On Hours
Table of Contents
I've been thinking today about how the requirement to work fixed hours affects my motivation to work.
Near where my brother lives, there is a sandwich shop. Every day they make a number of sandwiches. They open the shop early in the morning and work until all the sandwiches are sold. This usually happens around 10:00. At this point, they close the shop, clean up, and go home.
Why don't we all work like this? What is so sacred about time that we must sacrifice eight hours at its alter each working day?
For context, I work in design engineering, which is a job in three parts:
- come up with ideas to solve problems;
- prove that these ideas do, in fact, solve the problems;
- communicate these ideas in the form of some kind of document.
This sometimes called "knowledge work."
Often, this means that my work can really easily be broken down into nice stages - think of the thing; test the thing; draw the thing. This is really useful for dealing with executive dysfunction!
However, there is one major problem: the exact monetary value of any one piece of work that I do is super hard to pin down. This is especially true in the "think of the thing" and "test the thing" stages - the client is often paying for the drawing of the thing so it's a bit easier to say that the "draw the thing" stage is worth X amount of money. But then again, I can't draw the thing without thinking of it and testing it first - you see the issue.1
Maybe this is why tech-bros and Agile Evangelists are obsessed with inventing "Key Performance Indicators" (KPIs) and moving cards around on imaginary pin-boards - they really want to be able to measure these unmeasurable things and they do all kinds of gymnastics to get there.
As a result of not being able to assign a specific money-number to a unit of work (or even really being able to meaningfuly isolate what a unit of work actually is) we do the next best thing: we abstract.
The abstraction we use is time.
Because we can't measure the dollar-value of a thought; or of an idea that went nowhere; or of a single sheet of design documentation, we come at it from the other end:2 we say "one hour of my time as a designer is worth £X!" and promptly start measuring time instead of even attempting to measure any of the difficult (and useful) metrics.
This is a really common technique in engineering - working from the problem towards the solution is often very difficult because the number of possible solutions is uncountably large or even infinite. So instead, we can decide on a solution first then work backwards towards the problem. This is often much easier (but also much more likely to induce tunnel-vision).
All of this leads us to the point where we invent things like contracts for design engineers that say "you will work 37.5hrs per week, from 09:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday with half an hour for lunch."3
This is also a hangover from earlier stages of the industrialisation of the economy when the vast majority of work was stuff that really strongly correlated time spent and money made, as well as general protestant and calvinist beleifs that are still entrenched and unquestioned, deep within the capitalist psyche.
Even the best working environments available in my industry only go half-way to fixing this by offering "flexi-time." (Which generally just means that you can go home half an hour early today in return for staying an hour late tomorrow)
The idea that maybe we don't need hours at all is frustratingly taboo.
To get back to the problem of motivation, let's look at two tasks:
- The washing up
- Completing a piece of design work for my job
Both of these tasks have a major thing in common: they are functionaly infinite - as long as I live, there will always be more washing up to do (at least in the close future), and as long as I work for my employer there will always be more design work to do.
However, they have one huge difference:
When I finish the washing up today, I will be rewarded with the satisfaction of a job well done, a tidy home, and I will get to stop washing up.
Conversely, when I finish my design work for my job, I will be rewarded with the satisfaction of a job well done, a tick on my to-do list, and I will have to do more design work.
The reward for finishing my work is always more work!
Imagine if every time you finished washing up, someone came along and deliberately dirtied a load of dishes for you, and kept doing so until you had washed up not a specific amount of dirty dishes, but for a specific amount of time.
The washing up would transform from a sometimes-annoying but often-peaceful task into a sisyphean nightmare; this is exactly what tying idea-based work to time does for me.
A better way is surely possible!
A hypothesis for a more motivational (and productive) way of working
Each morning when you start work, you sit down (on your own or as a group) and decide on a reasonable amount of work to do today based on sensible things like how large your backlog is at the moment, different people's strengths or weaknesses etc. etc.
Because planning work is difficult - things often take wildly more or less time to do than you expect - you set an upper time limit on how long you want to stay at work. This is based on things like how fried you feel after your sixth hour of working on the same problem, or what time you need to be somewhere else. For the sake of argument, let's call it seven and a half hours with a half hour for lunch. Crucially though, this is an upper limit, not a target; if you are consistently hitting this limit then that is a sign that you are being too ambitious with your planning and should attempt less work per day.
Finally, and most importantly, when you have finished the work you have been assigned, you are finished! You can go home! That is the end of the day!
If you want to get all "rational actors" about this, then you can see that we have introduced an insane incentive for our hard-working employees: the more efficeintly they work, the more free time they will have! Think how much more effectively you might work with that kind of carrot!
This isn't a new or original thought in general, but boy is it far from the mainstream, especially in office-based "knowledge" work. See the parable of The Fisherman & The Industrialist:
The industrialist was horrified to find the fisherman lying beside his boat, smoking a pipe.
"Why aren’t you fishing?" asked the industrialist.
"Because I've caught enough fish for the day."
"Why don't you catch some more?"
"What would I do with them?"
"Earn more money. Then you could have a motor fixed to your boat and go into deeper waters and catch more fish. That would bring you money to buy nylon nets, so more fish, more money. Soon you would have enough to buy two boats, even a fleet of boats, then you could be rich like me."
"What would I do then?"
"Then you could sit back and enjoy life."
"What do you think I'm doing now?"
In conclusion: why am I not a fisherman?