I've been working a remote contract these last 6 month, and one thing that surprises me is how I bill a lot less hours than I would if I were on site.
If I boot up in the morning, spend 30 minutes trying to get into something, fail and end up back here on HN, I don't bill any time. If I did the same thing sitting in a cube, I'd get paid for it.
The end result is that the client gets a much better deal by having me off site. Works great for me too, since I can justify billing out at a higher rate that reflects the fact that they get essentially all my productive time for the week, and nothing else. Everybody wins.
As an added bonus, if I really can't get started in a morning, I can bail and go bouldering for the day and not feel guilty about it. The bizarro world salaried version of me would spend that same day sitting in a cubicle secretly playing video games on the clock.
My policy on billing is, "Would I be doing this if I wasn't on this project?" If no, I bill, if yes, I don't. So, would I be sitting in a client's office, potentially (usually) (relatively) far away from my home, dressed in nice clothes, unavailable to other clients for that time, if the client hadn't put me on the project, even if I drift on to Hacker News for a few minutes? All office hours are billable.
That said, since I spend such a small proportion of my time in a client's office, I do try to stay focused. I typically don't look at Hacker News or anything like that. I got sick of setting everything to use SOCKS proxy so I set up a VPN, but I didn't bill the client for this (30 min or so) despite my normal policy. My real billing policy is "bill fairly".
I think he's attempting to explain that he hasn't actually done anything (maybe loading up some programs, getting reference material together, etc.) and then does something unrelated. I wouldn't bill for that either unless it took a significant portion of time AND I wouldn't have to do it again later.
And of course there's no real mechanism to not get paid for time spent daydreaming if you're sitting in an office on salary.
On the point in question though, no, I won't bill time warming up the dev environment unless I actually use it for productive work. You lose the odd fraction of an hour here and there, but really if you're trying to add up things like that to get yourself paid an extra 2 hours at the end of the week you're probably just not charging enough for your time.
If I boot up in the morning, spend 30 minutes trying to get into something, fail and end up back here on HN, I don't bill any time. If I did the same thing sitting in a cube, I'd get paid for it.
The end result is that the client gets a much better deal by having me off site. Works great for me too, since I can justify billing out at a higher rate that reflects the fact that they get essentially all my productive time for the week, and nothing else. Everybody wins.
As an added bonus, if I really can't get started in a morning, I can bail and go bouldering for the day and not feel guilty about it. The bizarro world salaried version of me would spend that same day sitting in a cubicle secretly playing video games on the clock.