14 ms·

The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

• pvillano 4y ago
  If you make $XX/hr, playing with your kids is worth greater than $XX/hr. Once you have enough money* to meet the basic needs of food, shelter, and security, the marginal utility of making more money drops considerably. Life can be simplified to a conversion between time, money, and happiness. Time can be converted to money by work. Time and money can be converted to happiness by hobbies. College converts time and money into the possibility of making more money. Saving for retirement gives you time and money to be happy later in exchange for less money today. Making more money is a net loss if your job makes you unhappy, you don't have time to relax, the stress shortens your life and so on. Unexpectedly, the more money you make, the less time you should spend working. Someone with less money might take a second job to support their family, because more money makes a huge difference in their family's quality of life. Someone making more money takes extra time off every holiday, because the money "lost" is worth less than the family experiences gained.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  > But I don’t think I’m over-romanticising to suggest that just as there is something psychologically corrosive about the fact that the lawyer can always bill another six minutes, there is something psychologically healthy about the fact that the farmer can sometimes rest assured that there is nothing useful to be done until the morning. This sense of a “forced” break from work, reminds me of the Jewish concept of the Sabbath. You were literally forbidden from productive work, 1 day a week. So this forced time for reflection, spiritual care, and time with family.
  • jrochkind1 4y ago
    "were"? There's still Jews who do this of course!
    • adamzerner 4y ago
      Related: Bring Back the Sabbath (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/10/07/bring-back-the-sabbath/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/10/07/bring-back-the-sabba...)
    • pure_simplicity 4y ago
      As are some Christian denominations such as seventh-day baptists and seventh-day adventists (and some lesser known ones).
      • blendergeek 4y ago
        And many Christians observe a sabath day's rest on Sunday.
  • InefficientRed 4y ago
    The loss of the sabbath in Christianity really puts a limelight on the dark side of grace. Rest is for eternity; clock back in.
    • humanrebar 4y ago
      A lot of Christians still do some sort of Sabbath. It could be a sin to skip the Sabbath, even, depending on the theology. But the definition of sin in some theologies can be quite broad, personal, and circumstantial.
      • usrn 4y ago
        We weren't really told it was a sin I guess but that it was more honorable or optimal to not do anything except reflect and socialize on Sunday? It's not as extreme as what my great grandmother talks about where they really did nothing on Sunday. She was an atheist too so there definitely was a shift in American culture here.
    • invalidOrTaken 4y ago
      As a Christian who observes the Sabbath---is this not common among Christians? (I am genuinely asking, somewhat disconnected from the wider world of Christianity)
      • InefficientRed 4y ago
        Not at all, at least in the USA.
    • mensetmanusman 4y ago
      Christianity hasn’t lost the sabbath, the idea of the sabbath got steamrolled by a consumerist culture.
      • InefficientRed 4y ago
        That's either a silly tautology or false. Jews live in the exact same "consumerist society", but did not lose the sabbath. Even the most progressive Jews I know rest on the sabbath in some form or another.
• formerkrogemp 4y ago
  I'm just going to say that the billable hour sucks in accounting and I hope i never have to keep (to lie) on a timesheet again for awhile to meet the "budget."
• gsibble 4y ago
  I've been paid high hourly wages to build software and you definitely start to look at every minute of non-billable time as, "I could have made X in these 3 hours I spent relaxing." Leads to overwork. There's a healthy balance but took me a while to find it.
  • radoomi 4y ago
    Exactly in the same spot, I've recently gone freelance where I'm paid by the hour and I've yet to take a holiday cause I always think this week of holiday will cost me $$$ (huge amount of money compared to what a normal one week holiday would cost). Sadly, I will probably burnout soon and ignore that thought.
    • rwky 4y ago
      I used charge hourly years ago. I had the same problem where taking a holiday made me think about losing money. Now I charge a monthly rate based on the number of days a week I work (roughly equating one month to 4 weeks, granted they're not but it makes life easier). Now I don't worry about taking time off because once I've clocked my days for that week I'm done I won't get paid more. It also means you know exactly what your income will be each month which is handy for budgeting.
