Endlessly Curious

You may have noticed the lack of updates this week, I was in the office all weekend implementing something for a customer, so that they could then evaluate it this week which they were not expecting.  I do not mind doing the occasional brief bit of overtime like this, especially when it is my idea.  And it also gets me ahead of schedule plus it allows me to surprise my customers with an early delivery!  It did however mean that I did not have time to write posts, for that I apologise!

Working this last weekend and observing the results (on our scrum’s burn down chart) did get me thinking about just how much more productive I can be over the course of a day at the weekend compared to a normal weekday: I believe I did 3-4 weekdays of work over two days this weekend.  Yet I did not work any more hours than I would during the week but I achieved more in terms on implementation and testing than I would normally expect.  I also experienced that familiar loss of a sense of time (losing track of hours while working) which I’ve come to associate with really productive periods of work: some people call it ‘the zone’ which sounds a bit too dramatic (and cheesy) to me.

As to the causes for this bout of hyper productivity I think part of it was that I went into the weekend knowing exactly what I wanted to get done in terms of goals and also having a fair idea of how to achieve those goals.   I believe that helped me a lot, as a large portion of development time can be swallowed up with experimentation, thinking and research.  So knowing what needed done helped me focus my efforts but I don’t believe it was the sole reason for the apparent (brief) doubling of my productivity over the weekend.

Perhaps another beneficial factor was the lack of people in the building over the weekend (sorry folks).  The area where I work was very very quite this weekend, I was alone for most of the time with only one co-worker popping in and out for a few hours.  This meant there was no external distractions like background conversations, people (or dogs) moving about or folk asking me questions to distract me from my task at hand.   The building being mostly empty also meant there was no external electronic distractions e.g, email or instant messaging icons competing for my attention.

The lack of meetings was also great as this meant I had large unbroken periods of time to work in rather than an hour or so between meetings, as most experiments have shown that when you are in ‘the zone’ any disruption costs you about 15-20 minutes of time before you can get back to your ‘zone’ or train of thought.  As I have mentioned before in previous posts I make a practice of booking myself in my office calender system for meetings that I call work blocks during the week.  These blocks are usually about half a day in size and help prevent my day from getting horribly fragmented by meetings.  Working this weekend has just reinforced to me just how disruptive meetings can be to actually getting work done and how important it is to have uninterrupted periods of time for getting work done in.

Yet for all that an empty office helped me get stuff done this weekend, I would I be as productive over the long term working in such a solo fashion?  I’m not sure as these days software like games are suck large undertaking and require large teams of developers which means that communication and synchronisation becomes such key factors in development sucess but also key bottlenecks as well.