What would happen if days had 30 hours instead of 24? Would we meet deadlines more easily? Would we have the same problems we have now? My guess is that we would add those extra hours to our estimates without changing anything, which would mean that we would keep failing.
That’s the reason behind this post’s title. I don’t consider myself a lazy worker (well, who does?). In fact, I struggle to obey this post’s title. You will surely have experienced that moment when your day has ended but you want to finish that feature you’ve been working on for hours or even days. Won’t you also have experienced that moment when your day is about to end (let’s say in 15 minutes) and, since you can’t waste time, you start the next feature you have in your sprint?
Paces and phases
Pondering about it, I see two healthy options: you only care about pace or about timetable. If you care about pace, you will let your features decide (more or less) when you go home. If you care about the timetable, you will let your alarm clock decide when you go home, and I’m talking about power off your computer once you’ve listened to the bell. What usually happens to me is that I mix them in the worst way possible:
- I won’t stop before my time because I can use that spare time to start with the next thing.
- I won’t stop by my time because I don’t want to break my pace.
Have you read about dream phases? There is a whole industry behind it about how you can rest more efficiently in the least possible time. They’ve stated that the worst thing you can do is waking up in the middle of a dream phase, because that will make you feel that you haven’t rested at all. What they advise to you is waking up based on your dream phase, which will often end earlier or later than your alarm time.
This idea hits against usual timetables in most enterprises and lives. As clients, we’d rant if, after going to the bank, we find that the accountant is at home because they didn’t feel productive enough and have left a message saying that tomorrow they will catch up with their work.
What I’ve tried (and managed) to do
After time thinking about it, I’ve come up with a bunch of items that have helped me to improve in the way I handle time:
- It’s time to go home and you have been struggling with something you don’t have the least idea of what was wrong with it. Leave it, go home, relax, make your chores. If you stayed, there is a high chance you wouldn’t fixed/finished it, so don’t feel bad. By going home, at least you’ll be fresher tomorrow.
- It’s time to go home and you have just got the possible solution (yeah, sure) but it takes too long to finish in half an hour. Write down a bunch of TODOs with the steps you’d have taken and go home.
- It’s time to go home and you have just got the possible solution and it turns out to be fairly simple (spoiler: no, it won’t). In that case, the theory says you will take less time doing it today than retaking it tomorrow, so you can give it a try. If, after 10 minutes, you keep at the same point, go home.
Obviously, there are exceptions when there is no option to delay it for 12 hours. The best option is going to take a coffee or a walk, disconnect for 20 minutes. If the task looks it’s going to take hours, 20 minutes delay won’t make the difference and you’d better pause for a while.