    • MrRiddle 4y ago
      I took this list to gauge how many hours I want to work per year, and decided that 1500-1600 hours is enough, if it’s not, then the rate should be higher. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average...
      • egypturnash 4y ago
        Damn thats a nice list. Today I learnt that despite living in the USA, I have managed to arrange my life so as to work about as much as the average German.
    • heavyset_go 4y ago
• kposehn 4y ago
  I’ve moved away from billable hours and gone to a fixed-fee retainer block. Clients get up to X hours per week at a single price regardless of what they use. This scopes engagements more tightly and results in a natural prioritization of time where I’m most impactful and offloads busywork or meetings where I won’t be productive. As a result I can handle more business and be more effective for my clients, while actually reducing the overall cost of an engagement and charging a higher effective hourly rate. So far results have been excellent. Edit: I consult as an interim CMO/VP Marketing for mid to late stage tech companies, typically focusing on accelerating growth or guiding companies through big changes in strategy.
  • cammikebrown 4y ago
    Does “X” change much per client or have you found a good average amount that most clients go with?
    • kposehn 4y ago
      The retainer amount has gone up over time with both the market and outcomes I’ve gotten for clients. The ROI is pretty easy to quantify.
  • spyke112 4y ago
    Would you mind giving an example of how exactly you would bill your client, what does a “retainer block” mean?
    • kposehn 4y ago
      * A retainer block is a fixed price for up to a certain number of hours per week, usually 10 hours and clients can buy multiple blocks. There are four blocks in total (all sold currently) * The client pays this amount regardless of how much time is worked * The advantage for the client is they have this time available to them and them alone - no one else will take it since it is already sold * The limit of hours per week naturally focuses my time where I’m going to be most effective; more impact in less overall time
• tomatowurst 4y ago
  Does anybody make $1000 USD / hr? What is your day to day like? How many clients do you have and how many hours do you bill per year? Do you actually work 2087 hours per year which would net you $2MM/year? I'm curious how some people are able to bill such high amounts and how they got started. It must also be extra stressful since its not like you are working for a company either so you need to do marketing and find clients as well.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • D13Fd 4y ago
    It's not uncommon in my field. And quite a few of the people billing that rate or higher actually net greater than $2m, because they get credit not only for what they bill but what work they bring in for others to bill. That said, $1k/hr billed does not directly translate to $1k/hr earned. Usually there is shared overhead, etc taken out first.
    • anm89 4y ago
      what's your field?
  • executive 4y ago
    More like bill one client $1000/hr for travel and work on another client's $1000/hr case during the trip. /nojoke
    • gamblor956 4y ago
      That is fraud, and if you get caught you would be looking at prison time. And in the case of the legal and accounting professions, doing this will get your license revoked.
      • SkyPuncher 4y ago
        It's inconclusive if it's fraud without knowing contract details. If you're being paid simply to travel, then it is not fraudulent to also work on another client. If your being paid to travel _and_ focus on that client, then it would be fraudulent to work on another client.
• magicink81 4y ago
  Jonathan Stark is a thought leader / coach / writer / blogger etc that has been beating the drum on time-based pricing vs value-based pricing. He helps software engineers and others get off the time-based model and transition to value-based. Here's his website: https://jonathanstark.com/ https://jonathanstark.com/ Here are some interviews where he covers the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT32G9wmONg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT32G9wmONg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1b7QlQILRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1b7QlQILRo
  • wodenokoto 4y ago
    I strongly disagree. The dream is that you can deliver a project for 100 hour pricing in 10 hours of work, but usually value based pricing means you'll be spending 200 hours on something that was initially valued at a 100 hour level and there are no one to bill the OT to.
  • aosaigh 4y ago
    I'm a big fan of Jonathan Stark. As well as value-pricing he has lots of great content on writing proposals, developing productised services, moving to advisory roles etc. He has two podcasts that are worth listening to, The Business of Authority [0] and Ditching Hourly [1] [0] https://www.thebusinessofauthority.com/ https://www.thebusinessofauthority.com/ [1] https://podcast.ditchinghourly.com/ https://podcast.ditchinghourly.com/
  • MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    My side gig is that I have a few clients who pay me $1K a month for 10 hours of retainer. Most months, I barely put in 3 hours. A few, I might work 12 and I don't charge them because everyone's happy. They realize I have a day job and as such, I'm not going to be immediately available unless I can take a lunch break. A win for everyone.
