Weird to think that most of my career has been spent quantifying every moment into six minute increments. 0.1 for this. 0.3 for that. No wait that was a 0.5, I think. Eh, I was a bit too slow so let’s write that down to a 0.4.
That’s how I thought, lived, and breathed.
I didn’t appreciate how much control time had over my life until I went in-house. It was the first time in my career I didn’t have to record my 0.1s. I had just jumped out of a 0.7 meeting and waited a 0.1 for my Nespresso to be poured out of the machine.
“Wow, I can’t believe I wasted a whole 0.8 today,” I thought while slugging down my third (fourth?) espresso (an aside, Peets makes a great Nespresso pod alternative).
I paused and almost slapped myself back to reality. A 0.8? To whom? Who is getting an invoice for that 0.8? That’s right, no one. I sat down and had to reconcile this fact.
Earth shattering realization, let me tell you. Makes you think. If I’m not recording my time and quantifying my day, how do I know the value? How do I know how much my time is worth, my effort is worth, and ultimately, how much I am worth?
That’s the thing about recording your time. At the end of the day, you get so consumed with the idea of it that you start to associate it with your actual value. There were honest-to-god days where I felt valueless because I only billed a few hours. Conversely - because of travel and litigation related events - I would bill 10-12 hours in a day. Could not have felt more valuable (and exhausted).
Reader, as you can probably guess, this is not a healthy mindset. Especially when you suddenly go cold turkey and stop recording your time.
It took me a minute (could I have billed for that?) to appreciate that this was a real problem. I had spent so long associating time with value that I didn’t know how to value myself without it.
“I’m worth more than the hours I put into the day.”
Luckily, I snapped out of it and realized my value is unconditional and not tied to the 0.1s I accumulated in a day. And then eventually you see it (or rather, stop seeing it). The mental math and slew of 0.1s no longer appear before, during, and after every task. The clock stops. It’s a great feeling of relief.
I now speak to attorneys pretty much all day. Every so often I will catch someone counting 0.1s in their head while we speak. Towards the end of the conversation I always ask:
“Who are you billing that time to?”
Time recording and billing by time is such a bad way to bill and going that way was a hugely wrong turn. At some point law is going to have to wake up to that and start to assert the right to charge for what people really are buying: knowledge and expertise.
Also needs to wake up to the fact that overworked, tired lawyers are more likely to do bad lawyering - and manage down expectations of availability, long hours, and responding to fake urgency as though it is real.
Love this and is the very reason I offer and invoice insurance clients flat fee rates. I came to the same conclusion when I realize that not only was I putting in the time, it was being done to correct errors of another lawyer. The billing of a client to correct errors that they were already billed for? It made my brain explode! So I sat down and came up with a reasonable flat rate fee system that allows me to still garner some profit, I still track my time so I know what was done in a case by looking at the bill and I also am able to relax and enjoy working the actual case or matter as assigned to me by the client. Most of all, it gives my insurance company clients a guy post and map of the cost benefit of analysis on fighting a fraud case or litigating over an auto or bodily injury matter