[Silhouette]

If you bill daily, make sure you put in a full day. I would also make sure your definition of a "day" is known upfront (8 hours not including a lunch, or whatever).

Ouch. No. Please don't do this.

A major advantage of billing in longer increments is that you are not constrained to those minute-by-minute time tracking activities. If your client says they'll call you back with an answer in five minutes, and in reality it's half an hour, you did not just lose a half hour of chargeable time because you weren't on the clock. If you got the agreed work completed quicker than expected, you do not have any obligation to be a bum on a seat for the remainder of the day. If your client is even able to detect this if it happens occasionally, you're doing it wrong.

This cuts both ways, and sometimes you need to put in a longer day to get the job done, and on a daily rate you just have to suck that up. And obviously I'm not advocating slacking off or failing to make a reasonable effort to produce the results you're being paid for; that would be unethical whatever your charging agreement might be.

But if you want to start fixing what "one day" means because you think one party is going to feel cheated by the other without that, either you need different clients and better working relationships, or you probably are someone who should just work on an agreed hourly rate with some even shorter minimum increment anyway. It's a lower risk/lower reward arrangement, but it's more stable if that is what you want to prioritise.

[tptacek]

Such a great comment.