    • hnuser847 4y ago
      This sounds like a sweet deal. If you don’t mind me asking, what kind of side work do you do that only takes a few hours a week?
• simmons 4y ago
  I've been working as a freelancer for many years, billing hourly. I have absolutely no hesitation to take vacations. If anything, it makes me more likely to take a few more days off, since I don't feel bad about a client paying me for that time. I routinely take months-long sabbaticals between gigs, and use them to learn new things. I take extra long vacations over the winter holidays. If someone is feeling an urgency to work more hours beyond what provides true value for their life, the problem isn't how one's invoices are arranged. The problem is one's attitude.
  • themitigating 4y ago
    I agree but sometimes fear can play a role. What if the economy goes down? What if I can't find work? It might be very hard to ignore the nagging danger of poverty especially if you are in America.
    • sph 4y ago
      You need to include all that risk in your hourly rate, otherwise you're being severely underpaid.
• gnicholas 4y ago
  Another downside of the billable hour: it encourages perverse incentives. I was recently talking with a potential customer in the legal field, and he was interested in my startup's software, which helps people read on screen more quickly/easily. But at one point he turned to me and said "I know one of the senior lawyers is going to ask me if using your software is going to cause the billable volume to go down for their associates. I know that sounds like a silly question, but how should I answer?" In short, efficiency is discouraged when dollars are on the line.
  • Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    He is clearly not very good with that billable hour craze. By doubling efficiancy you can sell the same hour to two customers. This is normal and encouraged in law and the consulting world.
    • Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      It is?! Couldn't this also be considered fraud?
      • rhino369 4y ago
        It's definitely not overtly encouraged in the legal field. You'd get disbarred if anyone found out about it. That said, there isn't much proactive looking for fraud.
    • gnicholas 4y ago
      In my time as a lawyer, I only knew one associate who bragged about overbilling. Not surprisingly, the child of a politician.
  • Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    What was your advice on how to answer?
    • Traubenfuchs 4y ago
• slagfart 4y ago
  As a couterpoint, I've never been happier than at my current role where I'm expected to put in 40 hours per week, and not a minute more. Sure I do timesheets, but they cap at 40 hours. Prior jobs always had the implicit expectation that I could be working a little harder, or clocking off early on a Friday was evil. Now, 40 hours a week can be done any time, and that flexibility is hugely liberating. I honestly think they get more out of me as well.
• sph 4y ago
  In my experience projects tend to go over specifications pretty much every time. Fixed billing means having to review the contract every so often, and it's much more of a pain than being paid hourly. You want something we hadn't discussed before? Sure, but you'll pay me for my time. The goal is eventually to be paid by day or by week, but still proportional to the work you're putting in, unless you're a world class talent and can bill $100k for a week long project; at that point fixed prices will be preferable.
• amlozano 4y ago
  Penetration testing / security consultancy falls into this trap too. All the downsides are present. It is weird, though maybe not so weird if you think about it for a few minutes, how closely aligned law and offensive security are with business practices. One of the things I want to do with my consulting business going forward is to explicitly depart from this model. We will see if the market accepts it or not.
• movedx 4y ago
  My approach to money has changed as I've come to better understand its purpose - the storage of a future promise to give me something I value. This leads me to ask, "What do I value?" I value my free time, being able to eat breakfast and coffee out on a daily basis, and simple things in life like just having a comfortable home, debts paid, bills paid, and a happy wife. My approach to money has, therefore, become one of finding the maximum amount I need for the short term (six months), immediate term (two years), and extreme future (retirement; probably 60-ish), in order to meet those value driven targets. Once the balance has been found between selling my time and labour for money, I don't exceed it, because I've attained my goals. I go from, "I could be earning $X in this moment if I worked on my book" to, "I should go for a walk and then come home and play a game."
