Let's Kill the Billable Hour
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If you measure the wrong thing, you’ll get the wrong thing.
What you value is intrinsically tied to what you sell. It shapes you, it shapes your culture and it creates the wrong incentives when you sell time.
Once you start measuring something it very quickly becomes all you see. What you measure defines what you value. If you look at any company look at what they measure and you can instantly tell the kind of culture they are.
We need to have a discussion about how effective we are, not how efficient we are.
The history of the billable hour is a confluence of events that span over 60 years.
The last buggy whip factory was no doubt a model of efficiency.... There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
They don't understand why they're doing it, because as far as they know, this is the way it's always been done. And that is why we do timesheets.
The majority of what we manage in our lives has no way to be measured. The love of a spouse or children. The trust we have in coworkers. You can't measure it.