Please don't kill the creatives

Despite the ubiquity of the practice, a rigid "bill every hour" system doesn’t work in the creative realm. Let’s review the immutable laws of creativity.

You can’t put inspiration on a clock

If you do, you’re rewarding creatives who are slow, incapable, and unable or unwilling to collaborate.

To illustrate, imagine Chassy, a designer who takes 12 hours to create a simple banner ad. But, unfortunately, it turns out Chassy hadn’t reviewed the client’s latest brand guidelines, and so all the work he did has to be revised. By the time Chassy has completed his task, more than 20 hours have been torched in the bonfire of his inadequacies. What he created meets basic client demands, but the piece will be forgotten immediately by all who see it.

On the other hand, consider Elizabeth, who rips out the banner in an hour, following her well-honed instincts and thorough knowledge of the brand. She goes to coffee with a colleague, and when she returns brings fresh perspective that results in the creation of a clever alternative banner, designed to thrill the client and push boundaries a bit. The client loves the idea, and luxuriates in the knowledge that his agency partner is constantly looking for new ways to create lasting connections with his fickle audience. He ultimately chooses the safe, expected execution*, but feels a renewed sense of confidence in the relationship.

Business cost:

• Chassy: 20 hours, bored client
• Elizabeth: 4 hours, inspired client

You tell me: Does a system that rewards Chassy as five times more billable—and thus five times more "valued" than Elizabeth—a good idea?

Put another way, imagine the creative who scribbled the words “Just do it” on a notebook or bar napkin. Should that person be paid twenty-five cents for coming up with a genre-defining tagline because that’s how long it took, technically, to just do it?

That tagline was crafted by a writer who spent decades honing the craft of poetic distillation. Those three words represent a flash of inspiration born of a unique creative impetus, something that cannot be measured in “billable hours.”

Forcing creatives to catalog their time like factory workers punching rivets isn’t just absurd and demoralizing—it’s dangerously misrepresentative of how good creative gets done, and it rewards the least creative people the most.

Creative engagement is feast or famine

When it gets busy in the creative realm—when deadlines approach and projects pile up and clients get panicky—the demands are all-encompassing, squeezing out our personal lives for manic sprints when we perform minor miracles: launching creative campaigns that connect brands and tribes despite miscommunications, cramped timelines, and a host of obstacles.

And then there are times when the lines go quiet. When creatives can take a breath, reconnect with the world around them, and take time to explore new ideas and experiences. These are the essential nutrients of creativity.

Creative ideas arise from the interweaving billions of microscopic sparks in the vast darkness of the brain.

— The Smithsonian

In addition, it must be said that punishing a creative for “not being billable” is tantamount to beating a dog for not getting walked often enough; we have little to no control over what work we are assigned, and so holding creatives “accountable” for being billable every minute invokes despair born of helplessness—the antithesis of creativity.

Honor the way the creative process works

Luckily there’s a simple solution, one I employed exclusively during the 15 years I spent as a freelance creative director and progenitor of two boutique creative shops: project fees. That means defining a reasonable amount of time for any given creative assignment by working with all parties involved—the client, the account team, et al.—and then leaving the creative team alone to practice their alchemy: create, revise, get frustrated, walk away, return enthused, hunker down, banter concepts, drink coffee, sketch on the whiteboard, get inspired, and make sure the best idea gets time to coalesce, surface, and shine.

No matter how long it “actually” takes to create the final deliverable, the project fee is billed, and everyone knows exactly what to expect, without the shell game of padding timesheets or hiding hours, pretending that pursuing a creative solution is exactly like mowing a lawn.

Stop forcing creatives to punch a clock, because that’s just not how it works. Define and protect time for your creatives to do what you hired them to do: dream up ideas that connect. 

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” —Mark Twain, Pascal, John Locke, Ben Franklin, et al.

*Because he has been programmed to be risk-averse as the surest mode of self-advancement, but that topic is for another time.