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Subject:Re: fees: charging for conceptual time From:"Weissman, Jessica" <weissmanj -at- ABACUSTECH -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 20 Jul 1998 12:08:03 -0400
I assume you're charging your usual rate for the time it takes you to
"learn all about the project" up front, right? That is definitely part
of the work.
So your question concerns what to charge for the incubation period, when
you're not actually thinking about the project consciously but you are
clearly doing some kind of work.
It's an interesting question - I work the same way, but since I am an
employee rather than a contractor I just work on something else while
incubating a project. If I had to work on contract, I'd hope to have
multiple projects so that I could write one while incubating another.
If that's not possible, you might want to come up with what feels right
as a charge for part-time thinking. Either some kind of fee you build
into your hourly rate or an approx number of hours spend subconsciously
thinking.
Maybe you could calibrate by trying to do all the thinking consciously -
if this works at all, it might give you a good ballpark figure to
charge.
