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Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

I‘ve been billing hourly for over ten years now, and I agree that it is cursed.

But as much as I’d like to switch to daily/weekly billing, it feels like I would never allow myself to leave the desk to run errands, play with the kids etc - because I promised to work the (whole?) day/week.

Even if you don’t actively tell clients when exactly you do work, clients can see your away/offline status in Slack/Teams, or they might call you out of the blue, which would feel to me like being caught with pants down - talking about a failed deployment on the phone in the supermarket?

And I’d be worried then that the client comes to the conclusion “Oh that guy, bills the whole week but doesn’t even work in the afternoon. What a slacker!”.

How do you or other people handle this?

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There is no relationship between your billing increment and the specific times you're at your desk. You bill a day for any day that you do significant work for the client; that's it. The notion that billing a day means you've booked 8 contiguous desk hours for your client is just hourly billing thinking; that's part of the reason you want to stop billing hourly in the first place.

This and your other comments really helped getting an intuition for why daily/weekly billing is preferable over hourly - thanks for patiently reiterating this.

Especially your point „daily billing means I don’t work on other projects that day“ seems like a framing that could work well for me.

I think "don't double book yourself" is a good rule of thumb, especially when you're getting your sea legs, but there are ways to do that, with daily (or weekly, or monthly) billing, once you know what you're doing and you're confident about your scheduling and your business relationships and the way you set expectations.

The one expectation you should never set with your clients is hour-by-hour accountability. It's not even a win for the client: it just creates anxiety.

It's about managing expectations.

Reasonable clients who hire you to deliver a project three months from now don't expect you to work 24/7 for 90 days non-stop. They expect you to deliver what was agreed in three months. They happily pay for those three months because someone calculated it will save/make them more money. They don't care what happens in between as long as you keep them regularly updated, don't disappear on them, and respond to emails and calls in a timely fashion.

Ask yourself if you want the type of clients that obsessively check your online status on Slack. Most clients don't have time for that because they have other things to worry about.

If you're deploying something, it's prudent to sit tight for a while and monitor things. You can shop for celebratory champagne later.

If they absolutely expect you to pick up the phone the minute they call, hire someone to answer the calls for you. Now they have a dedicated account manager. Charge them appropriately.

If you want to read more, the OP of this comment chain, tptacek, wrote here a lot about charging daily/weekly vs hourly (and other nuggets of wisdom about consulting). Query `site:ycombinator.com tptacek hourly` in your favorite search engine. Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103417

"yeah I often work at night"

But tbh, customers aggrieved at your working practices are simply not worth having. If they don't trust you enough to do the work, they probably won't trust the output of it either, which all that it entails (not paying etc).

I've been a consultant in a previous life, and the best customers were invariably the ones who just let you get on with the job.

What did you tell clients when you’d be available for calls generally? Did you just not work with clients who are used to frequent calls?

Depends on what a "call" represents. A 15 minute chat, happens once every other week or so? Just do it, don't count them. A 2-hour meeting? If it's part of prospecting for new business, you do it and eat the cost; if it's the readout for a project you've delivered, then you accounted for that cost in your SOW. If it's ongoing support, and they're not a house account you bend over backwards to keep happy, book a billable day or set them up on some kind of use-it-or-lose-it bucket of retainer hours.

What’s the big problem with hourly? You just listed a bunch of benefits and said it’s cursed.

Here you go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103417

Two overarching principles here:

1. Sane customers value determinism more than they value maximizing the productivity of a single hour. They're engaging you because they want a thing done, and the order of their concerns is: (i) assurance that the thing gets done, (ii) getting the thing on a predictable schedule, (iii) getting the thing done sooner, (iv) that they're not making a fool out of themselves by paying way over the market for the thing and (v) how much they pay. Note how far down the list the actual absolute billing number is.

2. Conduct a thought experiment: imagine you have a project that is going to take you a week to finish. Now imagine you take 100 Provigils (don't do this) and get the project done in 3 days instead. Who should get the economic benefit of that efficiency, you or your client?

This still isn’t clicking for me - it feels like you’re equating daily/weekly billing with per-project billing, and hourly billing with metering.

Nope, that's another misconception about how T&M billing works:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3421770

You're metering, but at a lower level of granularity. You don't care about squeezing the maximum customer value out of ever hour, or maximizing hours you bill but don't do work in, because you're just not tracking hours. You work at an ordinary pace. Some days you're going to give your client 9 hours worth of productivity because you're in flow; sometimes they're going to get 7. It doesn't matter.

The only really important thing about your interval is that you can't book two clients on the same staffing in the same interval. If you bill daily, you as a general rule don't book two customers on the same day (really, I wouldn't do it in the same week).

Oh! I wish I didn't stop reading before the parentheses!

> But as much as I’d like to switch to daily/weekly billing, it feels like I would never allow myself to leave the desk to run errands, play with the kids etc - because I promised to work the (whole?) day/week.

Bill by the project and this problem is solved.

That said, I'm one of the weird ones who prefers to bill hourly whenever possible.

Off topic: do you use a tracking program for your hours and if so which program do you use?

Yes I use mite.de

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