What we can all learn from a 4-hour workweek
My wife is currently on maternity leave. She works 4 hours a week and has never been so productive. We recently spoke about her experience, and I believe there is something to learn for everyone.
Apart from taking care of our toddler, 3 months ago my wife started to work part-time at her current employer. Her working schedule is mostly Monday, from 8 to 12. 4 hours a week.
She says that she has never been so focused and productive. Some might wonder, how one can progress and complete things within that little time? We discussed what contributes to her productivity, and I believe there is something to learn for everyone. It boils down to three things: reduced context switching, writing things down, and smaller tasks.
Reduce context switching
Before maternity leave, my wife was working 40 hours a week. Her workdays were probably no different from the days of a lot of folks in IT. She works as a data analyst and her day-to-day responsibilities are to create data models, dashboards, and provide data insights for business stakeholders. On top come meetings, emails, and helping colleagues.
Now she has one 15-minute daily call. There are occasional short discussions with another colleague. But her work in progress has essentially reduced to one item. Her interruptions went almost to zero and productivity skyrocketed.
And there is no surprise here. A lot of people have experienced how switching between tasks drains energy. With every switch, you need to mentally offload the previous task and load a new one. This takes time and energy. The larger and the more complicated the new task is, the greater the cost. The more you switch, the less you do and the more exhausted you feel at the end of the day. Even though every context switch might go unnoticed.
However, there is one more thing to know about context switching. From my experience, not everyone realizes another benefit of reducing work in progress. Early delivery. I don't think I can illustrate and explain it better than Henrik Kniberg did. Please take 7 minutes to watch the video, I'll wait.
If you skipped it, the bottom line is as follows. When you do multiple things at once, you finish all of them later. Worst case everything gets completed close to the very end. When you work only on one item at a time, you deliver most of the items earlier. Every item takes less time from start to finish. And this is priceless, especially when you need to bring value early and often. Your stakeholders are going to love you.
The same applies to teams. If there is a new team set out to solve specific issues, it's most probably not the best idea to work on many topics at the same time. By focusing on just a few at a time, the team can deliver and demonstrate its value faster.
Basically what Pomodoro and other similar productivity techniques do is they make us reduce context switching by limiting our work in progress to one item. Even if for a short period. Which of course can be repeated several times to achieve even better results.
Work-in-progress limits in lean do the same on the team level. They force teams to focus on less to get more done.
Yes, for most of us, it's not possible to reorganize the work so that there is only one task we work on during the day and with no interruptions. No, it doesn't mean we can't do anything about the way we currently work.
Don't have more than one large topic in progress at the same time. If you're blocked on it, switch to smaller tasks instead of picking up another large topic.
Organize your days in blocks. For instance, have two 30-minute blocks to check and respond to emails, one in the morning and one after lunch. Work on important tasks till lunch. Continue with smaller items after lunch. Do reviews at the end of the day.
Add a blocker in your calendar and update your messenger status for uninterrupted time when you work on important topics.
Ignore new messages until you're finished with whatever you're doing now, no matter what. Yes, it’s tempting to respond right away, to always be there for your peers. But it hurts your focus and outcomes right away.
Do consciously reduce the amount of context switching during the day.
Write things down
My wife opens her laptop once a week. A lot can happen during the 7 days in between. We can spend time in the mountains, we might visit some cities, our daughter can get sick. And the only way for my wife to remember where she left off is to write things down. At the end of the day, she writes the current status down for her future self.
There is a reason why written language was a major milestone in the history of mankind. Compared to spoken language, it allowed us to reliably pass on information. It allowed us to precisely preserve information for the people we'll never talk to.
There are few scenarios I've seen repeatedly in different companies and teams.
What does your onboarding look like? Several people telling the same things over and over again, occasionally forgetting to tell about this or that? Write everything down. Let newcomers read the material and discuss only what's unclear or missing in the documents. And then… write it down as well.
Or it's a backlog grooming or a sprint planning session, the team opens a ticket that has a few vague sentences in it. People start to ask questions and clarify the requirements. Once done, they move on to the next ticket.
They just wasted their time. The next time someone touches the ticket, I guarantee they can't remember a thing. The team has a powerful tool to preserve the information and yet neglected it.
Write down everything that you just discussed in the ticket. Write down meeting minutes. Write documentation. Write ADRs to preserve the context when important architectural decisions are made. Write things down.
Good writing is not easy. It requires practice to express your thoughts or list the facts succinctly and clearly. Clarity is paramount. The text should not only be clear to you at the point when you're writing it. It should also be clear to you when you read it the next day and to your colleagues when they read it a month later.
People say that clear thinking leads to clear writing. I believe that it also works the other way around. Writing helps to structure the thoughts, find missing pieces, and new ideas. If you're having difficulty thinking about something, write your thoughts down. Then read and edit multiple times. And then suddenly the thing in your head becomes much more tractable. When we write things down and then work with the text, we don’t just produce the information, we also process it. The very act of writing helps to think. Or, as Leslie Lamport put it:
If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
Sometimes my wife is stuck with her current piece of work, seeing no clear way forward when she continues in a week. Writing everything down allows her to thoroughly think about the problem. She always finds new options to try out and eventually solves the issue.
Writing is one of the best skills and habits you can develop in your career. Your current and future colleagues will thank you, including your future self.
Break the work down
After some time working within a new schedule, my wife started to break the upcoming work down so that every task fits into 4 hours. That way she can reduce flow interruptions when in the middle of a task her working day is suddenly over, she needs to dump all the context in her head, and then restore it again next week. While writing things down certainly helps here, there is still an additional cost of saving and restoring the context. And when the task is finished exactly at the end of the day, the context trims down to “I’m done with X, the next thing to do is Y”.
There is a balance to strike when it comes to the optimal item size. While half a day works for my wife, it won’t work for everyone. If you hand over your tasks to other colleagues, there might be too much overhead from smaller items. Although I do believe that the sweet spot lies somewhere between half a day and two days.
Smaller tasks regularly deliver small shots of happiness: “Accomplished!” Your progress gets updated often.
A lot of things look rather clear, simple, and small until you start to break them down. The devil is always in the details. And as you break things down, you uncover the devil. Having the topic dissected helps to see the things you haven’t realized before — missing pieces and hidden dependencies. Maybe you need to talk to another person to ensure you got the requirements right. Maybe you need to reorder certain tasks. Maybe a certain part has a blocker.
In one of my teams, we had predefined sizes for the tasks: 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 days. We also tracked how much time was actually spent on a task. At some point, I made an analysis of how good our estimates are. Turned out that the best results were for the tasks sized 1 and 2 days. Tasks estimated as 5 and 8 days often took way longer to complete. As we looked into these tasks we realized that we were not seeing things coming our way. If we had broken these tasks down, we would have seen those things. As a result, we stopped having tasks with the size of 8 days, and the majority of the tasks were for 1 or 2 days.
Depending on the project size you might not need to do a complete breakdown right from the start. It’s usually enough to have a detailed breakdown for some time ahead. As time passes, ensure that the work is structured for the next time frame. It helps to avoid extra work if priorities change or if new discoveries are made that affect the scope.
For me, work breakdown has similar benefits as writing. Probably because the result needs to be written down. Breakdown helps to structure. And structure leads to better understanding and to discoveries.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.