Quotes & Sayings About Billable Hours

Back then I used to say that I despised the new coinage "quality time," that it was yuppie parents' smiley-face equivalent to lawyers' "billable hours. — Kurt Andersen

That's the rational premise behind my spending hours of billable time adjusting my Facebook preferences. The real reason, of course, for all this stuff, is that it provides a way to blow off work you should be doing, while creating the illusion that you are achieving something. — Jeffrey Zeldman

The billable hours is a classic case of restricted autonomy. I mean, you're working on - I mean, sometimes on these six-minute increments. So you're not focused on doing a good job. You're focused on hitting your numbers. It's one reason why lawyers typically are so unhappy. And I want a world of happy lawyers. — Daniel H. Pink

Our work and educational institutions reinforce this preference for later over now throughout our lives. In school we focus on the ends - passing the semester, making the grade, or otherwise getting it all behind us - rather than the present-moment experience of actually learning. As employees, we want the work to be over as soon as it begins. Work culture is driven by quotas, billable hours, budgets, and Gantt charts - bottom lines of any sort. The value is always somewhere ahead of you, rather than here right now, in the room with you. We're perpetually looking ahead to a payday or a weekend or some other kind of finish line. Virtually every day of our lives, we're trained to lean towards something we don't have, which essentially trains us to be dissatisfied with where we already are. — David Cain

Work done by other people sounds easy. How hard can it be to take care of a newborn who sleeps 20 hours a day? How hard can it be to keep track of your billable hours? To travel for one night for business? To get a 4-year-old ready for school? To return a few phone calls? To load the dishwasher? To fill out some forms? — Gretchen Rubin