[technotarek]

Has anyone figured a good way to account for time spent on asynchronous communication (ie email)? A lot my time goes there and it is sprinkled throughout my days and nights.

Ideally we wouldn’t bill hourly and wouldn’t have to care, but neither the world nor my contracts are ideal!

[withinboredom]

I make it clear that replying to just one email will trigger an hour of billing (or day, if we have a day rate). I also make it clear that this will never be more than one hour per day.

Thus, they get an hour per day of dedicated support, no more unless they want to pay for it (i.e., they want two hours, a single email triggers two billable hours even if it takes 5 mins to reply to a single email).

It works pretty well.

[welder]

The WakaTime browser extension does this, if you set it to only track your email domain.

[technotarek]

But this only works for webmail, right. Thunderbird user here.

[welder]

You can use this Thunderbird extension instead of the Browser extension:

https://github.com/monkeysintown/thunderbird-wakatime