In Monday’s post, I recommended that you check your firm’s policy on vacation days. In particular, I advised that you determine if your firm allows you to count a 0.1 hour day as a work day. Some firms do; some don’t. Today, we explore the rationale behind a 0.1 hour work day policy.
After reading Monday’s post, some of you may feel uncomfortable with the notion that you can “save” a vacation day by simply billing 0.1 hours. Let me allay your concerns. As a preliminary matter, if your firm’s policy allows it, you are perfectly entitled to do so. If your firm doesn’t allow it, rest assured that you’ll receive a call from someone in billing informing you that you need to account for another 6.9 or 7.9 hours for that day (depending on the 7 or 8 hour work day).
Let’s do a thought experiment: think about all the holidays where you were in the office working. Or weekends. Isn’t that supposed to be your free time? Time to spend with friends / family / spouse / boyfriend / girlfriend / dog? Even a cat, if that’s how you choose to spend your time? (sorry, I’m allergic to cats) Think about the times that you cancelled an event on a Friday night or a weekend because of work. Think about how you don’t get overtime for working on days that you aren’t supposed to work. (Yes, you get a bonus based on overall billable hours, but those hours can be billed at any time, and aren’t dependant on when they are billed.)
My point is this: you don’t get any extra credit for working on days that you aren’t supposed to be working, so taking a day off here and there when you actually can get away from the office shouldn’t count against you either.
Let’s make this easy with an example. MLK weekend in January 2010 is not too far away. Some of you may have already made plans to go skiing during that long weekend. But it turns out that you have a major court filing the day after MLK, and it’s a massive MSJ. No matter how much you plan in advance, you’ve been in the business long enough to know that there is no way you can go on the ski trip. You’ll be working throughout the weekend, likely pulling successive all-nighters. The client is going to want to make last-minute changes on Sunday or Monday. You won’t sleep at all Monday night or Tuesday morning implementing those final edits. In short, you won’t have an MLK weekend.
But guess what? After the MSJ is filed on Tuesday afternoon, you have some free time. Here’s the problem, though: if you go to work on Wednesday, you’ll sit in the office all day with little to nothing to do. You may end up surfing the internet for a full day and billing 0.1 hours anyway, because the only billable work that you could do was to check the ECF system to confirm that your MSJ was filed properly. Maybe you clean your office. You end up billing 7.9 hours to office admin. What a waste of a perfectly good day.
But if you take the day as a vacation day, you’ve just used up precious vacation time. And it doesn’t really feel like a vacation to you, but just a delayed opportunity to catch up on sleep after burning the midnight oil all through a holiday weekend. Why can’t you take your MLK weekend now? If your MSJ was due the Friday before MLK, you would have three free days that wouldn’t be counted toward your vacation time. Why is it that, just because your MSJ filing happened to fall on a Tuesday instead of a Friday, you now have to use vacation days?
You shouldn’t have to. That’s why I advocate the 0.1 hour work day policy. It balances out the lost weekends and holidays that associates sacrifice in order to serve the partners and their clients. Consider the 0.1 hour work day as a “make-up” day for weekend work.
Note that I am not suggesting that the 0.1 hour work day be abused. If you are planning to take a two-week vacation to Europe to celebrate an anniversary, you’ve booked your tickets three months in advance and given ample notice to all the partners, and the firm has already transferred your workload to other associates during your time away, do not try to bill 0.1 hours each day to avoid using your vacation. You have no reason to bill any time if someone else is responsible for your work while you are gone (unless something comes up in the case that is related to knowledge that only you possess). It’s really a vacation, so treat it as one. Enjoy yourself, don’t think about work, and bill the two weeks as a vacation.
Agree? Disagree? How do you bill your vacation days? Want to tell me that you like cats better than dogs? I’d love to hear from you.
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