Is Deep Work More Valuable?

This post comes from “How To Do Remote Collaborative Deep Work”. The aim is to compare the perceived day-rate of a Deep Work Studio team member with the value delivered.

The Sprint Process

At Deep Work Studio, we use Google Ventures Design Sprints to prototype, test and learn from real user feedback — fast. We’ve adapted it to work in a remote setting with clients of a six day process with two members of our team.

Say we charge $24,000 for a sprint. The perceived value is clients get:

• Twelve days of time
• Cost is $2,000 per day per person
• Way higher than freelance or employee rates

In hourly rates:

• Eight hours a day
• 96 hours per sprint
• $250/hour

These rates our high, so how do we charge based on the value delivered?

The Actual Time with Deep Work Studio

Doing Deep Work means we work on average four hours a day. We’ll use this as the base for our calculations:

• Four hours a day
• x two two members
• x six days process
• 48 hours

Which means we’re actually charging:

• $500/hour

Which means we need to justify the value clients get at $500/hour.

Schedule Deep and Shallow Work

We don’t do ‘busy’ work such as agonising on the colour of a button, but focus on the most important problems and questions with results from real users.

The result, for $500/hour our clients get work produced in days to what an agency or freelancer would usually take months.

Structure to commit to high value Deep Work when we collaborate

Collaboration means clients are in control bringing depth of subject and skillsets combined with our product design skills to produce higher value results.

Using Sprints, we focus on the most important questions and problems. To produce answers and solutions in 20% of the time that produces 80% of the value.

Calculations:

• 48 hours of work divided by 20% of the time for 80% of the value:
• 240 hours of value

No Context Switching

Clients don’t pay for it!

Most agencies work on three or more projects at the same time. By working in pairs, each pair only works on one project at a time. During the Sprints we only do client work. The result, clients don’t lose 40% of our time to context switching.

Calculations:

• 48 hours without 40% of time context switching
• 19.2 hours gained

Using Collaboration Tools For Focused Deep Work

Using the tools we work remotely, meaning no need to travel or pay for us or your team to be in the same place.

Working in collaboration obviously uses the clients time. The total time in a sprint remotely is 10 hours.

However, in the standard client <> designer relationship, the client pays for the designer to learn the domain, spends time understanding the designs and preparing feedback, waits for the feedback to be implemented. Working together means we produce the right and most valuable results faster than the standard working process.

Calculation:

• -10 hours client time lost working collaboratively
• +20 hours not spent preparing feedback and paying for learning the domain
• 10 hours gained

Preparation and Review

Clients are paying for our experience, expertise, process and iterations — not just the time with us.

Preparing the sprints to work remote is roughly 200 hours of work. After every sprint, we internally review and improve, roughly 100 hours a year.

Calculations:

• 300 hours of preparation and improvements
• Divided by 40 projects a year
• 7.5 hours gained

The Totals

The perception was that in a six day sprint, clients would get a total of 96 hours per sprint of human time on tools. Totally up the value of Deep Work, clients get:

Calculations:

• 240 hours by focusing on value
• 19.2 hours gained with no context switching
• 10 hours gained by using a collaborative process
• 7.5 hours gained by preparation for deep work and constant improvements
• 276.7 hours total

What does this mean?

Instead of an hour rate of $500. Clients are paying $24,000 divided by 276.7 hours. A total of $87 per hour.

Compared to day rates, clients perceive $2,000 a day but pay $348 per day.