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The advantage of the billable hour

A week ago, I wrote about the joys of freedom from the billable hour. But I've realized that the billable hour does have one big advantage: it limits the time you spend.

I used to do the occasional psychological study for pocket money (and because they're fun). In one of them, they had a long list of questions that we were allowed to look up the answers to on the Internet. You got extra money, I think it was something like 12 cents, for every correct answer, and a bonus for giving more correct answers than the other people in your group. I soon realized that the point of the study was to see how much time people would spend researching when we were incentivized to answer lots of questions as quickly as possible. And I also did a quick cost-benefit analysis. I was uncovering all sorts of interesting things while researching the first question. The twelve cents wasn't enough incentive for me to stop researching and move on. I ended up answering about a fifth of the questions in the allotted time.

What I'm saying is, I tend to research endlessly, given the opportunity. The billable hour imposes some discipline on me that I don't have at the AG's office, where I spent half the day writing a memo that I probably could have completed in less than two hours. On the plus side, I can now tell you all about the legal standards for border searches in great detail, including each circuit's position and legal tests.

Full post as published by Magic Cookie on October 03, 2008 (boomark / email).