  • Winsaucerer 4y ago
    > "the storage of a future promise to give me something I value" This is a good insight, and exactly how I've described money in the past -- a promise, that can be exchanged for goods and services. Everyone's happy to receive these promises in exchanges for goods and services because they know that they'll always be able to find someone else willing to do the same later.
• jedberg 4y ago
  This is what did in one of my startups -- we did consulting to bring in revenue while we built the software, but the siren call of one more billable hour was always stronger than building the software, so we ended up making good money consulting but never built the product.
• huitzitziltzin 4y ago
  One potential advantage of the billable hour: My wife works for a company which provides consulting and evaluation services to states and the federal government. Project budgets are fixed and every employee's time must be accounted for precisely. My wife's time is expensive. What this means it that there are many project meetings to which she is deliberately not invited b/c her time is too expensive to be spent in a meeting. Someone else will summarize the key action items for her afterwards in an email or a five minute call. She is rarely, if ever, in an interminable, useless meeting b/c that costs her firm too much money. This is not applicable to every business context: fixed budgets and a notion of exactly how much each employee's time costs are probably both crucial. But if <insert your firm's name here> could implement this, think of the time you might save to do valuable work!
  • analog31 4y ago
    Oddly enough I've been on the other side of this: Multiple IC's brought together in a meeting, to prepare for the meeting with the contractor, "to avoid wasting the contractor's expensive time." Writing and reviewing a statement of work for the contractor in excruciating detail, when an IC doing the same work would just figure out what was needed. I made a mental note of what skills were so much more valuable than mine. Now I have those skills.
    • l33t2328 4y ago
      What skills were they?
      • beeboop 4y ago
        Presumably finding high paying employers and convincing them to hire you
    • jamiepenney 4y ago
      That's pretty intense. I'm a contractor and my clients have all been happy with my ability to work independently - they give me goals and I figure out how to meet them. That being said, I only work in high-trust environments and generally get word-of-mouth referrals for contracts.
• high_byte 4y ago
  billable hours are fine, counting hours is what I don't like. as an employee I wasn't worried about that. now I have to question whether I should stop logging hours when going to eat, shit, etc. of course it also depends on your morals, I see people in my field having no shame reporting 3x their hours... 10x of they can.
• orthecreedence 4y ago
  Salary incentivizes the employer milking every last hour from the worker. Hourly incentivizes the worker to work slower. Project-based incentivizes the worker to cut corners and get things done as fast as possible. It seems like the optimal setup is some mix of these: retainer plus low hourly plus bonus on project completion.
  • kqr 4y ago
    There's another alternative: profit sharing.
• kache_ 4y ago
  The high rolling software contractors I know use "billable hours" as a random meter stick to charge whatever they feel like. I know a guy who has more billable hours than waking hours across the week across three contracts. The customers know and don't care, because he gets things done. I've even heard people complain about clients over beers and say "because they were being so stupid I added 8 billable hours" charge what you want. Billable hours are to make the departments approving the spend feel comfortable. What are they going to do? Find someone else who can build a complex OLTP system in 2 months?
  • postcynical 4y ago
    More positively framed: this is essentially charging for value added, not time spent. A contractor who saved/made the company a lot of $$$ can overcharge, knowing that his rate pales in comparison with savings/profits he made, so no one cares. However if he does not deliver enough value add, that sort of behaviour won't fly and he most likely will under-charge to avoid embarrassment.
  • chasd00 4y ago
    For really big clients the trick is finding out the maximum allowed budget before the next approval escalation kicks in. You divide that by the LOE in hours and that’s your hourly rate.
• ojbyrne 4y ago
  I found it interesting that the article started with “It will take about three minutes to read this column” because it seemed a little long for that (I don’t think I’m a slow reader but maybe). Anyway it made grasp the urgency of the six minute interval theme from the rest of the piece in a visceral way.
