The Conundrum of Hourly Knowledge Work  ## Metadata - Author: [[Aurooba Makes]] - Full Title: The Conundrum of Hourly Knowledge Work - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #KnowledgeWork - #Creativity - #ValueBasedPricing Author: Courtney Robertson Source: Aurooba Makes (Personal Notes) Reference: https://aurooba.com/notes/the-conundrum-of-hourly-knowledge-work/ date created: 2025-08-22 00:00 --- # Title: The conundrum of hourly knowledge work ## Table of Contents: - [📚 References](#-references) - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#-notes) - [📖 References](#-references-1) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) Assessment](#-deib-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-belonging-assessment) - [✅ Logical validity](#-logical-validity) - [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### References: - Aurooba Makes: “The conundrum of hourly knowledge work” by Courtney Robertson: https://aurooba.com/notes/the-conundrum-of-hourly-knowledge-work/ ## 📝 Summary: Courtney Robertson argues that knowledge work—particularly coding—is inherently creative, unfolds beyond the desk, and resists neat quantification by the hour. Timers and strict hourly models can suppress creativity and outcomes by conflating time-at-desk with value. She proposes value-based pricing (and, in employment, salary-like models) as better aligned with how insights actually emerge: after deep understanding, then stepping away, allowing breakthroughs to surface during everyday activities. ## 📖 Main Content: - The piece is a public note: exploratory, candid, and open to revision. - Key claim: Knowledge work continues off the clock; insights often arrive while “doing the dishes, taking a shower, or admiring the sunset.” - Tension: Hourly billing rewards visible time but ignores cognitive incubation and creative breakthroughs. - Personal experience: Being “attached to a timer” reduced creativity; stepping away from hourly constraints improved work quality. - Positioning coding: Coding is creative knowledge work; lines-of-code are a poor proxy for productivity. - Pricing stance: Time tracking is sometimes useful for deep, trackable work, but incomplete; value-based pricing better captures outcomes and worth. Salaries are a rough analogue in employment contexts. Direct anchors to relevant passages on the live article: - Insight incubation beyond the desk: “some of the best solutions… when I’m not at my computer” (opening section) — see the article’s opening. - Timer suppressing creativity: “paid on an hourly basis… didn’t realize how intensely this impacted my creativity” — mid-article experience. - Coding as creative knowledge work: “I firmly live in the camp that coding is a creative act” — section titled “Is development/coding knowledge work?” - Value-based pricing: “That’s why value based pricing has always worked well for me…” — “The role of value-based pricing in knowledge work.” - Quantification is hard: “it’s really hard to quantify the knowledge work we do” — closing note. Note: The source is a single-scroll note without timestamps; link to the canonical URL above for context navigation. ### 🗒️ Notes - Knowledge work characteristics - Non-physical, creative problem-solving. - Productivity decoupled from measurable units (e.g., lines of code). - Incubation effect: breakthroughs occur away from the desk after deep comprehension. - Problems with hourly models - Encourages “butt-in-seat” time over outcome. - Penalizes necessary detachment phases (walks, sleep, chores). - Can reduce creativity and quality due to pressure to “keep the timer running.” - Value-based pricing benefits - Aligns compensation with outcomes and impact. - Accommodates nonlinear, asynchronous insight generation. - Still leaves room for tracking deep work where appropriate. - Coding as creative knowledge work - Strategic, functional development requires design thinking and synthesis. - Output metrics (lines, commits) can be inversely correlated with value. - Employment analogues - Salaries loosely mirror value-based approaches but may still rely on proxy metrics. - Practical implications - For freelancers: structure proposals around outcomes, milestones, and value. - For teams: encourage breaks, reflection, and autonomy; avoid timer fetishism. - For clients: calibrate expectations toward deliverables and business impact. ## 📖 References: - Primary: https://aurooba.com/notes/the-conundrum-of-hourly-knowledge-work/ - Related context (general): - The incubation effect in creativity research: concise overview on the [incubation effect in problem solving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubation_(psychology)). - Value-based pricing primer: Alan Weiss’s overview of [value-based fees](https://alanweiss.com/books/value-based-fees/). ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1) Original idea: Best insights often arrive away from the desk after deeply understanding the problem, surfacing during mundane activities. Paraphrase: Once I’ve internalized a problem, I deliberately step back—sleep, chores, a quiet moment—and that pause is when new angles appear. The “aha” rarely happens while staring at the screen; it emerges while life goes on. 2) Original idea: Coding is creative knowledge work; output volume doesn’t equal productivity. Paraphrase: Software development, as I practice it, is a creative craft. Some of my most productive days involve writing almost no code, because the real progress lies in clarity, decisions, and design choices that shape everything that follows. ## 📰 Newsletter: This week in WordPress and open source, we’re leaning into learning and value. If you’re teaching yourself web dev, focus less on hours logged and more on insight gained—breakthroughs often happen while you’re off-screen. On the updates front: Gutenberg continues iterating on performance and design tools, giving theme builders more power with fewer plugins. Community highlights include new contributor-friendly docs for first-time patchers and mentorship cohorts