<HTML>In a message dated 5/24/02 8:49:34 AM Central Daylight Time, jorge1ml@cmich.edu writes: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">Hi Willem,   I never spend 10 to 20 hours on administrative work and neither does my brother, a private sector RPT of 30 + years.!  About 1/4 of my income is from private business and all of his income is.   Unless one has a big rebuilding shop, employees, huge overhead, retail work, or just loves paper work,  I don't think it should average more than a couple minutes a day. -Mike  </BLOCKQUOTE> Mike I never realized how much time I was spending on paper work until I hired a lady to do some computer work for me. Back in '95 I bought a new computer, The data base program on my old computer would not transfer to my new computer, so I hired her to work about 10 hours a week to retype my customer file. I thought, while I've got her, why not give her my paper work to do also. After about three weeks, I noticed she never got to the work I had hired her to do. She was spending the 10 hours just keeping up with my paper work, which included entering new customers, updated old ones, filing the paper work, entering bills, writing out checks for bills being paid, filing that paper work, and even answering the phone and setting up appointments. When I started thinking about it, I mentally added up the time I used to spend, and it came out to about 2 hours a day. Maybe not all at once, and not 2 hours every day. But over a weeks time, that is what it came out to be. And I work pretty fast, and don't even call my customers, like some tuner do. I think most techs don't realize the amount of time is spent doing non productive things. Just like I discussed before, when we were talking about how much time spend tuning and repairing the school pianos. A few minutes, here, a half an hour there, and the next thing you know, you've got 8 - 10 hours. And some might be more than that. Maybe others don't spend that long, but this is my experience. Wim </HTML>