How to charge for the work around the work

A client calls while you’re out for a walk. You talk for 40 minutes. You answer their question, they thank you, you hang up.

Did you invoice that?

Most freelancers don’t. Not because they decide not to — because they forget. By invoice time, that call was three weeks ago. The call history might jog your memory. The amount probably won’t.

This is billable time. It just happens in the spaces between the “real” work.

What counts as billable

Everything that uses your time for a specific client is billable. That includes:

• Phone and video calls
• Email threads that take real time — not a one-line reply
• Reading and annotating a brief
• Pre-call preparation
• Async feedback review
• Admin that only exists because of that client’s project

None of these produce a tangible deliverable. All of them take your time. That’s the line.

The distinction between billable and non-billable isn’t “did I create something you can see?” It’s “did this work exist because of this client?”

Why these hours disappear

Timers don’t help here. You’re not going to stop mid-walk to start a Toggl session. You won’t think to do it during a 15-minute email exchange. By the time you’re at your desk, the moment is gone.

Most freelancers lose billable hours not from one large gap but from dozens of small ones. A 40-minute call. A 20-minute brief review. Two rounds of async feedback. Across a week, that’s two or three hours. Across a year, it’s weeks.

The fix is a calendar entry

Block the time on your calendar — either during the work, or immediately after from your call history.

A call that just ended: open your calendar, create a 40-minute event, name it [Client][Project] Call — scope questions. Done in 30 seconds. The event is timestamped. It will appear in your monthly analysis. It will show on an invoice.

The naming matters. [Client][Project] Brief review — 20 min is a billable line item. “Brief review” as a mental note is not.

This is exactly what the bracket naming convention is for — not just tracking focused work sessions, but catching everything that belongs to a client.

What that actually adds up to

One CTO working part-time freelance takes 1h30 of client calls per week while walking, commuting, exercising. None of it tracked. At €120/h: 72 hours a year, €8,640 not invoiced.

He started creating calendar events immediately after each call — not during. From his call history: who called, when, how long. Thirty seconds of work per call.

That’s the billable time you’re not billing.

Meetings are the same thing

A two-hour kickoff call is a two-hour billable block. Weekly client check-ins belong in the project’s time. Most freelancers don’t invoice for meetings because the client seems to expect them for free.

They don’t. A meeting is work. Name it like work.

One habit that closes the gap

At the end of each day, or right after a call: check what happened for clients. Anything that took time and isn’t already on the calendar — add it. Give it a name that will make sense on an invoice three weeks from now.

This takes five minutes. The amount it recovers is not five minutes.

When your calendar has these entries, invoicing at month-end is just counting. The admin time. The calls. The brief reviews. None of it disappears if it’s on the calendar.

Timescanner reads your calendar and totals time by client — so the 40-minute call you took on your lunch break shows up in your monthly analysis. Works with any iCal-compatible calendar.