Reblog

Billable Pomodoros

So you are ready to start the next project and you are a freelancer and a good Pomodoro Technique practitioner. Of course all those tracked pomodoros are a good source of information for billing. But how the pomodoro should be converted into time and then into money on the bill? My rule of thumb is the following:

1P ~= 35’

The math behind the equation assumes that breaks related to the technique are part of the job (a very important part indeed). If you take more or less 5 minutes short break and a long break of 20 minutes you have 140 minutes every 4 pomodoros which are exactly the 35 minutes shown above.

There are great days and there are bad days, but let’s say you’re a 12P/day kind of guy. Twelve pomodoros is 7 hours (I know the very last long break is not included but as an average I don’t think it’s important). If you have an hourly wage of 40$ and 12p is your daily average for a month, you’ll charge ~5600$ to your customer. Just an example. If you prefer to bill days of work, then is up to you to decide how many pomodoros make up a day.

The interesting part of making pomodoros a billable unit is the high quality of the work sold to the customer. If you bill pomodoros and the customer is able to understand the technique, they can be sure that what they receive is high quality, focused work that can be tracked down to the single 35 minutes unit (if you keep the history). With tools like Pomodori this is plain easy.

Would you agree with my conclusions? What you would do differently instead?