Are you awake?

If you are, and you are an ideas person, then you are billable.

My second favorite quote from Rick Webb's book, Agency: Starting A Creative Firm in the Age of Digital Marketing, goes like this:

"Time sheets are a joke. They are an outright lie. They are, first and foremost, a massive fraud, contentedly perpetrated and affirmed by all parties in the ecosystem -- the employer, the client, and the employees. Finance knows it. Your client knows it. Your client's finance department knows it. Your boss knows it. His boss knows it. Everyone knows it, but no one cares. There is zero accountability or incentive to discover the truth. Time sheets are supposed to perform one job — to accurately track time — and they don't accomplish this."

The sad, never fully-accounted-for truth is, the business of ideas is almost always on.

Step out of the shower. Idea.

Step off the bus. Idea.

Spill some coffee. Idea.

Read to your kids. Idea.

Wash the dishes. Idea.

Never mind the hours spent researching, unearthing, refining, testing, polishing and selling ideas.

So in a perfect world, idea people would bill for almost every moment they are awake. After all, you never know when the synapses will spark. If we're lucky, soon. If we're to be productive, then often.

But from a rational, accountable, measurable perspective this approach seems implausible, doesn't it? Can't idea people just have their ideas on the clock during business hours when we can fold all that subjective art making into a grasp-able time frame?

This is the lie, of course. Ideas eclipse the measurable-ness of time.

Time sheets, and time keeping as applied to the business of ideas is as efficient and useful as measuring the ocean by its acoustic frequency. Sure, it can be done, but to what end? Likely towards the devaluation and subservience of Art (that said with my cynicism in full, radiant bloom).

The business of ideas has always been at war with business over the valuation of ideas.

The better approach would be to equate ideas with efficacy, with results. But to do that would require transparency on the side of business; a willingness to share. I have yet to see a business willingly trade ideas for results. That would be too fair now, wouldn't it. Far better to insist ideas are measurable and paid for only by the hours spent waiting from ideas to reveal themselves. It costs less.

I realize this perspective comes across as bitter.

Yes, those in the business of ideas ought to be accountable in some understandable manner as, we presume, are all people in business. But it is the arbitrary yardstick of time that roils. And not that ideas couldn't ultimately be distilled to a time-valuation. The issue is realism: In a publicly-traded, accounted-for system, the ideas person is defined by a finite period of time. They are a "full time equivalent." But we all know that that equivalency will never be under- nor over-reported. To under-report invites giving back money. To over-report invites questioning capability. In other words, the system will never truly measure reality. It is, by default, a lie accepted by all parties. 

Is there a solution?

Rick's book suggests one: Placing the actualization of effort in the hands of a producer. Place the effort of measuring on the makers, allowing for interpretation. Is that fair to the client? Perhaps not, but they are not in the ideas business.

What do you think?