Research to evaluate the tasks assigned - is it paid time or not?

Question

Project management

It's about freelancing.
When working with some customers, a controversial situation arises regarding the payment of time spent on understanding certain tasks. I am not a beginner and I can evaluate most of the tasks right away, without spending a lot of time evaluating their implementation, but still some research is sometimes required:

1. Or when the task is written incomprehensibly and you need to write off / phone to clarify the requirements. It's okay, 15-30 minutes is not a pity, you can spend them for free. Although if there are more than one such task per day from different customers, then it’s already sad.

2. The most difficult thing is when the task, although in my stack, is new to me, I know roughly how to solve it, but I’m not sure how many hours it will take and I need to additionally google / read the documentation to understand how long the direct programming of this task will take . In fact, google / read - this is my training and should not be paid (although some customers do not care and I calmly track this time). On the other hand, if I were not an expert in my field, then I would not even know where to get information to solve the task, which means that this time is part of my work and should be included in the total time for solving the problem, and not just coding . A Google expert, by the way, sounds a bit strange, but I will say that there are not many such tasks where I need Google, basically everything is coded without Google, of course.

The hand just asks the tasks to stupidly set more time than they require (i.e., to lay risks for misunderstanding, phone calls, chats, etc.), on the other hand, I want to be as honest as possible.

Answer 1

Author, your position is quite adequate. When I was a developer, I tracked the time for research, and when I was a project, I paid for it.
1. In the first case, with a fuzzy problem statement, you play the role of an analyst/UX expert/team lead/project. And you do their job of setting the task that they should have done before contacting you. Therefore, you can safely track this time.
2. In the second case, I would track all the time that relates to googling reference information - the API of the new sections of the SDK, the REST API, the API of some rare third-party libraries, etc.
For example, when I was doing the task of loading a list of contacts in a mobile application, I immediately indicated that I would need an additional 8 hours to learn the APIs in the Android SDK to work with them. The documentation for the SDK is several thousand pages long, it is constantly updated, and it is useless to cram it.
3. If the customer is stubborn and wants to pay only for "knocking the keys", then make the rest of the costs hidden