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

ft.com

2 points·altacc··4 comments

Within IT I’ve seen something similar to this with contractors and consultants. I used to be a contractor and was paid hourly and many of my fellow contractors considered a day off as spending or losing money, not money that never earned in the first place. The distinction for them meant that they never fully enjoyed time off as their leisure time came with an extra perceived negative cost. That doesn’t seem like a healthy perspective to me.

My girlfriend has a farm on the Thai countryside and sometimes she buys bags of pig poo for use on her farm. She always asks me to help her pick up the bags and move with our pick-up to her farm. Then afterwards I have to carry the bags maybe 100 meter to her farm.

She told me if she pays people to carry the bags, it would cost her an extra 5 THB per bag.

I always feel like I am wasting my time, as I feel my girlfriend doesn’t understand that if I’d spend the time working behind the computer, I’d be making much more money. And to spend an extra 5 THB per bag would be a negligible cost for me.

Or perhaps she does understand it’s more cost effective if I work behind the computer, but she just enjoys seeing me do some “hard labour” (she tends to show a grin when I am carrying heavy bags around).

Well, it appears that your earnings from this time are non-monetary, which probably have a higher value that what you'd earn (value and cost being different things).

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