If you’ve ever hired a lawyer, you may have noticed something odd on the invoice: time billed in increments of 0.1 hours. Six minutes. A phone call that lasted eight minutes gets billed as 0.2 hours. A quick email reply is 0.1 hours.
This isn’t arbitrary. It’s a 50-year-old professional standard — and it’s the most honest way to bill for time-based work.
Where the 6-minute increment comes from
The American Bar Association first formalized the 0.1-hour billing increment in the 1970s, when law firms started moving away from flat fees toward time-based billing. They needed an increment that was granular enough to be accurate, but rounded enough to be practical.
Six minutes — one-tenth of an hour — threads that needle perfectly.
Smaller increments (15 seconds, one minute) create billing friction without meaningfully improving accuracy. Larger increments (15 minutes, 30 minutes) force you to round up aggressively or eat time that should be billable. Six minutes is the increment that survives contact with real professional work.
The legal profession figured this out half a century ago. It never left.
Why most fractional workers have never heard of it
If you came up through a company, someone else handled the billing. You did the work; finance sent the invoice. The 0.1-hour increment was invisible to you.
When you go independent — whether you call yourself fractional, a consultant, or a freelancer — you suddenly own the entire billing process. Most people default to what feels intuitive: round hours, rough estimates, or a timer app designed for hourly employees.
None of these work well for the way fractional work actually happens.
The problem with timers
Most time tracking apps are built around a single assumption: you start a task, you start a timer, you finish the task, you stop the timer.
That’s not how professional work happens.
You answer a client email in the middle of something else. You take a call while you’re walking. You spend twenty minutes thinking through a problem in the shower — and come up with the solution the client pays you for. You’re never going to open a timer app for any of these moments. But they’re all billable time.
The timer paradigm systematically misses the texture of real professional work. It captures the obvious work — the two-hour strategy session, the all-day workshop — and loses everything else.
What happens when you lose the small stuff
Let’s do the math.
Say you bill at $150 per hour. You’re losing 30 minutes of billable time per day — a couple of emails, a quick client call, some thinking time on a walk. That’s $75 per day. Over a 20-day work month, that’s $1,500. Over a year, $18,000.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s a meaningful part of your income, quietly leaving through the gap between when work happens and when you open a timer.
The right tool for the job
The 0.1-hour increment exists because it matches the grain of professional work. Short interactions, small tasks, quick responses — these are the atoms of how consultants and fractional executives actually spend their days.
Fract is built around this standard. One tap logs 6 minutes to any client or project. No timer to start, no timer to forget to stop. Just tap when work happens — immediately, accurately, in under five seconds.
Bulk buttons handle the bigger chunks: +30 minutes for a longer meeting, +1 hour for a deep work session. But the default is 0.1 hours, because that’s the right increment for professional billing.
Lawyers have known this for 50 years. Now you do too.
Fract is free, requires no account, and keeps all your data on your device. Download on the App Store.
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