I ran across a great article today titled How to be Productive: Stop Working. Our industry at large seems to have a difficult time with this concept, and something I frequently encounter when talking with people about agile is the misconception that agile requires that teams work only 40 hours per week. How are these related? What’s the real story?
In the article the author describes the concept of “asset integrity” and how that same concept should be applied to people. I find myself in complete agreement, and the simple examples of driving with jet-lag and heroic all nighters certainly struck a nerve. Been there, done that.
The agile answer to “asset integrity” comes in the form of an eXtreme Programming (XP) practice referred to as sustainable pace. Agile teams and individuals seek to find a pace at which they can work, day in, day out, without becoming too fatigued to be able to focus effectively. Sustainable pace will vary from person to person and from group to group, but as the article notes research has demonstrated that after about 40 hours per week the quality of work performed begins to deteriorate which ultimately results in additional cost instead of increased productivity.
Understanding sustainable pace can be challenging and perhaps even counter intuitive. There is a long held belief that more time spent results in more work performed, and there are individuals who work extended hours for years at a time with seemingly no detrimental impact on the quality of their work or their mental (and physical) health. Is their sustainable pace significantly different than of those who have been evaluated in the related research noted in the article?
No. Actually the article also points to the key factor in productivity, focus. I’m sure it’s not by coincidence that one of the agile values promoted by Scrum is focus.
Many of us have acclimated our lives around constant interruptions and changing priorities, and spend a substantial amount of our time multi-tasking. The dangers of multi-tasking are described in another recent article How to Stop Multitasking which carries the subtitle “doing too many things at once is like giving up ten IQ points — and a bunch of other scary stuff”. This article points to a 40% decrease in productivity when we multi-task. As we’re task switching and unfocused we loose touch with our true productive sustainable pace. Instead we work semi-productively and unfocused, and spend more time doing so but perhaps not feeling tired because we haven’t focused. Our true capacity for producing valuable results hasn’t increased, it has simply been spread out over a longer period of time.
Stop doing that and focus!
I actually remember running across something several years back which referred to the right attitude for a day being a “hard 8”: that is a person working very hard for 8 hours, after which they were exhausted and needed to rest to be able to come back and work effectively again. That’s the kind of focus we’re looking for in determining our true sustainable pace.
Naturally there are times that project commitments demand that we sometimes work outside of our sustainable pace for a (hopefully brief) period of time. We accommodate this when it needs to happen, but the true productivity we realize, and for which our team frequently receives accolades from our colleagues and clients, is our dedication a real sustainable pace and focus.
OK. Now it’s time for me to go out and take a walk!
