The Week I Tracked the Time I Spent on Work That Got Rejected

She rejected the whole thing. Not specific elements. All of it.

Fifteen hours of work. Gone. Not billable, in her view, because she did not approve it. She had a point on paper. The contract said I billed for approved deliverables.

I had written that clause myself.

How It Happened

The project was a brand identity package. Logo, color system, typography, usage guidelines. We had a kickoff call, she gave me a direction, I built it out over a week and a half.

When I sent the first presentation, she said it was not what she had envisioned. I asked what she had envisioned. She described something almost opposite to the direction from our kickoff call.

I went back to my notes. Her exact words from the call were in there. I had tracked the call in my notes. What I had not done was get written sign-off on the direction before I started building.

So I had fifteen hours of work in a direction she had described to me verbally and could now claim she had not approved.

The Hours I Tracked That Week

I was using Time-Trak by this point so I had the full picture. Fifteen hours on the rejected first round. Then eleven more hours rebuilding from a new direction. Two hours of calls to discuss the pivot. One hour updating the project file.

Twenty-nine hours total. I invoiced for the eleven hours of approved work.

Eighteen hours unbilled. That one hurt to type.

What the Data Made Clear

I could not argue her out of the contract clause because I had written it. Approved deliverables only. The first round was not approved.

But the time log made something visible that I carried into every project after that. The risk was not in the work itself. The risk was in the gap between a verbal direction and a written approval.

I had protected myself against scope creep. I had not protected myself against directional rejection.

Those are different problems.

The Change I Made to My Contract

I now have a direction approval step before I enter any production phase. It is a short document. Sometimes it is literally a PDF with three moodboard directions and a checkbox. The client picks one and signs off.

That signature is worth a lot. Not because clients become impossible after it, but because it changes the conversation if they want to reject the work. It moves the discussion from what they envisioned to what they approved.

Most clients are reasonable. This step protects you from the moments when they are not.

The Other Thing I Changed

I also rewrote the approval clause. Now it reads that the first full round of work is billable if the client-approved direction was followed. Rejection of the final output after a signed direction approval is treated as a revision, not a rejection.

A lawyer would probably improve that language. But even the rougher version of it has held up in two conversations since I started using it.

What That Week Actually Cost

Eighteen hours. At the rate I was charging then, roughly $2,100. On a project I had quoted thinking it would be straightforward.

I did not track the first round in detail until midway through the week because I had been doing it loosely. After that rejection I started logging every task with a label. Design exploration. Direction presentation. Revision round one.

Labels matter because they create a record of what happened and when. If she had pushed harder on the invoice, I could have shown her the log. Fifteen hours of timestamped work in the direction we discussed on the call.

The time tracker did not save those hours. But it would have helped me defend them. And more importantly, looking at that logged total was what finally made me fix the contract.

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