My professional life from 15 September 2009 to 14 March 2010

In 2008, I developed my own system for recording my jobs/assignments. Since that time, I have been adding new features and improving the existing functionalities. In July 2009, I added a Time Management feature, which allows recording my exact working time. Each record includes date, time (from–to), job code, activity code. In this manner, I can precisely calculate how much I earn per hour for each job and I can also extract some summary statistics. So, what was I doing from 15 September 2009 to 14 March 2010?

Working time (total): 945 h 20 min
– Administration tasks: 91 h 57 min (9.73 %)
– Preparatory tasks: 69 h 43 min (7.37 %)
– Translating: 522 h 16 min (55.25 %)
– Proofreading: 225 h 28 min (23.85 %)
– Job completion tasks: 8 h 27 min (0.89 %)
– Quality assurance tasks: 10 h 26 min (1.10 %)
– Interpreting: 2 h 40 min (0.28 %)
– Transport to interpreting: 14 h 23 min (1.52 %)

Explanation:
Administration tasks – reading/answering e-mail messages (in relation to translation jobs), entering new jobs in the system, invoicing, going to post office, programming the system, updating website, writing this blog etc. This is the only type of activity which is not assigned a particular job code;
Preparatory tasks – creating/converting translation memories, preparation of files (conversion using OCR, formatting), etc.;
Job completion tasks – everything you have to do after the text is complete (sending by e-mail, using FTP etc.);
Quality assurance tasks – this is a special set of defined tasks relating to a certain class of jobs only. The client has provided certain tools, which have to be utilized for this purpose.

When was I working?
My most productive time of day is from 8:00 to 12:00 (33 % of all my working time). The period from 12:00 to 18:00 (although it’s longer by 2 hours) accounts for the same percentage – 33 %. 15 % of my working time fall in the period from 21:00 to midnight. The remaining periods of a day account for the remaining 19 % (for example only 3 % of my working time fall in the period from 2:00 to 6:00).

Are you a freelancer? Do you have any similar data in relation to your work? I would be very happy if you can provide any feedback and/or comparable data in a comment or you can send me e-mail message.