TIL most freelancers I know don't track their actual hourly rate.

I was talking to three other writers last week. All of them just divide their project fee by the hours they guess it took. I started logging every single 15-minute block for a month. My 'real' rate on a $500 article was $22 an hour, not the $50 I thought. How do you guys actually calculate what you're making?

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phoenixgonzalez4mo ago

Holy crap, $22 an hour?? That is brutal, I would have cried. I seriously thought freelance rates were way better than that.

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markm275mo ago

Heard a buddy's rate tanked after he tracked his time.

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ward.piper5mo ago

My friend Jake started logging his hours last year, and his billable rate dropped from 95 to like 78 an hour. He realized he was spending way more time on admin than he thought. That's a tough spot, @markm27, and it seems to happen a lot when people actually look at the numbers.

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