One of my goals in writing on TrippAtkins.com is to equip and empower young adults (20-somethings) who are feeling disenfranchised with life and work and trying to find the right balance in life. Here’s my situation. I am an attorney and my wife is a CPA. Before our son was born, both of us spent many hours at work. We both enjoy our work and didn’t think twice about spending extra time there because we could spend the rest of our time at home together or with friends. Then our son was born. Now, I don’t have the desire to stay at the office past 5:30 when we close. I want to get home as quickly as possible. Actually, since Cole was born I have been noticing how much time is wasted just because I "have" to be at the office all day. There has to be a better way, right?
One of the things people in our generation are doing differently now, more than ever before, is getting a work model that fits with their life rather than molding their life to fit their work model. Let’s look at the way things have been done for the last fifty years or so in the U.S. Companies are open for business Monday through Friday from8 am until 5 pm. That means if you are an employee of one of those companies you are required/expected to be there during those hours. You receive a paycheck based on the hours you work and some measure of your value to the company.
I work in the legal field which is still very "archaic" in how things are done. Most law firms bill clients by the hour. So immediately the only way to become more profitable is to bill more hours. While the hourly rates can reach into the $300-400 dollar range there is never a threshold that says, "okay you are billing enough." That high hourly rate basically acts as a set of golden handcuffs that keep you at work. While the hourly rates may change depending on jobs and industries the principle is the same: simply exchanging your time for a paycheck is not how people in our generation want to earn a living…in fact it is simply unacceptable to most of us.
A new form of income generation is emerging – value billing. Actually it is, more correctly, re-emerging because this is how things were done prior to the hourly work model. Value billing is where you are paid based on the value that you provide the client, company or customer, not based on the amount of time that you spend. So rather than bill by the hour you bill by the project. This allows you to leverage your time because you know what you are going to earn for the completion of the project if it takes you one hour to complete or if it takes you 40 hours to complete.
So how does this help the disenfranchised young adult wanting more time for their family? It totally provides you with time freedom. The way I like to look at it is like this: it is going to take a lot of your time to create a successful business or to generate your desired income; however, those hours do not have to necessarily be from 8 to 5. What if you work better at night, or really early in the morning. What if your son has a baseball tournament or you have other more important family matters than just sitting at a desk? When you control the work rather than the time for the work you allow yourself to be much more productive and leverage your time and your business.
In the book "The Four Hour Work Week" Timothy Ferriss discusses a principle known as "Parkinson’s Law." Parkinson’s Law says that work will expand to fill up the time allotted for its completion. What? Basically, if you set aside two weeks to complete a project, the project is going to take you two weeks to complete. If you only set aside three days, you will probably complete the project in three days. From a job perspective – if you are required to sit at your desk from 8 to 5 your work is going to expand to fill that entire time. But, if you are free to do what you want after you complete your work, just think how fast you can get everything finished up. Consider this, do you ever notice how efficient you are the day before you leave for vacation? You always get more done on that one day than you have in the month before.
