I’ve been thinking a lot about working overtime, mostly because I’ve been doing a lot of it. I haven’t taken a day off since the day after Christmas, as I struggle to meet an impossible deadline.
My boss doesn’t seem to like contractors as a general rule, and she especially doesn’t like paying over time, but when she set the deadline I basically told her that I can work 60+ hours a week or miss the deadline, which would she prefer?
I record my own time, and I put in a timesheet and she looks at it every Monday, sighs, and signs off on it. So in some ways she’s trusting me, and I’m doing everything I can not to screw it up, because this is a really good gig and I don’t want to lose it.
Nobody has ever talked about it or suggested I do it this way, but I have this weird duality in the way I record my time. When I’m at work, I record the time I arrive, the time I leave, and how long I take for lunch, and bill for every minute of that time. They have me body and soul, and so I feel they need to pay me, even for the time I spend surfing the web, reading email, talking to people about non-work related stuff, going to the toilet, or wandering down to the fridge or the water cooler. But when I’m at home, I am much more conservative about the time I record. I can spend from 10:30 to 21:30 in front of my computer with a short break for dinner, but I try to estimate how much of that time was non-productive time and only put down 6 hours on my time sheet. Which is funny, because most of the non-productive time was doing the same non-productive things I do at work, where I do count them.
I guess the difference, at least in my mind, is the “tax” I pay for the privilege of working at home. Mostly during this crunch I’ve been spending my 40 hours at the office, and then spending my evenings and weekends working at home. I end up putting in about 20 billable hours in that home time, although I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was counted by some objective means I’d probably spent closer to 40 hours of my home time being at least as productive as I am in the office, if not more.
But that’s the problem with being a “knowledge worker”. There is an excellent Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert marvels that the mindless time he spends filling in time sheets or whining about them to the secretary “counts” on his timesheet, but the highly productive time he spent designing circuits in his head in the shower doesn’t, because he wasn’t in the office. I have a similar dilemma – I can hardly put down in my time sheet that I spent a sleepless night mulling over how to structure foreign keys between the ShowPlaylist and PlaylistPack tables, but I can easily justify putting down the time I spend explaining to Steve at work what the target audience for the MacBook Air is, even though the first got us closer to our development goal and the second didn’t.
Today (Sunday) was “office rules” – I had to go into work to integrate my code with Rohan’s and test it on the three computers that act as my “test theatre”. So I was at work, so I billed from the time I arrived to the time I left. There wasn’t anybody around except Rohan and Kris, and they’re in bigger time crunches than me so there wasn’t any idle chit chat and very few distractions. As we were leaving around 17:30, Kris said “have a good weekend” and we all burst out laughing.