More On Billable Hours

Seriously, keeping track of billable hours - and meeting a set number of billable hours - has got to be the worst thing about being a lawyer.

Lawyers aren't so lucky. If you're tussling with a statute and your eyes glaze over, the length of time spent glazed isn't billable. If that same cute little hummingbird -- there he is again! hi, hummingbird! -- hovers in the tree outside your office window and waves hello, the time you spend smiling at him is not billable. In the time it takes to get up, go to the bathroom, get a cup of coffee or glass of water, and return to your desk, you've just squandered 0.1 billable hours.

Summer associates are not pressured to bill, but we're not stupid, either. This is the time to acclimate, to become adept at nickel-and-diming your workday to an extent unprecedented even for people like me who've done it before. I guess thinking in six-minute quanta becomes intuitive with sufficient practice....

Yet it amazes me that people can bill in tenths of an hour, log thousands of those six-minute increments every month, shackle their attention spans and obsess and skip workouts and not be doing it for the love.

Read the whole thing.