Realistic Look on Hours I spent on My Handmade Business

As the end of the year is quickly approaching, I was thinking back of the list of things I wanted to do in year 2016. I wrote in this post back in 2015 that I wanted to track the number of hours I spend working on my business. The main part of the business is designing and making wedding dresses. A less time consuming, but equally important aspect of the business, is the culmination of other less time consuming projects. These are things like selling on handmade market places like etsy and creema, participating in various photoshoots and working on other sewing projects like custom kimono dresses and costumes. This past year, at the end of every work night, I would keep a log of the hours I spent in excel. 

It is pretty simple; I only have three columns – date, hour and the specifics of my activity. Between January 1st to December 23rd (total of 358 days), I spent the total of 737 hours. On average, I spent two hours every day working toward my business. It is about 14.41 hours per week. In reality, I don’t work on Sundays and there are some days that I did not get to put my hours toward because of travel or family. So it might be more accurate to say that I spend 2.8 hours, or approximately three hours every weekday after/before my 9-5 job on my personal business.

I included the following to my log:
– Sewing time
– Time I spent on buying materials
– Blogging
– Writing newsletter
– Taking and editing photos
– Consultation time with clients
– Networking events or parties
– Time I spent on making my own clothes. Although it was not many hours, I counted this into log as my study time and material for blogging.
– Updating etsy and creema shops
– Accounting and taxes

I did not include the following:
– Transportation time from home to meetings or to fabric shops
– Knitting I do for pleasure
– Time spent at post office to ship orders
– Updating SNS

For the upcoming year, I am hoping to spend a similar amount of hours. About 2 hours a day would be a good goal for me to keep up my work/life balance. I am lucky to have a full time job that I can work from home so that I don’t loose time in transit. My kids go to bed at 7pm and don’t get up until 7am, which allows me to have the night and early morning dedicated for what I like to do. Looking back, the majority of time was spent on sewing, which is fun for me but I need to spend more time on marketing/networking. This will bring more business but would necessitate a decrease in time on the sewing machine. But there is the rub, if I cannot have more business but less time to sew. So, I need a sewing assistant who can come over to my house and help. So…. finding that person is my next goal.

I will continue to log my work hours in 2017. It would be interesting to compare again this time next year.