more to be equivalent to job satisfaction.
• Hired housekeeper
• Finally, life outsourcing : thanks to the service with caring secretaries, you can repair the car without removing slippers and many more things, at the mere thought of which it becomes sour in your mouth.
• I do not insure the car . You would see the unsurpassed speed and flexibility that service stations 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 give it to the layout to publish on Habré and the site of my company. In the nineties, I grew good and fast; now it is unprofitable.

This is the article in the Backpack.

Work for an idea?

Work for an idea is a cover for free or poorly paid work. Ideas ideas, but the work must be paid in full. Not less than our hourly rate. It turns out that it is not profitable to sell junk at molotok.ru: books, badges, alarm clocks - 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 give 80% of earnings. The task is to isolate these 20%.

We deal with the user interface , icons , icons , and icons again . 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 flawless British correctness, requested a keychain redraw five times .
2. Entered a minimum order of $ 1,000 or 25,000 p. for the first call (for existing customers who need some kind of kickshaw for the new version of the product, of course, there is no such restriction). We are talking on the site:
   

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

3. Refused the second order from one of the daughters of Gazprom. From the day of acceptance of the commercial offer to the receipt of money and the beginning of work a year has passed. We didn’t have nothing to do with Anyone’s account: we took part in several meetings at the other end of the city. Once at such a meeting I was given to sign a protocol (on paper!) Of a meeting that took place a year ago. It became clear that in a year we did not move at all.
4. We make any graphic design for our clients: corporate sites, booklets and business cards. But with new customers we start only with core things : we 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 broke into a cake, but the client still remained unhappy and the interface, of course, also did not order.
5. I stopped (with rare exceptions) to go to meetings . It happened after I went to Noginsk. It took half a day, and on the way back I got on a fine, then Kamaz got me. I spent 6 hours ($ 600), $ 700 + an hour to repair. I lost $ 1,400 without earning anything.

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

Alexey,

Unfortunately, I can not 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 a procedure for further work and deadlines.

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

And, of course, you don’t even need to apologize if you are in New York. Read more about travel in a separate chapter.

Have we lost in income? Of course. Did you win money? Without a doubt. Our account has less work than it once did, and designers don't need to read endless lists of changes. We save on salaries, office space, we have less boring work and more than the one for which we became designers.

I can not afford it

Sometimes I myself think everything is demagogy. In the end, I can not afford to be splashed with 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 extra 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 seamstress designer to stitch my invention: an ergonomic gym bag (I have no idea how to look for such people) and restore the rights in return for the lost ones (gaunea is my anti-utopia of organizing affairs).

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

Need to throw away some others. What kind? I reduce the bid and immediately understand what is needed. Is it nice to know: “Dude, have you overestimated yourself?” No; it's much nicer to just bargain with the shoemaker and not bother with it. Helpful? Oh yeah.

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

What is uncountable?

Oh, these are the most beautiful moments of life! Time with friends, with my beloved, with a child, sports. In my case, opera and concerts take many hours a month - even if you don’t 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 temperate fades, so they keep the temperature low in the hall). My favorite sport - long-distance running - takes time, but the pleasure of a morning jog along the embankments of Stockholm is priceless. For this, everything was started. Bottle and foam for shoes rest.

PS Does anyone have a familiar seamstress designer? Need to sew a gym bag.