• nlh 4y ago
  To build on another commenter's mention of perverse incentives: I've thought about this a lot. I think, regardless of what we say, at a foundational level humans operate on incentives. Billing by the hour creates the following incentive: The more hours you spend on the project, the more money you earn. Period. I know our high-level business brains will rationalize this away in our marketing: "Now my friend, you know it wouldn't make sense for me to over-bill you, because I want you to be a happy client! I will hard and efficiently for you!" But no matter what words are said, in the back of our lizard brains, we all know that another hour on the project means another [$10|$100|$1000], and that creates a reward system for the person billing. The only time hourly billing should really be used is when time-based labor itself is the thing being bought and sold -- a retail worker, a security guard, etc. They are being paid for butt-in-seat time. The incentives line up -- the longer they stay butt-in-seat, the more money they earn! (Which is what the buyer wants too.) I don't have the perfect solution for consultants/knowledge-workers, but something closer to value-based pricing (with appropriate accommodations for bad time estimates, etc.) feels like the right direction.
  • cascom 4y ago
    I think the incentive to bill 41hrs vs 40hrs is real, but talk to a lawyer about whether they care about 2301hrs and 2300hrs for the year and I think you’ll get Avery different answer
• emeril 4y ago
  I spent much of my career billing hours though I had no incentive to be more than 75% or so utilized (i.e., 30 hours per week) however the firm had a system where you would be minimally rewarded if you exceeded 100% utilization though it was difficult to guarantee hitting that threshold (e.g., if you were at 110% and the project ended before the end of the quarter and you had a slow week or two, you received zero bonus) As such, I deliberately worked between 70% and 80% during my years there as it seemed only chumps went for the small bonus Interestingly, I billed around $400/hour back then and they collected on pretty much all of it though I made about 10-15% of that rate personally...
• jimmySixDOF 4y ago
  I love Tim Harford and both of his podcasts (listed on the site) are brilliant and well worth listening to -- but a lawyer's approach to hourly billing is not the only way to look at it. Take an Engineering firm who bid $100,000 for a scope of work and internally allocates 1000 hours to complete the job drawing from a shared resource pool of 100 full time staff. The PM in that case will need to closely balance productivity as a function of time vs completed scope which is very different from the pay-as-you go perspective of a lawyer. You jealously guard every fraction of those hours and fill them as much as is humanly possible. Not as easy to make the comparison with the Farmer I suppose which was his point in the article, but since this HN discussion is considering the overall concept of billable hours in general this needs to be said.
• perryizgr8 4y ago
  On this page: 1. scrolling is strange 2. zooming is scrolling?!
• Buttons840 4y ago
  Saw this in consulting. Members of my consulting team were not a good fit for the project, but the consulting company prefered to leave them on the team because it paid everyone's paychecks, except the clients. The client will complain about the teams performance, but this is actually desired, if the client isn't complaining you're not slacking as much as you could be. Same thing happens with individuals and hourly work, to be fair, but an individual can have integrity or at least find an excuse they're at peace with. When it's a group - a company - that is slacking some like myself inevitably feel they're being dishonest.
• tptacek 4y ago
  I've been beating a related drum on HN for years, about billing hours, and I'll try not to repeat too much of it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=bill%20hourly%20author%3Atptacek&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... I know this post is mostly not about billing strategy (though that's what the thread is now about), but I'm going to chime in with a simple bit of advice for tech workers that I believe is universally applicable: Bill days, minimum. A lot of the pathologies involved in metered billing, time tracking, and perverse incentives vanish when you bill days instead of hours. People have all sorts of weird excuses to talk themselves out of billing days --- "what if I only have an hour worth of work to do?" Bill a day. See how easy it is? The last consulting company I built had a minimum billing increment of a fiscal quarter. I co-ran a consulting company for almost 10 years that did minimum-daily billing, for a pretty big and diverse set of clients, and nobody pushed back on the billable day. Bill days (minimum), not hours!
  • dataflow 4y ago
    > A lot of the [...] perverse incentives vanish when you bill days instead of hours. I'm confused how that's supposed to eliminate perverse incentives. Doesn't it exacerbate them? Don't you now have an incentive to spread out every client's work over every day possible? Like doing a few minutes of work for each client every day round-robin?
