I recently went to see a wonderful production of Romeo & Juliet. During the famous balcony scene, Juliet ponders, “What’s in a name?” As she discovers for herself, “it is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man.”
This soliloquy prompted me to wonder, “What’s in a day?” Precisely how do we define the billable day? (No, I wasn’t thinking this at the exact moment that Juliet fell for her star-crossed lover, in case you were wondering.)
The ordinary dictionary definition of a day is simply the period of light spanning sunrise and sunset. But you could also be referring to a “solar day,” which would be the 24-hour period that it takes the earth to rotate once on its axis relative to our sun; or perhaps a “civil day,” which is measured from midnight to midnight; or even an “astronomical day,” which is from noon to noon.
In everyday jargon, the word “day” is used even more loosely. Example: “My day really sucked” doesn’t usually mean that your entire day sucked but that some event or series of events during your waking hours sucked. It probably felt like the whole day sucked as a result, but… anyway, you get the point. There’s no one definition of the word “day.”
How, then, does one calculate the “billable day”? Is it an ordinary day, or a solar day, a civil day, or an astronomical day? Is it simply based on the time you step into the office to the time you depart? What about if you work at home after dinner and go past midnight? What if you are traveling across time zones? Or, even more complicated, across the international date line? How do you account for the fact that you lose a day traveling from New York to Tokyo, for example?
There doesn’t appear to be a clear consensus. Some lawyers use the “civil day” definition of midnight to midnight. Others prefer to “call it a day” when they finally go to sleep. For them, the end of a work day and the beginning of the next may be the two hours between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. when they take a nap. Sometimes, you are artificially required to cut off a “billable day” based on end-of-the-year accounting requirements by various clients. In these instances, a partner may tell you to enter all your time for the current day, and bill everything else to the following day because bills have to get to a client by a certain deadline.
It appears that Shakespeare had it right all along: The billable day is as much an artificial construct with arbitrary rules as a name that is neither hand nor foot nor any other part belonging to a man.
So, how do you define a “billable day”? Which method do you employ? Or is it a mix, depending on circumstances? I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments, as always!
