Haha, not sure if you're serious but of course charging doesn't work that way. Otherwise it'd make sense for every company to just implement as many unnecessary

Haha, not sure if you're serious but of course charging doesn't work that way. Otherwise it'd make sense for every company to just implement as many unnecessary time-sinks as possible. Being higher-cost than competitors (or hell, even higher-cost without competitors) without adding proportionate value (e.g. when you add a time-sink) will lose you business. Second, as immoral as it may sound, plenty of companies or rather employees within companies don't write time purely on a time-spent basis. Time spent is one of the variables, but you'll mostly look at sensibility and industry practices, too. If you did project X for a client for $10k and can modify it and do it for $8k for client Y the week after, you're likely still going to charge something close to $10k even if you didn't spend the time. And vice versa, if you bid aggressively on a project claiming you can do it in less-than-ideal amount of time and spend more time anyway, you'll get push-back and will not be able to charge it fully. In other words, operational efficiencies are helpful in a world in which you agree to get paid on a time-spent basis.