    • tptacek 4y ago
      If you bill hourly, you have a strong incentive not to invest in process improvements that will cut the number of hours you bill. Most process improvements worth investing in are measured in at least hours. If you bill daily, you have a lot of headroom to make yourself more efficient before you get to a place where efficiency is cutting into your returns. That's the most mechanical way to respond to the question, but I could keep noodling on reasons you'll work more efficiently billing days than hours. (If you can bill weeks, you should bill weeks!)
    • makeitdouble 4y ago
      I too see how on paper it doesn't seem to change anything, but I think culturally it's a huge gap. The incentives are not always to bill the most, and you also might have to pitch a time estimate before starting the task. Having a day as the minimum unit removes the need to decide if it's a 2h fix or a 5h fix, an estimate that could take 2h in itself to reach. Then a lot of scrum team will report advancement daily, and it will be way easier to communicate with the client with a billing that fits that cycle (this is also where you probably don't want to report small time sliced increments to the client, if they're already not very happy with your 20 days estimate for changing a page's footer)
• usrn 4y ago
  I used to charge per class when I was freelancing to avoid this. It creates other issues but I feel like they're easier to deal with.
• etempleton 4y ago
  Earlier in my career I was billable down to the minute. It was truly terrible for all of the reasons outlined. It also made no sense. If I could get the work done in 5 minutes or 5 hours why does it matter? It should be about the end result right? If I am too efficient that is bad. If I am not efficient enough that is also bad. When hiring an outside vendor I suggest negotiating a specific deliverable for a specific price. Everyone will be happier, better work will be done and you will probably pay less.
• RajT88 4y ago
  I'll weigh in, since my current and previous 2 jobs were "billable" in the sense you had to fill out a time sheet every day. There's good ways of implementing billable time and bad. What makes it good: 1. When you have a billable target, only calculating it based off the available pool of working hours (i.e. minus holidays and your PTO time). My first billable job was billable in the sense I had an hourly rate, and when I didn't have billable work, I'd use up my vacation days and my boss thanked me for it because it made hitting his numbers easier as well as mine. It was nice. 2. Not micromanaging your employee's time sheets. I only ever put in 15 minute increments, but sometimes I put in blocks of 1 hour. My boss doesn't bug me on it because she trusts me. In turn, she trusts me because I deliver. 3. Having NBUE time allotted for some things (like self-study, hiring people, etc.). When you don't have 1, you start seeing people work 80 hour weeks just before they take a week off. When you don't have 2, bosses spend a lot more energy reviewing time sheets, and employees spend a lot more time submitting them. When you don't have 3, you have people avoiding important, but non-billable activities and the company is loses out.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  Counter-point to most of the comments here: I was a billable hourly consultant for the first 13 years of my career, and I never felt the urge to work "just a little more". I made plenty working about 40 hours a week, and valued my free time more than any marginal amount above that. If anything, the biggest problem I had was knowing that the client had an alloted pool of hours, and I had to make my solution fit within that budget. Many times, I gave them unbilled hours just to ship something I was happy with. That's a separate problem worthy of its own discussion at some other time. But even if you do work extra hours in order to make more money, that's better than doing the same thing on salary. I see people now working 50+ hours a week, with no incentive other than, I suppose, a go-getter attitude that they hope will result in them working 50+ hours a week for more money, with a fancier title, someday. My point is that the billing model by itself is neither the problem nor the solution: overworking yourself, or letting your employer overwork you, is something you can do under any system if you aren't careful.
  • patrck 4y ago
    Yeah, Harford overweights the trade-offs and does not cover any benefits. For parents, one large gain is explaining your work to your kids. They get to see how you work, and this provides a template for them. Of course, whether this is good or not....
