## So how much time should you spend responding to proposal requests?
As a freelance web developer or designer you should spend a minimum of 15% - 20% of your time on business development. When you break it down business development should include;
* Networking
* Social Media
* Referral Generation
* Responding to Proposal Requests

Of these 4 things, networking should be the bulk of your time and responding to proposals should be the least.

## In reality we spend the most time responding to proposals.
The reasons for this are many but typically it is harder to motivate our selves to meet strangers and stick our necks out than sit behind a computer screen and polish our proposals to a diamond like finish hoping this will make the difference in our business.

The truth is this, you need polished and slick proposals but you can't afford to spend all day doing them. Take it from one who knows, I've spent almost 4 days on a proposal once only to come in second place. That was almost an entire week of lost wages, unfortunately I hadn't put it in that perspective.

## Don't steal from yourself
Like the idea of compound interest (think 21% interest credit cards) each hour and each day you lose not involved in a revenue generating activity will add up and cost you.

Imagine this, if you made an average hourly rate of $40/hr in an entire year you'd make $83,200 assuming an 8 hour day. If you wasted just 10% of your time or 48 minutes a day you'd be out $8320 dollars. I'd bet the reality is that we waste more time than that, closer to 15% or 20%.

## Reduce your time spent on non-revenue generating activity
As a freelancer no one is making money for you, unless your hands are on the keyboard you can't bill. This means you must analyze your time and optimize it where you can. Using a system like [QuoteRobot](https://quoterobot.com) is a great start, you get prepopulated templates, slick looking themes and content you can reuse from one client to the next. If you want to see how fast you can create a proposal watch our "30 Second Wordpress Proposal" video [here.](http://youtu.be/JrdKpx6DoWw)