Do you track your pitching time?

This is not a baseball post, I'm from the UK, I don't really do baseball.

However as an independent consultant I have to pitch. I have to pitch for work. And that takes time, unpaid time.

I have started tracking the unpaid time to see how much a client or future work (that I don't have yet) has cost me.

So for each client or inquiry for work I create a new tracking item. I'm doing this in Google Spreadsheets.

I total up all the small tasks, emails, calls, research and maintain a tally, which I put an hourly rate against, so that I know how much the client has cost.

I might use this to calculate rates for particular clients so I can offset the unpaid work against paid work. And I can also see if a particular client is costing me too much for unpaid work.

But I currently get benefit from this because I can see that certain activities take me too long and I need to identify strategies and techniques for making them faster.

e.g.

• Creating a proposal document takes too much time, therefore
• Create a template
• Automatically generate the contents from a mind map tool
• Create 'snippets' to reuse in proposals
• etc.

I'm not a big fan of metrics, but I do measure and track my time to help identify areas I need to introduce efficiencies.

Does anyone else do this? How are you using the information to guide your charging strategy.