• dbg31415 4y ago
  > If you bill £1,000 an hour, as some senior lawyers do, then any particular six-minute increment of time is available to be turned into £100. Can you really afford an hour in the gym? Can you really afford to call your mother or read a bedtime story to your child? This really hit home. Thinking like this cost me so many relationships in my late 20s and 30s. Working for startups & agencies, getting paid a bonus for launches or finding extra billable time on some projects -- and worse, even when I didn't have an insane deadline, I would usually find reasons to work. "Oh sorry, [Girlfriend], I won't be at dinner with your friends tonight, you go without me... I've gotta work..." And I would use it as an excuse to get out of things I didn't really want to do too. "Oh sorry, [Mom & Dad], I don't have time to drive you to your cousin's funeral, but I'd be happy to send some flowers." And what 27 year-old wants to do those things? They aren't fun, they're tedious, there's no ROI. Except... years later, in my 40s, I really wish I had spent the afternoon with my parents grieving, to gain a bit more experience with that. And to hear their stories and memories of people who meant things to them. I really wish I made time for a few more of my ex-girlfriends too... There will always be someone willing to help you turn each hour of your life into a paycheck. But man, you really can't put a price tag on a lot of things, and there aren't always do-overs. Not going to sit here and tell you to always put family first, but... I wish I had prioritized non-work over work when I was younger.
• gandalfff 4y ago
  My current job is billable hours + unpaid time working on things required for those billable hours.
• smitty1e 4y ago
  > By accounting for every moment of their working lives, and defining each moment as either “billable” or, regrettably, “non-billable”, lawyers were being tugged inexorably towards an unhappy, unhealthy attitude to the way they spent their time. Not all lawyers, of course. And not only lawyers, either. We fetish precision at the expense of humanity. Organic life is messy, sloppy, and imprecise. Wisdom is understanding that diminishing returns sets in at the 80% solution. We don't need to Automate All The Things until the Orwellian social credit system leads to complete demographic cratering and the human race dies off. As XKCD points out[1], you're OK at around four significant figures. Breath. [1] https://xkcd.com/2170/ https://xkcd.com/2170/
• huijzer 4y ago
  As my parents have a dairy farm, I can tell that the idea that they have time off after doing the milking is false. There is always something to do and it is also easy to fall into the trap of not calling your mother because it is not worth it. The solution is to set clear boundaries.
• ernirulez 4y ago
  I have to say something good about billable hour: it made me value my time more. I used to work as a freelancer in tech, so I had to bill my time. I was billing my time at 50€/hour. Out of work, when I was doing something I liked, I didn´t think of the price of my time, but when I had to do something I didn´t like I thought "would I do this if I was payed 50€/hour?" Depending on the answer, I would try to leverage that. Since then I try to make the most of my time. Not only my personal time alone, but also I think about who I spend my time with. Apart from my parents, my wife and my daughters (which is always a very valuable time) I try to spend my time only with people who provides value to my life, and I try to avoid people who don´t. One example: 2 months ago my father died. We used to spend time together, less than I would have liked when I think of it now, but back then I was not that aware of it. I remember we would go work on the fields growing vegetables, collecting olives and trimming the trees. I remember one day that I was a bit tired when we were setting up a new land and trimming some very old, mostly useless, olive trees, so I asked my father (in a rude way): - "why are we doing this? why are we wasting so much time and doing so much effort just to clean some old trees that will hardly provide enough olives to make a few olive oil litres? His answer was so clear, emotional and bonding that still hurts me today. He answered: - What? Who cares about the trees? The important thing is the time that we are spending together. I would have never thought that now, I would pay several thousands just to spend a single more hour with him.
  • matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Learning about billable hours was a revolution for me. It changed how I looked at everything. It's such a simple concept, dollars per hour of work or $/h. Then I started maximizing the dollars and minimizing the hours worked. Time is the most precious thing to me now. I want to spend it enjoying my life and the people I love. I selected my job for the highest $/h ratio rather than highest salary.
  • wodenokoto 4y ago
    I agree. And it goes both ways. If you have a guy being paid $100/hour to upload some CSV files and clean their header names and rename them, it is very easy to see just how much you can save by automating that task. When personnel are salaried, it is easier to forget that their time costs money. Double so for overtime. When salary includes OT, there is no short term reason to have your staff work efficiently. Just have them work another hour - the marginal cost is free!
• ReptileMan 4y ago
  Only if the main virtue in your life is money.