Whatever you do, do not drop your rate: you'll just be undervalued by your clients.
Many of my best ideas have come to me in the shower, on a walk and even in the middle of the night.
It's ridiculous to say you should have a stopwatch with you at all times, so daily billing it is.
If they don't want to that, just assign 8 hours as a full day and stop worrying of you reach them or not.
Similar lines, I read about some earlish computer pioneer that was offered a senior position at a company and the deal breaker was whether he could get a shower in his private bathroom off his private office. Company said no so he moved on. "I have my best ideas in the shower." I don't recall who it was, Cray sticks in my head, but I don't think it was him, someone similar though.
Sorry for the vast amounts of vague above.
(or maybe they all did it)
Similarly, things like going for a walk or getting a little exercise can give your body plenty of things to do, but fewer things the mind needs to check on.
I get half up front, half on delivery.
Trying to juggle a set of rules for when to run the clock is a distraction.
That and Value based pricing
> Engineering is creative work, and you're paid to think - code is just the end product.
No you aren't. No one cares if you think. They care about what thinking is (supposed to be) getting them. It just so happens, though, that whatever that is requires thinking. So you do charge for that. But no one is paying you "to think".
If you are a manager, an architect or a scientist, all you do is think. You literally don't do anything else.
The only reason diagrams, meetings, documents and research papers exist is to communicate your thinking to others
First of all, no; it's not true that, "You literally don't do anything else". Even if we were to accept that, though, it's besides the point, because what you're saying right now is a change of subject.
What I said was that you don't get paid to think. You're getting paid for what the customer (hopes) they'll get from you. (And yes, that's true even if they never get anything from you.)
To say it again: nobody cares if you're thinking. The exercise of thinking has no intrinsic value to the people who people who are paying you. All of the value is consequential. Ergo, even if you are thinking over the course of your work day, you are not really getting paid to think. If you could somehow manage to deliver the same results without thinking, you'd still get paid--because you're not actually getting paid "to think".
Reductio Ad absurdum:
If you are a miner, you are not being paid to dig, you are being paid to find coal. If you could deliver coal without digging, you would still get paid.
But wait, you are not being paid for coal, you are being paid for keeping house warm. Id you could keep their house warm without them burning coal, you'd still get paid.
But wait, they don't actually want to keep the house warm, they want to not feel cold. If they could achieve that without heating the house, you would still get paid.
So no matter what you job is, I couls always say 'you are not getting paid to code/trade/do X, instead people want results of X' and you could repeat that process for X,Y and Z ad infinum. So the argument has no value