I couldn't experiment with his advice with my current business model. Working on a longer time interval (daily, weekly) when you want to deal with multiple clients during a single interval is a recipe for unhappy clients and potentially legal fees.
If I am billing weekly, but in practice I do 2.5 days of work for each of two clients, do I bill both for the entire week? Most of Thomas's arguments for rounding up in these longer increments on the basis of opportunity cost demonstrably don't apply in this context, because clearly I can use the other time to work for another client. The best outcome I see if someone I'm working for finds out is that I have an unhappy client and probably lose the contract -- which is fair enough, frankly, if I'm billing for a week but only actually working for them for half of that time.
For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not arguing against having a reasonable minimum billing period so clients don't mess you around and so you can manage your time sensibly. I'm just challenging the notion that "hourly" is not a reasonable period for some of us, and pointing out that "daily" or "weekly" can have serious drawbacks too.
If I am billing weekly, but in practice I do 2.5 days of work for each of two clients, do I bill both for the entire week? Most of Thomas's arguments for rounding up in these longer increments on the basis of opportunity cost demonstrably don't apply in this context, because clearly I can use the other time to work for another client. The best outcome I see if someone I'm working for finds out is that I have an unhappy client and probably lose the contract -- which is fair enough, frankly, if I'm billing for a week but only actually working for them for half of that time.
For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not arguing against having a reasonable minimum billing period so clients don't mess you around and so you can manage your time sensibly. I'm just challenging the notion that "hourly" is not a reasonable period for some of us, and pointing out that "daily" or "weekly" can have serious drawbacks too.