We always quote every project, even our own pieces, internal work, etc. The reason being is almost exactly what you’re talking about. Creating parameters, and essentially “fishbowling” yourself actually stimulates the creative process. If the project is open ended, not only will you work on it forever, but the direction will tend to be off, or the scope will creep out of control.

Anyways. All that aside, I appreciated and enjoyed your ramble.

That whole 20-50% thing sounds like a good rule of thumb, we tend to call that “polish” hours when we’re dealing with a contract, but really yea, it can be filed under “unforeseen issues” and whatnot. We’ve certainly been burnt before by underestimating a quote and not allotting for enough “Coordination time” before. I like that, “coordination time,” it’s kind of like “synergy” or some other savvy business euphemism.

BTW, when I wrote this, I was coming from a place of working on our own site so there was no _real_ budget/deadline so this is what I kind of came up with as far as a “system” to deal with that. It was more of a ramble, and probably why I didn’t publish it as soon as I was done writing it. :)

What we’ve found is this. When we quote a job, let’s say for the sake of argument a 10 hour job. We immediately need to add 20%-50% to our quote. We call this time “coordination time” So our quote for the job would be 12-15 hours. With 2-5 hours of coordination time. Coordination time is a really poor name for this time, it should really be called, “we can’t accurately guess how long this job is actually going to take us, so to be safe we have to add time” time. But when we look at the job, we don’t look at Coordination time. We actually look at the original 10 hour quote as our allotted time. We effectively Fishbowl ourselves.

You would not believe how accurate this method is. 90% of our jobs fall within this 12-15 hour time, or under it. The few jobs that go over are due to fact that something went terribly wrong.

We have also found that it is not humanely possible for us as designer to work more than 6 billable hours (actual production hours) in a 8 hour day. Too much BS comes up throughout the day to deal with, you need to take mind breaks, things like that. So being 100% efficient in our office is working 6 billable hours a day. Our best designers are 90% efficient.

Taking all of this into account, if you quote using our method, and quote correctly, and then schedule your day wisely, that is, know that you cannot work 8 productive hours in an 8 hour day. You can actually schedule yourself pretty accurately.

Now don’t get me wrong, Fishbowling still happens. Most of us tend to use the time allotted to us, all of it, even though if we didn’t need to use it, and if we didn’t use it, we would be more profitable. And again… we all know there is “coordination” time built into each job, so we are continually lying to ourselves. But the systems works really well, and helps us avoid scope creep and “just one more thing” disease.

project management is fun like that.