forming ahead of the next release cycle. Keep an eye on emerging funding conversations around sustainability in the plugin ecosystem—maintainers can’t pay bills with stars alone. New plugins we’re testing: a lightweight pattern library helper, a block-based form builder, and a site-health profiler for multisite. Learning resources: modern PHP patterns for WordPress, Git branching strategies for teams, and a “JS in WP” refresher series. Want more? Join the weekly contributor office hours and say hi—your first patch is closer than you think. Links: - WordPress Contributor Guide: https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/ - Gutenberg updates: https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/gutenberg/ - Sustainability discussions: https://github.com/sustainers/awesome ## ✅ Action Items: Prompt you can reuse for alignment with your role and OSPO aspirations: “Analyze how this article informs my work as a Developer Advocate focused on open source and WordPress. Map its ideas to: - Contributor experience: onboarding, mentorship, psychological safety, and sustained engagement. - Education design: curriculum and workshop formats (PHP/JS/HTML/CSS/Git/GitHub) that honor creative incubation and outcome-based assessment over seat time. - Advocacy: policies and narratives that support value-based recognition (e.g., impact metrics, crediting, funding models). - OSPO strategy: governance, transparency, inclusive decision-making, and sustainable funding aligned with value delivered to the ecosystem. - Program metrics: replace time-based proxies with outcome metrics (issues resolved, docs improved, community health, release readiness). Provide concrete actions for community programs, documentation improvements, and sponsorship initiatives within the WordPress ecosystem that reflect these principles.” How this specific article aligns: - Reinforces - Summary: Hourly knowledge work presents a conundrum because valuable insights and breakthroughs often occur when the worker is not officially at work or at their desk. This creative thinking can happen while doing other activities or even when they are not consciously working on the problem. However, when working hourly, it becomes difficult to account for this non-traditional work time. The author shares their experience of working on a timer and how it impacted their creativity and ability to produce great work. They argue that coding is a creative act and that quantifying productivity in knowledge work is challenging. The author suggests that value-based pricing or salaries may be a better approach to accounting for the value of knowledge work. - URL: https://aurooba.com/notes/the-conundrum-of-hourly-knowledge-work/  This is a *note*. Notes are work-in-progress thoughts and ponderings that I choose to share “out loud”, subject to change and revision. Some of the best solutions I’ve come up with for problems I’ve solved in my projects have often come when I’m not at my computer. That’s a common fact every knowledge worker can relate to. Our brain doesn’t operate on a timer and it often keeps working the problem even when we’re not officially at work or at our desk. In fact, when I’m working a difficult problem, I know **the best way to surface a valuable insight is to deeply understand the problem and then walk away and do something else** – or sleep on it, and at some point while doing the dishes, taking a shower, or admiring the sunset, an idea will come to mind and lead to a breakthrough. It happens time and time again. But when you work hourly, how do you account for this work you did that wasn’t *“at work*“? You can’t really, it’s very difficult to quantify. This past year, I found myself in a situation where my knowledge work was attached to a timer and I was essentially paid on an hourly basis according to the time I tracked. So I would toil away at my computer, sometimes stuck and frustrated but still there because I was working, and that had to be at my desk with the damn timer on. I didn’t realize how intensely this impacted my creativity and ability to produce great work until I stepped away from that situation and did work off a timer again. #### Is development/coding knowledge work? I wear many hats but the easiest hat to describe is one of being a developer. I know there’s a lot of perspectives on whether coding is creative or not, an art or not, etc. But I firmly live in the camp that coding is a creative act – at least at the level I do it, where I’m doing a lot of strategic functional work. **Knowledge work is non-physical work where you cannot correlate productivity with something specifically quantifiable.** Coding is knowledge work – creative work – because contrary to what some people might think, the number of lines you write doesn’t reflect your productivity at all. There are days where I write barely any code but my productivity is very high and I’ve accomplished something important and vital. #### The role of value-based pricing in knowledge work. I’m not saying that tracking your hours is a bad thing or not useful in knowledge work. It definitely is. And there is a lot of room for *[deep work](https://calnewport.com/deep-work-rules-for-focused-success-in-a-distracted-world/)* which you can actively track and time. But that’s not the whole picture. That’s why value based pricing has always worked well for me as an independent consultant/developer. The *kind* of equivalent when you’re employed is a salary, I suppose? I’m not sure and I don’t have a clear answer. #### It can be hard to quantify knowledge work. I guess what I’m saying is, it’s really hard to quantify the knowledge work we do because it doesn’t just happen at an appointed time. And it doesn’t always look like “work” in a traditional sense, it doesn’t always happen at a desk. 🤷🏽‍♀️ #### If you liked this article, you’ll enjoy my biweekly newsletter on modern development. Get an original essay or tutorial in your inbox every other Tuesday., The Conundrum of Hourly Knowledge Work, Aurooba Makes, 01hayg1y0cabttjp8newkc2nyr.