Nicely put. I've worked in two companies now where this is a huge issue. The total time to produce the output is very hard to calculate, yet everybody insists upon an hourly breakdown, and therefore a cost. But it never matches. It would be far easier to put a value on the output, set a deadline, and pay accordingly. The client gets the result, and the employee is allowed to work out the best route to take to produce the value, without tracking their hours, and worrying about how to make a 15 hour job fit into a 7 hour limit.