The Billable Hours Were Not the Hours the Work Took

Your hourly rate only tells part of the story when necessary working time cannot be invoiced.

About five or six years ago I started working remotely for a client because I needed the income and that was the work available. The arrangement was strict. Tasks had budgets. Time was tracked in Pomodoros. The client talked about being paid for the “value” brought to an hour. In practice, payment was a fixed hourly rate against accepted tracked work.

The rate then was $3 an hour. That is a historical figure, not a statement about what I earn now.

What counted, and what did not

A lot of necessary preparation sat around the work that looked billable on paper.

Searching the CRM and project records for background. Reading emails. Watching a kickoff meeting. Working out requirements without a clear handover or one place that held the documentation together. Answering colleagues’ questions. Joining conversations. Receiving explanations from the client.

In my experience, that time was often not accepted as billable unless it produced a separately recognised deliverable.

So you could spend the morning becoming able to do the job, then invoice only the slice that looked like the job itself.

An illustration, not an invoice

Here is a representative example from that period. The figures are before any taxes or expenses, and they show how those days felt rather than reconstructing a single invoice.

Creating WordPress pages and checking their layout might land as 2.5 accepted billable hours. The preparation and surrounding work could push the total time consumed to four or five hours.

The quoted rate was still $3. The day was not. I also remember feeling that getting eight billable hours could sometimes consume ten, twelve or even fourteen hours. That is how those stretches felt.

Why I stayed

I needed the income. That sentence does a lot of work. It is easy to write tidy advice about walking away from a bad arrangement when you are not the person whose rent depends on the next accepted timesheet.

I stayed because this was the opportunity available, and I had to make it function.

Friday afternoons became planning time

Eventually I started planning the following week on Friday afternoons.

At the time I thought of it as organising my work. Looking back, it resembled elements of sprint planning. It was not a formal Scrum implementation. It was a practical queue.

In that arrangement, one Pomodoro meant 30 minutes of budgeted time. Sixteen Pomodoros were eight hours. I planned sixteen Pomodoros of tasks for each working day.

I also prepared another four to eight Pomodoros of backup tasks. That was two to four hours of alternatives, not extra work I necessarily intended to finish that day.

Backup tasks mattered because colleagues were also trying to secure billable work, and assignments or plans could overlap. If the planned stack moved, I still needed something I could pick up without first hunting for an invoiceable task.

I spent nearly two hours on those Friday afternoons preparing and documenting the plan. I submitted that plan as a tangible deliverable and billed the planning time.

That was a way to make necessary coordination visible and billable. The plan had to exist either way. Making it a deliverable meant the coordination stopped living only in unpaid gaps.

What improved, and what did not

It definitely reduced unpaid time.

I could start the week with a clear queue instead of first spending part of Monday searching for work I could invoice. That alone changed the shape of the day.

I still use a similar approach now. I generally get eight billable hours, sometimes more when needed.

It remained imperfect. Eight billable hours could still require nine or ten hours of the day. Preparation did not vanish. Interruptions did not vanish. The gap narrowed. It did not close.

There was also an unofficial team habit of trying to finish and log out before the client woke up, because later conversations could stretch the day. I have written about that elsewhere.

Friday planning helped me arrive with work ready. It did not rewrite the billing rules.

A small thing worth checking

None of this is an argument that every hour spent near a computer should automatically be invoiced. Personal distraction is not preparation. Scrolling is not a kickoff meeting.

The useful distinction is between time the work genuinely consumes and time a timesheet is allowed to recognise.

If you are in a similar setup, one practical check is simple. Over a representative week, compare the hours you invoiced with the hours the work actually took. Then look for preparation or coordination that keeps disappearing into the gap, and decide whether that work should be named inside future task budgets.

Agreeing billable preparation with a client is a practical option. The Friday plan was one way I made coordination visible enough to bill without pretending the whole problem had disappeared.

An hourly rate is a clean number.

The day is rarely that clean.