Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By David Aronchick
Easy: bill at $125 an hour, and work 2000 hours a year.
What’s that you say? You don’t work on an hourly rate? Wrong. You absolutely work on an hourly rate, and if you don’t treat your job that way, it’s a recipe an inefficient work day. But I only make $(insert some smaller number than 125 here) an hour! Wrong. That’s what your paycheck says, but your opportunity cost is much higher than what you take home. Whether it’s doing something else at your current job, working at a high paying new job, or spending time with your family, or basking in the sun, you need to treat every second you’re at work as a little distilled piece of gold. And every second that goes by, you’re spending that gold on something – whether you like it or not.
A very close friend of mine is head of product at a software firm. They had their origins in consulting, but now do mostly software as a service and only run the consulting arm on the side. When they first started, the company was all about billable hours and so it was critical to track every second of work that occured on a contract. Now, the company makes much of its money off an on going service revenue stream, so lots of the consulting infrastructure isn’t really necessary any more. Yet they continue to measure everyone in the company by the hours they work, and the projects they worked on. With every opportunity to throw out the old ways, they still keep the tools and reports around. Why? Pure productivity.
There are lots of tools out there that help you focus and look forward towards a goal – but nothing more helpful in getting there than simply looking at what you accomplish every day. In a blog post about Fogbugz, Joel Spolsky talked about the concept of evidence based scheduling , a methodology I am a huge fan of. The quick summary is that you can tell more about how long something is going to take, compared to your estimation, by looking at how close your estimations were in the past and using that margin of error moving forward. The key insight here is that the amount you were off from estimation to realization is most often caused by the dull hum of usually constant interruptions that plague us all every day. By including these constant irritations as part of the calculation looking forward, you’ll be more accurate in your prediction. Even better, by recognizing that tasks are consistently off your estimation because of some recurring distraction, you have the opportuinity to address the distraction systemically and be a more efficient team.
You can use a tool like Fogbugz to accomplish understanding how much real time tasks are taking, and I am a big fan of using it for exactly that. But for non-milestone related tracking, I think my friend’s company has hit the nail on the head. Instead of looking at filling out time cards and tracking developer checkins against work items as being a drain on time and energy, it’s viewed as a way to move the team forward together, with a unified look at what’s important and what needs help. If Jim is working on pitching a partner, and puts down that he’s been working on it for 31 hours this week, that’s something everyone can see and evaluate. Either this is viewed as a) appropriate, b) inappropriate and help Jim be more efficient or c) inappropriate and get something out of Jim’s way. Sales, marketing, business development, software engineering, system administration – the technique works across all disciplines because it does one thing extremely well: it provides transparency.
What about for yourself? The dollar figures I used earlier provide a fantastic touchstone for what’s valuable and what’s not. Did you just spend a half hour arguing with a vendor over coffee delivery? You just cost yourself $67.50. Forty-five minutes figuring out Outlook? $93.75. You can go through your whole day like this – and be hard core. Abstracting your tasks away from the vague notions of efficiency and ‘getting stuff done’, and bring it back to cash to help you realize exactly how important every second is. And you’ll find the more work items you track in this way, the more careful you’ll be about where you spend your time.
There’s a danger that cannot be ignored here – this culture MUST be imbued from the top down, and the bottom up. There’s a cost in tracking (10 minutes every 2 hours is $50), and, of course, and any friction at all will be met with the harshest resistance. The second anything starts to appear to get in the way of getting things done, people are going to try to throw it out (at best) or just ignore it (at worst). But there is no doubt, by measuring everyone’s work with a public ruler, you’ll create a team that not only works efficiently, but works together in a completely new way. When people realize time is money, they treat every second with the importance it deserves.
