My time is the only thing I can't invoice twice

I can reuse code.

I can reuse a template, a contract, a server configuration, a polite way of saying no.

What I can't reuse is an afternoon.

Once I've sold it to a client, it's gone. I can't invoice it again. I can't spend it on our own product. I can't even spend it doing nothing, which some days would be the most productive option.

It sounds obvious. It took me years to feel it.

The hour that goes somewhere else

Here's the trade-off nobody puts on a slide.

We fund our products with services. That's the plan, and I like the plan. No investors, no clock, patient money.

But every hour a client pays for is an hour that doesn't go into the product. Not a metaphor. A literal hour. The same hands, the same head, the same afternoon.

So every time I say yes to a new job, I'm also saying "not yet" to something of ours. Nobody hears the second part. Including me, most of the time.

Every yes to a client is a quiet "not yet" to your own product. The trick is to hear it.

The cheapest hours are the most expensive

This changed how I look at small jobs.

A small job feels harmless. A quick fix. Twenty minutes. Nothing worth a quote.

But small jobs don't come alone. They come with context switching, follow-ups and the time it takes to remember where you were before you got interrupted. A twenty-minute job can easily eat an afternoon. And the afternoon is the part I can't invoice twice.

That's one of the reasons we're focusing on maintenance plans instead of loose favours. A plan has a shape. It has limits. It lets me know, at the start of the month, which hours are already sold and which ones are still mine.

It's not glamorous. It's a fence. Fences are underrated.

Why I still say yes

I don't want this to sound like a complaint. It isn't.

The services pay for everything. Without them, there would be no product to feel guilty about. The hour I sell today is what lets me spend a different hour, later, on something that belongs to us.

The point isn't to sell fewer hours. It's to know what each one costs. Not in euros. In the other thing it could have been.

Economists call this opportunity cost. I call it the afternoon I sold.

And there's a corollary I'm still learning, conveniently in August: an hour of rest can't be invoiced twice either. If I sell it, it's gone too.

So I'm trying to keep a few afternoons for myself.

Unbillable. Unreusable. Entirely mine. In theory.

P.S. "Trying" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. More than I do on some afternoons.