WORK HOURS

by Kent Beck, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

More hours worked doesn't mean more work accomplished, especially in information work. Get tired enough, and you'll actually remove value from a project because of increased defects, missed opportunities for design improvement, and snappish or withdrawn behavior that strains the social fabric of the team.

Incongruence

Gerry Weinberg teaches us to look for incongruence (Quality Software Management, Vol. 3: "Congruent Action"). When people say one thing and do another, something interesting (and often nasty) is going on.

I'm flying home from a meeting with a Wall Street client. Everyone there would agree with the opening paragraph, but many of them told me stories of long hours spent "because they were behind." If less time would have meant more work accomplished, then they got less done than they could have, even though they said they wanted to get more work done. Incongruence.

One possibility is that folks are just missing a way of thinking about work hours that leads them toward effective behavior. With my recent habit of finding metaphors, let me try a new one. My day is like a glass of milk. When I come to work, it's like I've poured a glass of milk and set it out in the room. I can get nourishment from the glass of milk until about eight or nine hours later. At that point, the milk goes sour and drinking it will make me sick. The longer I go past the hour the milk goes bad, the sicker it will make me.

At the End of the Day

When milk goes bad, about all you can do is throw it out. The work day is just the same. All you can do is play with your kids, get some sleep, and try again tomorrow. It doesn't matter how thirsty I am toward the end of the day, I just have to wait until tomorrow when I can pour another glass.

The roots of my own overwork run deep (and it wasn't because I didn't have a thinking tool, like a metaphor, to illustrate the paradox of my situation). When I was in my stupid work hour phase, I was interested in peer acceptance and blame avoidance far more than actually getting the most and best work done. I too held on to the misconception that putting in long hours was good for productivity.

Having a metaphor helps to remind people to set limits. When it's 4:00 in the afternoon and I haven't been off of e-mail to get to the work I meant to get done that day, I'll think of that glass of milk, shut my laptop, and try to manage my time better tomorrow.

-- Kent Beck, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium