exploring “spoonable hours”

Exploring the intersections of freelancing and fair pricing in a very imperfect world
FYI – I’ve supported a small number of clients with a small number of hours of freelance support over the years, but most of my work is my day job!

vignettes

1

Mr. Spreadsheet Whisperer and I recently had to buy a new car because our old one bit the dust (fortunately in a way that was inconvenient but not dangerous). After many sessions of test driving and negotiations, we settled on a plan with the dealership. Yes, they put a humungous bow on the top of the car. No, we didn’t get to take the bow home. Yes, I was a lil disappointed about that. As I was leaving, the thought occurred to me that everyone walks out of there paying a different price for the same thing.

“Is that the definition of a sliding scale?” I asked myself. But I also wondered, should I have negotiated even more shrewdly? Did I get a “good deal?” 

And then I consoled myself, knowing that the worst of “it” was over. We solved our problem, we have a safe and reliable new car, and I won’t have to go back there for quite some time. Phew.

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2

A few years ago, I met with someone from a big tech company (you can probably guess which one) who was a “pricing strategist” (iirc). She wanted my perspective on how much a new tech product should cost. It was a really strange and interesting conversation – I wish I could remember more of the details. The “market” economy teaches that the right price is whatever people are willing to pay. But how do you figure that out? And of course, she didn’t just ask me this outright! I would probably say a low number, since that’s how negotiation usually begins. But the thing was, I wasn’t *buying* the product, I was just having a conversation about what it might be worth/what was a fair price for it. She asked me what we are paying now for stuff, assuming that perhaps we would be willing to pay as much or more for a product with better features. Would we? All hypothetical, of course. Spoiler alert, the product came out, it was priced at $1800 per person per year, I didn’t buy it, and then a few years later, it was replaced with a new thing.

In real estate, it’s possible to calculate the relative “value” of most house features, like an extra bathroom or bedroom or deck assuming you have enough data. But can we really do this for technology? (BTW – if you know the name for this type of math, please leave me a comment. I thought I knew the word for it, but now I can’t figure it out).

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3

In prepping for this blog post, I learned that the Labor Theory of Value isn’t only used in Marxist economics; it comes up in other strands of economic thinking and harkens all the way back to the ancient Greeks. I think it’s very relevant here:

“Marx used the labor theory to launch a critique against free-market classical economists in the tradition of Adam Smith. If, he asked, all goods and services in a capitalist system are sold at prices that reflect their true value, and all values are measured in labor hours, how can capitalists ever enjoy profits unless they pay their workers less than the real value of their labor? It was on this basis that Marx developed the exploitation theory of capitalism.”

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/labor-theory-of-value.asp

Woof, okay. I didn’t think I would be coming here to publicly dispute Marx but here we go. Perhaps in industrial production, everyone’s working hour produces a similar number of widgets. Of course you have some specialization/variation/differentiation but the LTV uses an average anyway, so I guess it accounts for that. However, when I apply this to working as a spreadsheet tinkerer or a “knowledge worker” (ew), I find that it doesn’t hold water for me.

Moreover, I know that my *own* quality and efficiency of work varies greatly hour by hour, mostly influenced by changes in my mood and experiencing chronic pain/chronic illness, but another factor is also the difficulty of the task. In my case, an hour is very much not equal to any other hour. I know this about myself and I am generally able to pace myself and switch up tasks so that I can best fit my “to-do” list to my current capacity to get things done.

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4

As someone who works adjacent to the tech consulting field, and a lot of my friends are in the trenches, I hear a lot about the “billable hours” system. I will betray my bias here, if you haven’t figured it out already: billable hours make absolutely no sense to me! I agree that we need to have a system of accountability and fairness for the exchange of work and money… but I don’t think it should be based exclusively on hours. Especially because most consulting practices have a groundrule that you cannot bill for time spent learning… and I really disagree with that premise! I also think that the industry expects people to work more hours than is humanly possible or advisable (for health/safety AND quality of work product) so I can only imagine that most people end up fudging the numbers – which seems like a perfectly normal thing to do given the constraints of the consulting world! Plus, what if you really got two hours “worth” of work done in one hour? Bill for two of course! But doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of billable hours in the first place? And don’t get me started on how it’s customary for lawyers, accountants, and management consultants to bill for 5-10 min increments. Yikes!

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5

As I mentioned previously, I live with mental health challenges and chronic illness that flares from time to time, and takes a lot of active management. I also have some highly specialized skills that have taken me 10+ years to hone. What is one hour of my body-mind compared to another hour of my body-mind? What about one hour of my body-mind compared to an hour of someone else’s body-mind? What about one hour doing something “easy” vs doing something “hard”? What about fairness to small orgs paying me for my time, when they have to fundraise for every $1 that they pay me? And what about fairness to my colleagues in this work who are also trying to put food on the table for their families?

