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Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning.

This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is to try acting like a lawyer or an accountant for one work week.

Track your time and think of yourself as billing it to different projects.

The experience will likely be enlightening

and give you some ideas

of how to best spend your working hours.

So I have spoken with lots of lawyers and accountants over the years.

Many have told me about having to bill their working

hours to different clients. That means tracking their time, often in small increments like

six minutes, that is, one-tenth of an hour. These tend to be highly paid folks, and six minutes for a $500 an hour

lawyer is $50. Still worth noting. I can tell you from these conversations that basically

no one likes tracking their time in six-minute increments.

Now, I know that often this distaste stems from billable hour requirements.

Knowing that you have to clock a certain number of hours can lead to a loud ticking sound in your mind, especially when you know that any time off

is just borrowing time from the future. But even in the absence of that, or even if the billable hour

target is quite reasonable, it can feel like a pain. And yet, I am always telling people to try

tracking their time for a week. Indeed, every year I lead a time tracking challenge around this time,

...