[consulting] Billing Increments

[Ryan Cross]

Its not just about the raw time to complete the task all the time.

Do a quick search for "context switching time" or "productivity
switching" and you'll see numbers from 5 mins to 45 mins to actually
recover from a distraction and get back into a zone of productivity. I
think the common wisdom is at least 15mins.

On top of that you will also want to factor in your time to actually
do the billing and other admin/overhead. For example, even something
as simple as correcting a typo on a site's name could be a much larger
affair that you imagine.

context switch (assume zero if in the process of checking email, more
if a phone call).
Read the email to understand what they want (2 mins?)
Turn on the the time tracker
make the actual change (<1min probably)
Send an email to confirm the change (2 mins)
Stop the timer
Create and send invoice ( 5 -15 mins) (plus any time chasing +
processing payments)
and then going back to your original task, and getting your head
wrapped around it again (at least 5mins +)
and there are probably other things that you could add in there as well.

It can often be easier to just do a quick task and ignore the rest
(i.e. don't bill for it), but obviously those small tasks all add up
and even without the billing/admin load you still are loosing the time
to the context switch.

In the past, I have also charged for travel time (or some minimum call
out rate) if I have to be onsite and is quite common in other
industries.

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 11:13 PM, Fred Jones <fredthejonester at gmail.com> wrote:
> I had a discussion with the author of Hamster [0], the time tracking
> tool I use about time increments. His tool tracks by minutes, rounding
> to the nearest minute when it does monthly totals. I know that some
> web dev shops, however, have a minimum increment of 15, 30 or even 60
> minutes. I am wondering what other people do.
>
> I, for better or worse (probably worse), end up having a lot of very
> small time increments as I answer an email here, make a small fix to a
> site there, add a page for a different client etc. I have always just
> billed what the Hamster says, but I am wondering now if I should make
> a minimal increment. I definitely lose a bit of time switching
> projects. Sometimes it's really just a second or two but other times
> it's a lot more than that. I was thinking to make a minimum of 15 min.
> per day. Then if I do 2 or 3 little tasks for a client, each taking
> only 2 minutes, I would bill them for 15 min. for that day. We can
> code a script to do this calculation automatically based on Hamster's
> SQLite file.
>
> Interesting to hear what people have to say on this subject of time and billing.
>
> Thanks,
> Fred
>
> [0] http://projecthamster.wordpress.com/
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