Billing by the Second

Looking around for time tracking software yielded a number of solutions, but they all seemed heavyweight, ugly or just hard to use. A notable exception was Stunt Software's On The Job, which is beautiful and elegant. I would have used it except its reporting is rudimentary and its data export functionality nonexistent. It does store a file in /Library/Application Support/OnTheJob/data.xml which seems simple enough to read for myself, but of course that's undocumented and could easily change. So I wrote my own tracker. It was easy (wc -l *.m says 354 lines of code, and most of that is HTML reporting), and does just what I want.

My app (unimaginatively named "TaskTracker") keeps track of time, down to the second. Initially I had no plan on exposing this level of detail to my clients -- I viewed the seconds as more of an implementation detail and thought they wouldn't be interested in the data.

I have since made three discoveries. First: clients like invoices with detail down-to-the-second. I suspect the invoice seems more "real". Folks intuitively know the world is messier than a series of uninterrupted 15-minute increments. People come to your office. The phone rings. You check your email. You pen blog entries. When they read my invoice, they see that everyday chaos recorded.

That said, I think it's a mistake to shove the details in their face. I think they like to know the details are there if they want to see them, but usually they don't want to see them. So I deliver my invoices as HTML documents that uses CSS+JavaScript to be able to hide and show those details (defaulting to details hidden).

My second discovery was the Tyranny of the Increment. With my new super-fine-grained tracking system, I'm quick to stop the clock and just as fast to start it. Spot a friend, stop the clock. Three minute spike for the client, start the clock. Hit the washroom, stop the clock. And so on. Previously, I'd put myself in "mode". Hey, I was "inside the increment", no time for that now! While this sounds like something Tom DeMarco would like, I found it somewhat inflexible. Now I roll better with the changing day, and am absolutely confident regarding my time-sheets. It not like I can't still go heads-down as I need to.

My third and final discovery was that my billing time actually went down with this new system. In retrospect, I see what happened. When you bill in increments, chances are slim that I'll work the complete 15 minutes I billed my client. So now when I complete 9 minutes of work, I get paid for 9 minutes -- not 15 minutes. Seems right from the client's side, but it's a shift from the standard for time-billing professionals.

Would I have created this system if I had known it would have cost me revenue, on an ongoing basis? Yeah, mostly because I believe it's a competitive advantage. If, on aggregate, this system results in one more clinched recommendation during my working lifetime, I'm pretty sure it will pay for itself.

Thursday, October 14, 2004
10:20 PM