[I am avoiding the tangent of “what is enough?” as it relates to quality of life and annual earnings because that’s not the subject of this post, but also a juicy related topic. Write a comment!]

introducing? imaginging? spoonable hours

For readers who are not deeply steeped in the chronic illness and/or disability justice spheres, you might not have heard of “spoon theory” – I encourage you to check it out! I’m using this concept to imagine a freelance compensation system that would make sense in my brain and my bones. What if an “hour” is just a unit of intention+focus… perhaps a unit if energy+effort… that is not necessarily connected to the clock? I could spend 20 minutes fixing a huge trainwreck and then use the rest of the “hour” to read or play Animal Crossing. That is one unit. Or I could spend 6 hours dragging boxes in Lucid Chart to make the perfect diagram. That is one or maybe 2 units. 3 if it was driving me nuts. Or I could spend 1 hr having face-to-face meetings, sometimes they run over a little bit and that is ok, as long as I don’t have a scheduling conflict! These “units” end when I reach a natural resting point, either because I achieved the task, I’ve tried everything I can think of, I need to rest, or I ran out of time. What if I looked over my work at the end of the month, looked at my emails and my calendar and my google docs and sometimes my stopclock, and counted the “spoons” required to support the client – and that is what I charge for. It would not be an “art” or a “science” really – it’s just the way my brain works and it seems like it would make “sense.”

In this framework, I would imagine having convos about what sorts of tasks are typically meaning-making for me (fewer spoons) or energy-draining for me (more spoons) so that me and my working partners would not be surprised at the end of the month (or whatever passage of time!) by an invoice that costed a lot or a little. We could even try to shift work around so that more of us get to spend more time on the work that replenishes energy instead of costing it. This invites in transparency and would allow me and others to be more truthful about the time we spend working, and the impact of that time on our overall wellbeing. And in this paradigm, I would not have to “pretend” that something that took a whole unit of energy (but not a whole hour) really took a whole hour!

It does beg the question, who is going to do the not-fun stuff? Well, as my grandfather said, “if it was fun, they wouldn’t call it work!” And as some thinkers have probably said somewhere (I am making this up), even socialist countries need garbage collectors. I am not suggesting that we all have to do ONLY work we enjoy, or that we should charge more for the really tedious stuff. (I actually really love tedious tasks like data entry, or making dashboards, or diagrams as I mentioned above!). Remember, your tedious may not be the same as my tedious. But if I was really honest about how I feel about different work aspects, I would probably interrupt the procrastination-shame cycle that I think we all can relate to.

All of this being said, I want to write out my philosophy of pricing and the parameters that I consider when I am working out a contract that will pay me for my work. In reality, I’m not yet totally embracing “spoonable hours” but it’s a useful thought experiment and I think I would like to approach it like an asymptote!

current state

1. It’s easy for me to say yes to a request for spreadsheet or Salesforce help that takes 3-5 hours or less, and do this all for free. After 5 “hours” of work, I usually find that having a contract and compensation in place is important for mutual accountability and the success of a project. My experience teaches me that entirely pro bono work doesn’t feel practical or effective, and the parameters below have been more fruitful in partnering with people/orgs to do impactful work together.
2. My totally transparent sliding scale recommended rate is $92-150 per hour. Yes, I say per hour because I think that “means” something to other people (even if it frankly doesn’t mean much to me). This is less than most of my colleagues with similar experience levels to me, but I have no interest in undercutting or competing with them! Generally, I work on projects that are so small that my trusted colleagues can’t or don’t want to take them on anyway.
3. I take into consideration the size of the organization (in number of people and perhaps in their overall budget size/scope)
4. I take into consideration the mission of the org, how excited I am by the mission, and to what extent the mission opens up the org to stigma or marginalization. Orgs with easier/more access to resources (and less marginalization) are usually able to pay more.
5. It’s important to me to consider what the org needs help with. Is it something that is easy-peasy for me? Is it something that will require a LOT of advanced troubleshooting for me? Is it something that I have unique knowledge/expertise in? Is it something I’ve done before and therefore I can implement with a lot less effort required?
6. I love to support orgs that have racial justice in their purpose. For these orgs, I have a policy that I do not “charge” for time spent on training and capacity building. Sure, I’ll count the units of energy I use for building, planning, meeting, testing, writing documentation. That’s all workity work work work. However, I never want orgs to feel like they “can’t afford” to have all of the training that they need to feel confident taking over responsibility for a new system or process. Therefore, I don’t want there to be an exchange of money for the time I spend on training. I am genuinely so so happy to dedicate time to training, and this seems like a small and meaningful way to do reparations.

Maybe in my ideal scenario we would have Universal Basic Income, which would allow folks to skill swap using gift economy principles. Or we would implement an as-yet-unrealized but very compelling version of socialism. Some other options that I think are useful to consider:

• I like the “flat fee retainer” model but I’ve only ever used it a couple of times (and frankly, I think I ended up “losing” $ that way because the project took WAY longer than I thought it would)
• My friend taught me that some designers bill based on number of revisions (not time spent on revisions) which I thought was really interesting!
• Crowdfunding model
• I’ve seen some sliding scale models that have specific, carved out slots for higher paying and lower paying work. I’ve never been so structured with this approach, but I love the transparency!
• A cooperative of data/tech freelancers who ebb and flow with work based on emergent needs and somehow make it all happen (this is how I feel when I’m working with my closest collaborators) and everyone is paid a fair amount