incoherence.net

Oh boy. I feel another productivity rant coming on. Reader beware.

It’s pretty hard to be productive – trying to maximize the amount of work done in a minimal amount of time requires serious discipline, process, and fairly in-depth knowledge of all the moving parts (including, in a lot of cases, people). Though, there is a sweet solace which comes from the extra time saved and accompanying relaxation.

So why don’t more people try it?

Well, I suppose there’s always been hard working people…carrying their strenuous labor practices as a badge of honor, e.g., “work ethics”. They’re the people staying around the office to shut its doors, pulling in extra hours on the weekends, broadcasting messages like “Bah, slaving away my youth” on their Facebooks. I certainly admire the dedication and ability to focus, even if I don’t like the practice.

I really much prefer the 8-hours-a-day, weekday work hour schedule, that with a few deadline or crunch time exceptions maintains a brisk pace of progress and accomplishment. For an engineer, it’s about:

• Cutting long, overdrawn, conversational meetings
• Minimizing coding practices that require a revisit or a refactor a month later
• Building tools for common tasks, especially for non-engineers
• Implementing processes so everybody has the right set of expectations going in and coming out of a project
• Defining mission statements, so that everything built will continue to be useful
• Keeping track of the 30 little things that come up and fixing them before the last minutes of the day
• Documenting everything under the sun
• Bugging people till they do what you want

O-kay – upon re-reading the above, it has that Dilbert-esque vibe, but sadly I’ve been bitten by the lack of all of these ideas, and while there’s a significant overhead in making sure these items get done, the alternative of missed deadlines and prolonged evenings are much less pleasant. Also, notice all the items have to do with being efficient with stuff while working, which is itself different from non-work activities at work like checking Twitter or grabbing a restaurant sit-down lunch. I’m convinced that the time afforded by being efficiently working allows for more frequent break allowances, as long as the stuff gets done, right?

Of all the articles I read on this stuff, there is one group of people who really can’t seem to get away from working long, hard hours: entrepreneurs. They write about how working hard for their own businesses is a requirement for success, especially when competing against other entrepreneurs who also pull ridiculous hours.

Not being an entrepreneur I wouldn’t have the authority to argue the point, but I do wonder whether having the breaks and rest of a normal workday allows for better creative thinking (y’know, the whole “subconscious works on a problem” thing), better research (e.g., when I’m home I still read blogs on software practices and development), better tools (say, using the new Thunderbird email client), better planning (sitting back to think about transpired events), and better relations (going out to drink with new partners). Beyond the obvious R&R, I think maintaining this support structure by taking time off has its value when it’s truly time to crunch.

I look forward to the day my entrepreneurial self gets away with a 20-hour workweek; I’d just blog about how boring free time would be.