Attorney Work Life Balance Calculator
This web page allows you to calculate your schedule based on your law firm’s billable hour targets. However, the script is inherently defective because it only computes hours for Monday-Friday! Um, designer, what about the weekend??? Make sure you don’t underestimate the non-billable time, and note the “plug” variable is the number of hours working at home.
(Thanks to Jewishbuddha.org for the pointer)
The original post at rethink(IP) — where I found the link — asks why anyone would work for or hire a firm with such high requirements, but doesn’t address the methodology or assumptions directly.
To answer your question, it appears to me that the weekend hours are included in the “hours worked at home” figure in the results. Working in the office on the weekend is no better than working at home, and can be a lot worse if you live far from the office (as I will in 5 months). Working at home on Saturdays will save me a round trip commute. Either way, though, I assume those “at home” hours are going to be on the weekend, because given the commute and the already-long hours during the week, there aren’t enough hours in the day for those hours at home to be on the weekday.
It’s flawed however, in that it asserts 100% billable efficiency when working at home, which is unrealistic. Billing 3 hours at home probably takes more than 3 hours of time, especially given other distractions and obligations at home.
In my case, I routinely worked in the office every weekend. (I still do). Relegating that information to a small “work at home” box masks some important complexities. Eric.
I’ll agree with that.