What is your typical total time “working” vs. time billed? I think I must be doing something wrong, because I’m having 12 hour days but only billing 7-8 hours/day. I can’t block bill so I lose a lot of time switching between tasks and reading random emails and don’t want to put down a million .1s for reading emails, but still seems weird to be losing so much time. I’ll take quick breaks throughout the day but nothing I’d expect to total more than hour. At a loss here.

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Why do you not bill reading random emails? On days when I have a lot of work I bill pretty much every minute that I’m at my desk. You should change up your billing practices because I think it’s unfair to you that you’re losing so much time.

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Also - things like reading emails to get up to speed on a matter, rereading past emails to recall what’s going on in a matter when you’re turning back to it - all of that is billable! You should bill everything you do that’s related to a matter.

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You can't do your job without reading random emails. Bill your times WE DONT WORK FOR FREE.

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Can’t you just combine all the email reading? For clients that don’t allow block billing I just put like “review and respond to email correspondence regarding purchase agreement (.9)”

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I do this if there is long/substantive correspondence on a single topic, but I’ll try to be more liberal/aggressive with lumping emails together like this.

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Just depends on the day for me and what I’m working on. When switching tasks a lot, I do end up working 10-12 hours to bill 7-8 sometimes

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I shoot for 7 out of 8, but I do get to block my billing.

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I have the same issue - the more matters I work on in a day, the more time I lose, with all the jumping around and regrouping. I can't imagine resetting a timer every time I switch matters or tasks - I'd spend more time on fooling with the timer than working. I'm trying to work on not jumping around so much so I can complete a task, reset, and move on.

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Okay - I'm figuring out how to use the timer pop-out on the timekeeping software. Fingers crossed that it will change my life!

You’re losing too much time. Put down the .1 in your draft log for every email and contemporaneously track how long it actually took (timers are great for this). Then when you’re doing your final review for submission tally up the total time actually spent on emails for a particular case and mark it down. E.g if you hypothetically spent 30 minutes total in the day reading and responding to 7 emails for a case, your bill would show 1.4 for emails, marked down to .5

This lets you accurately track your time and not give anything up for free without unethically billing for time you didn’t actually do.

Those 30 seconds you spend reading a single email for a case should be rolled into other tasks you do for the case. If there’s absolutely nothing else at all to do that week, then yes it’s fair to take the 0.1.

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You shouldn’t be losing so much time. Do you keep time contemporaneously? Also, if you have enough work, you shouldn’t lose too much time switching between tasks unless you’re sitting there wondering what to do. I lose about an hour a day talking to people and taking breaks. Otherwise I find that something that takes 6.5 mins that I get to bill a .2 for several times a day makes up for missing some time. And you only get that if you keep your time contemporaneously—start and stop the clock every time you start and stop something.

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I have the same issues OP. Using a timer helped me. Also like everyone said, bill the time you spend reading emails. If you are a transactional specialist like me, reading random emails is part of our job and how we keep up with the deals. Also, reading random emails throughout the day really hurts productivity. You are taking double hit if you don’t even bill it.

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