Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think time-tracking has fascination for a certain bracket of freelancers because it is an easy, low-stress way to rescue waste from the business: you are actually doing more work then you are invoicing, so if you actually tracked it better your billings go up and your client will be happy and it doesn't hurt any shadow beliefs about the evilness of making money.

There are better ways to accomplish these goals, like switching to daily rates (or weekly rates). No client worth having cares what your work structure looks like if you're capable of producing -- just move to a day rate, give them your honest best effort, and deliver results.

e.g. Most of my clients are pretty happy with me. None of them would perceive value from me slicing out 7 minutes from an invoice because, e.g., I wrote a post on HN. (They just profoundly don't care about that, they care about the deliverables, the feeling of happiness they get working with me, and -- ideally -- measurable results as a result of the engagement.)

I figured you'd say something like this; just to make my bias clear, I'm pretty close to thinking "use of automated time tracking or paying for web services to manage time tracking is a symptom of a broken business model". Harvest is a lovely web application, but something would have to have gone wrong with my consulting practice for us to want to use it.

"No client worth having cares what your work structure looks like if you're capable of producing"

That is very easy to say when you are an established freelancer with work being thrown at you. Just starting out though, there is a fine balance between what's ideal and staying afloat.

If you want to run your business suboptimally in the hopes that it will attract your first clients, that's fine, but you shouldn't do so while pretending that it's the right way to run a business. I have a hard time thinking of clients who are particularly well-served by, say, 3-hour billings. Customers that need sporadic work like this are probably far better served by retainer arrangements. If you find yourself doing lots of 1, 2, and 3-hour projects, you should consider a staff augmentation arrangement instead of project billing.

For the most part, I think all consultants kid themselves about how productive they are juggling multiple projects in a day. It's not as if this is some great insight on my part. I'm a developer; I've read all the same stuff as you. I just paid close attention to the stuff about getting "in flow". Re-read Joel Spolsky's "Fire and Motion" essay.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com