I keep a column in the ledger for hours I did not bill, and this year it is 61

Some years ago I started keeping a second column in the studio ledger for unbilled hours, mostly so I could see the shape of my own dishonesty rather than guess at it. I log them at the end of each week: the colour tests nobody pays for, the second visit to the garden because the first material had gone over, the correspondence, the scanning, the trip to the framer.

This year it stands at 61 hours. On a single plate of Helleborus niger, three of those hours were spent mixing and rejecting greens. Three hours on leaves that never went near the board.

I am not sure whether the exercise has made me better at pricing or only more aware of how badly I do it. My inclination is that a rate quoted honestly would make the work look expensive, and I would rather be thought reasonable than be paid properly. That is not a flattering thing to write down. But it is the most useful number in the book.

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Elin Holm·1w

The rejecting is the work, though. Three hours of greens that never went near the board is not dishonesty, it is how you find the one green that does. The problem with a column like that is it invites you to price the searching, and the searching is the part nobody can invoice without sounding mad.

I keep something similar, more loosely. It mostly taught me that my estimates were fiction, not that I was dishonest. Sixty-one hours sounds about right for a year of care.

Margaret HsuOP·1w

"The searching is the part nobody can invoice without sounding mad" is a better phrase for it than any I managed. I have tried pricing it honestly once, on a proposal, and watched the client's face travel through three distinct expressions. I now fold it in quietly, which is its own small compromise.

Your point about estimates being fiction rather than dishonesty is the one that stings. I suspect I have been using "dishonesty" to mean "the plan was wrong," and it is easier to be morally severe with myself than to admit I simply estimated badly. Sixty-one hours of care is a generous reading and I will take it, though I note it is also sixty-one hours nobody paid for.

Gloria Mae Jackson·1w

Now honey, three hours mixing greens that didn't make it onto the board is not dishonesty. That's the work. I've got a scrap basket full of strips I cut wrong and set aside, and every one of them taught my hands something the good piece couldn't have. You can't get to the right green without going through the wrong ones, that's just how color behaves.

What I'd watch is that column start to shame you. Once you're logging it like a debt, you'll start skipping the second visit to the garden to keep the number down, and the work will get thinner for it. Maybe rename it. Call it the learning column instead of the unbilled one. Sixty-one hours of figuring things out sounds like a good year to me.

Margaret HsuOP·1w

I would take the point about the naming, but I am not sure I would follow you on the scrap basket. Wrong strips teach the hand, yes, but a rejected green on a plate is not quite the same thing. It is a question that had to be put to the paper before it could be answered. Three hours is not a great deal for Helleborus, in my experience. The greens in that flower are nearly neutral and they shift with the light, and you cannot judge them in the well.

Where I do agree with you entirely is the debt. Log it as a debt and the honest entries start to feel like failures, and then you quietly stop making them. The number should be a record, not a bill.

Margaret HsuOP·1w

The renaming suggestion has come up twice now, so I suspect you are both right. "Unbilled" is a bookkeeper's word and it does carry a whiff of the ledger-as-accusation. Though I would say the shame is doing something useful in small doses: it is what stopped me from counting a perfectly pleasant afternoon of sketching as work.

The part I would push back on is the scrap basket. A strip cut wrong is a mistake you can see in a second. Three hours of rejected greens is not a series of clean failures, it is a long slow argument with yourself about temperature and granulation and whether the leaf is actually that cold. Nothing to keep. Nothing to learn from in the hand. Just time. That is why it goes in a column, I think. It has no other record.