Not necessarily… it’s an option.
I have chosen to avoid jobs that track hours explicitly, yes. I find it personally stressful. So many decisions to make – am I legitimately noodling this problem or just daydreaming? I feel guilty one way, and cheated the other.
I’ve worked in pension consulting and had to report every hour. I’ve also worked in an R&D role where my manager made us keep time sheets so he could evaluate how much each project was costing the firm. It’s certainly a legitimate way to estimate the cost of doing the work. But there are other ways, and my choice is to work for employers that use other methods.
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I don’t disagree with that.
yes, tracking hours is one of the worst parts of working in consulting. I don’t disagree with that.
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If my work were more explicit, something like bagging groceries, where what matters to my employer is how many hours I am standing there, available to customers, I would not mind tracking hours, I’d probably welcome it.
But I literally do some of my work in the shower, or in bed. I think about problems and come up with solutions to them at odd times. Tracking hours for my work is hard, and ambiguous, and doesn’t really speak to my value as an employee, at least not very directly. So yeah, I don’t want to fill out a time sheet, and I’ll stick to jobs where I don’t have to.
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uh, nobody is arguing that tracking hours is fun.
for me, the first time takes me 6 hours. All subsequent times are 10 mins. This is because i’m a genius. But please go on
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i don’t mind. I keep a time sheet for my own use. It’s about 50% accurate
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Well in that case I think I’m rivaling JSM in hours worked 
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meetings suck away your life force. If that’s not working i don’t know what is
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I’m arguing more than that. I’m arguing that for some types of work it is imprecise and perhaps even misleading. And that there are other ways to track costs.
It’s certainly a common way to track costs, and it makes sense in many situations.
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much like using car-years to track exposure…
Other ways being what?
Typically experience with how much it takes to complete a project. For instance, you might know that updating this set of factors typically takes two people (an actuary and an analyst) a month when it’s their to priority, but they still have time to keep other balls in the air without being overworked.
That’s not completely different from counting hours, but it’s at a much less granular level, and would not involve a time sheet.
If it’s a new project, the people who will do it may compare what they expect to need to do with other projects they have done.
When I’m asked how much time it will take me to do something, i typically estimate in half-days.
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I had a number of assignments that were paid a flat amount for the software provided. We billed 0.5 hours to fit it into our billing system, but it usually took 5 minutes (after the initial non-billed time it took to code the software).
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Work smarter, not harder!
If you can get away with it, bill as many hours as possible for those 5 minutes
this seems like way more of a rough estimate than tracking hours to me. yes you can do this, but it seems more flawed and when you have thousands of clients that a company works with, it’s going to result in very rough estimates.
I think we all measure our work by some temporal scale.
Some people do it in weeks, some in days, some in hours, some in 15 minute intervals.
If you say this takes a month or two weeks, what happens when that time is interrupted by something else?
I agree that tracking hours is flawed. Nobody can be that precise. But your method seems more flawed.
I have a lot of clients I work on, not just a handful. My time is constantly interrupted for other clients.