[bdamm]

I left the consultant career track for precisely this reason. It is a damned hard problem, maybe even impossible, and is an endless source of guilt and shame because inevitably there will be time where I'm daydreaming - it turns out I am not physiologically able to maintain 100% focus for my entire day. So it ends up being just creative lying, which I felt bad about.

[reeeeee]

I don't understand. When you work for a company, don't you also spend some time of your workday daydreaming, or getting a coffee, or doing some other thing that does not earn the company money?

[ornornor]

Yes but you’re not asked to make it a line item and choose which client it will be billed to.

[kspacewalk2]

Why feel guilty? Set a reasonable hourly rate, estimate how long something ought to take, and if it takes 20% longer and you know that's because of "internal factors", i.e. you've spent some time daydreaming, just bill for a smaller number of hours.

[jeremybenmeir]

The problem is that some folks in this situation will under-bill. And it's somewhat common for an associate to have a billable-hour target that they must hit (or else they lose their bonus, for example).

[answerlotl]

Yes this, but I wouldn’t call it “under billing” per se. In my case, you have time budgets for specific types of tasks for specific clients, and you are encouraged not to go overbudget on those tasks. But inevitably you do go over because you didn’t happen to figure out the best solution immediately and you want to do a good job.

So now you’re over budget on this task. You can write down the actual amount of time the task took this time, if you want, because no one will be upset if you took extra time on only one task. But you also know that you’re likely to go over on several more tasks this week/month because you’re not only time-constrained, you’re also competing to be one of the better people at your firm in order to get noticed. (Or, alternatively, you’re just trying not to appear incompetent). So you decide to write down the “appropriate” amount of time for the task instead of how long it actually took.

So then the problem becomes that you not only have time budgets for individual tasks, you also have monthly/yearly minimum billed hours requirements to meet. So you’ve just worked 16 hours on a task you said you only worked on for 12 hours. You’ve lost 4 hours that you will have to make up somewhere by working extra hours unreported.

This becomes a pattern very quickly, especially for people who want to prove themselves by delivering a high quality work product. You’re squeezed from all directions.

In fact, my timesheet often has almost nothing to do with how I actually spent my week. Rather it’s just me attempting to fill it in in a way where no one is angry- clients, bosses, colleagues, etc. It’s not a software problem. It’s a systemic/incentives problem.

[kspacewalk2]

My perspective is that of a completely independent contractor, so I didn't even consider the complexities of being part of a larger organization and having competing incentives/priorities.

[tanseydavid]

I appreciate your candor. I have been tasked with this type of timekeeping for almost 30 years now and I still dread it.