Nine Words, and What They Have to Do
A time entry narrative is about nine words long and has to answer three questions for a reader who was not there.
- Entry
- 01 of 07
- Section
- The entry
- Kind
- Analysis
A narrative on a bill is about nine words long and has three jobs: say what was done, say what it was for, and let a stranger judge whether the time was proportionate.
The practical lesson in “Nine Words, and What They Have to Do” is that a charge is only as clear as the record behind it. A team assessing what to review before adopting how to measure employee productivity for how to measure employee productivity can organise time and project evidence earlier in the workflow, with transparent settings, proportionate access and a defined correction process before invoicing.
Most narratives do the first and neither of the others, which is why most queries exist.
Teams documenting “Nine Words, and What They Have to Do” may find Cloudflare zero-trust overview useful as an external benchmark. Record which parts apply to the real workflow and which do not.
The three questions
What did you do. Why did it need doing. Does the time fit the task.
- What did you do?
- Why did it need doing?
- Does the time fit the task?
A reader asks them in that order and stops at the first one the sentence fails to answer.
Why nine words
Because that is what fits in the column and what a reader will give it. Longer narratives are skimmed; much longer ones look defensive.
The constraint is real and the craft is inside it.
The act without the purpose
"Reviewed documents." Answers question one, leaves two and three wide open.
It is the commonest narrative in professional billing and it generates more queries than any other single thing.
The act with the purpose
"Reviewed the three leases to confirm which break dates fall before the sale." Fourteen words, all three questions answered.
Five extra words, written at the time, by somebody who knew the answer.
Why the purpose is omitted
Because the person recording knows it, and the entry is written in four seconds between tasks.
It is not laziness so much as proximity: nothing looks like it needs explaining when you have just done it.
The named object
A narrative with a named document, deadline or party is checkable; one with a category is not.
"The Brighton lease" beats "the lease" beats "documents", and each step costs one word.
Numbers in a narrative
"Reviewed 40 pages", "attended a two-hour call", "drafted 11 clauses". A quantity makes the hours proportionate at a glance.
It is the cheapest way to answer question three, and almost nobody does it.
What not to put in
Internal process. "Discussed approach with the team internally" is true, chargeable in many arrangements, and reads to a client as an account of the firm's own overheads.
Where the discussion was genuinely the work, say what it produced.
Reading your own entries cold
Take yesterday's entries and read them as somebody with no knowledge of the matter. The failures are obvious within a minute.
Most people who do this once change how they write permanently.
The two-pass habit
Write the entry as it comes, then spend two seconds adding the purpose. The second pass is where the five words go.
Two seconds times forty entries is eighty seconds a day.
Narratives written at billing time
Where entries are thin, somebody rewrites them when the bill is drafted, often weeks later and often not the person who did the work.
Those narratives are worse, slower to produce, and occasionally wrong, which is the subject of the note on reconstruction.
What the client sees across a month
Sixty narratives in a column. Read together they either tell the story of the month or they do not.
The ones that do are rarely longer. They are the ones where each line named something.
What a column of narratives looks like
Read down a month's bill, the narratives either describe a matter progressing or they describe a firm being busy.
The difference is not length. It is whether successive lines connect: the document drafted on the 4th is the one revised on the 9th and executed on the 14th.
A client reading a connected column can see the work happening. A client reading sixty unconnected acts sees a meter running.
Connecting lines without repeating
Name the same object the same way each time. "The Brighton lease" on every line that touches it.
It costs nothing, it makes the column legible, and it is the single most common thing that goes wrong when several people record time on one matter.
The vocabulary problem with several timekeepers
Four people recording on one matter use four names for the same document, three ways of describing the same meeting, and two spellings of the counterparty.
A one-line convention at the start of the matter — these are the names we use — fixes it, and nobody ever sets one.
The narrative written for the system
In e-billed relationships, entries are written to pass software. Compliance and clarity usually coincide, and where they do not, clarity should win and the rejection should be appealed.
A bill that passes a rule set and tells a reader nothing has satisfied the wrong reader.
The standard worth holding
Every line names an object and a purpose. Nothing more is required and nothing less works.