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Comment by mcavaliere | Hacker News Reader

I wrote up some thoughts on this topic since it's something I don't see often talked about.

Agree with the points. While billing hourly & tracking time on my own I tend to keep going back to the timer application to pause or start for every small occasion, depending whether I am working on the project or doing something else, even if its for a minute or two, coz distractions are omni-present & I can not work on something straight for 60 minutes at a time. That actually increases my anxiety.

So I much prefer to bill per work/project basis as a whole.

One thing regarding ethics, sometimes a client will want to 'copy' a feature they saw on another website, including the visual feature as well. That makes me uncomfortable, I try to make variations of it, although I have never denied work for this reason. May be next time I will atleast object strongly when its a blatant copy.

I think using a start/stop timer is selling yourself short. Almost every programmer has ebbs and flows between thoughts and output (e.g. writing code). When I take a brief break from coding to check my e-mail or something, it's not like I stop thinking about the program I'm working on entirely. I don't think I would be nearly as productive over the long term if I just stared at my IDE for all hours of work.

Often a solution to a bug that I was working on the previous day will come to me during a morning shower, and I think it would be ridiculous to bill for those kind of events. That's why I tend towards the conclusion that the breaks and what would be considered "observable, verifiable" work tend to balance out.

More years ago than I like to think about while I was working corporate, I threw together something to track my active window titles. That may not work to track vim in tmux, but I'd you're doing anything with website development it should give you a decent overview (which may also surprise you and motivate you to change your habits).

On Windows, Manic Time does a beautiful job of this active window tracking. I haven't found anything that does it for Linux, though.

There's tools for this like RescueTime. There's also Editor plugins like WakaTime that just track the time you spend on specific projects within your IDE. Not sure if they have vim options, though.

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