[patio11]

Hourly/weekly billing are entirely standard in industry, and most good clients will not balk at them. The business does not want your butt in a seat for 480 minutes a day; they want increased revenue or reduced costs. They will not micromanaged the distance between your butt and your seat at one minute increments unless you structure your affairs such that they're required to.

Note that all of your professional analogies doing the same work for the same clients in a W-2 fashion are salaried, not hourly. They don't fill out timecards or send a report to their boss every week saying "64 minutes for project planning meeting" either.

As to how much work actually gets done in a day, part of the deal is that the business is buying an adult professional who is committed to delivering efficiently on the stated objectives in the SoW. That bounces around a little bit; most days it resembles a standard work day at the client's site (at least in my business).

[tedmiston]

Thank you. So to clarify, are you backing up this approach with SoWs defined in terms of scope? My current work has less upfront definition more like "figure out how to build a system that does X or features 1, 2, 3" and is billed hourly. I'd like to experiment with other models that lead to simpler invoicing.