标签: productivity

The Wharton School recently published an article that examines how the youngest full professor at Wharton got that way . Adam Grant's secret is to publish 5 to 10 papers a year. A book that gets on the New York Times best seller list helps as well. The article features an excerpt from the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World that could be called "In praise of binge work.” Tim McCune is the guy that taught me the term " binge worker ." I have always been a binge worker, but this article and book bother me on several levels, as does binge work itself . First is this whole data-driven fallacy that the only figure of merit is how many papers you publish. A recent data-driven exercise was the Vietnam War, where " body count " was the metric. News flash, we lost that war. Next was my stint at Ford Motor, where the same McNamara Whiz Kids that gave us Vietnam decided "design cost" was the only pertinent metric in building a car. They demanded we engineers give them a cheap car. We did . Nobody bought the cars. The single metric was so data-driven and official. Management could amount to picking the cheapest cost out of two columns. In Web publishing, the metric is clicks. All that matters is how many clicks you get, or Facebook likes. There are click farms in Romania that will give you as many of either as you pay for. Besides this data-driven madness the whole world is descending into, there is the concept that binge work is preferable. I do it because I must. I have ADHD; it’s easy to get distracted. The way I compensate is by having OCD. I can't multitask, so I jump from binge to binge. When I told Jim Williams that my mom used to give me grief because I ate one thing at a time--first corn, then salad, then meat, then potato--he laughed, and said "My wife still gives me grief because I eat that way!" We should be careful about praising a coping mechanism. The first problem is that this "lock yourself in the office and don't pick up the phone" only works for a very narrow type of work. If you are writing the Linux kernel, or a paper that has no dependence on other people, I guess it is OK. But quite often the highest form of work is interactive, where you have to answer the phone and interact with people and stay social. Ed Fong told me that his systems work was much more social than his IC design. My dad tried to help me with my binges, saying I had to learn to multi-task. He told me, "You never get a spare 40 hours," in which you can accomplish some big task. I admit that there is a penalty to stop and restart work; you have to "pop to the stack" a bunch of stuff, and then pull it back down when you re-start. But I have learned that good documentation and notes can make this really easy. The last problem I have with binge work is that it is selfish. It means to heck with your wife, or your co-workers, or your boss. You are holed up and everyone has to leave you alone. The movie Where the Buffalo Roam shows Hunter S. Thompson shooting a fax machine that is asking when his article is going to be done—it’s way past deadline. When I saw that 30 years ago, I thought he was cool. Now I see he was a jerk. Now I am writer too. I know that there are copy editors, and managing editors, and art directors, and layout people, and they all depend on knowing when I will be done. They might accommodate me if I call or write and explain why I am late, but to just hole up and ignore the world is the sign of a narcissist sociopath, not a super-productive star. Heck, we're the analog crowd and I think there needs to be some gradient in this theory of productivity. I have dreamed of a workplace where you have to sit at picnic tables in the morning, no laptops or phones permitted, and then go into a private office with foot-thick concrete walls for the afternoon. It would combine the necessary day-to-day social interaction with the lack of distraction people like me need to get things done. I haven't read Deep Work , so maybe that is what he is really saying. "When I teach, I teach, when I write, I write, and never the two shall intermingle." It still seems like a pretty strange way to live. I have wondered if management is really being a SerDes (serializer-deserializer) , where you take a parallel requirement, like a multi-faceted project, and convert it into several serial streams to individuals who only have to worry about that one stream as it comes in. When all the individuals complete their streams, you put it back together into "parallel" form and see if it works. When I sent this post to several friends, Linear Systems president Tim McCune, who hosts the Analog Aficionado party noted, “ James Michener locked himself away in a cabin when he was serious about finishing writing a book. Shelby Foote wrote his million and half words on the Civil War with a nib pen. I'd probably be done writing a magnum opus if I'd stuck with my electric typewriter, I do feel diluted with a half-dozen screens up.” Fellow Analog Aficionado and successful author Ron Quan said, “When I write the books, I definitely become a binge worker. But after that I kick back. It is true that to get things done keeping focus is very important. However, when working with a team, it's more like what can we all do to pitch in.” How about you, are you a binge worker? Do you think it helps or hurts your design productivity and relationships with others?   Paul Rako  

最近在看《how google tests software》，不同于多数企业有专门测试部，google称为engineering productivity team。怎么翻译呢？工程化生产力团队？ The founding team of what Google calls “Engineering Productivity” has to overcome bias against testing and a company culture that favored heroic effort over engineering rigor.

For my money the most important work on software productivity in the last 20 years is DeMarco and Lister's Peopleware . For a decade the authors conducted coding wars at a number of different companies, pitting teams against each other on a standard set of software problems. The results showed that, using any measure of performance (speed, defects, etc.) the average of those in the 1st quartile outperformed the average in the 4th quartile by nearly a factor of 3. Surprisingly, none of the factors you'd expect to matter correlated to the best and worst performers. Even experience mattered little, as long as the programmers had been working for at least six months. They did find a very strong correlation between the office environment and team performance. Needless interruptions yielded poor performance. The best teams had private (read "quiet") offices and phones with "off" switches. Their study suggests that quiet time saves vast amounts of money. Think about this. The almost minor tweak of getting some quiet time can, according to their data, multiply your productivity by 3x! That's an astonishing result. For the same salary your boss pays you now, he'd get essentially 3 of you. Too many of us work in a sea of cubicles, despite the clear showing how ineffective they are. It's bad enough that there's no door and no privacy. Worse is when we're subjected to the phone calls of all of our neighbors. We hear the whispered agony as the poor sod in the cube next door tries to work it out with his spouse. We try to focus on our work... but being human the pathos of the drama grabs our attention till we're straining to hear the latest development. Is this an efficient use of an expensive person's time? Later studies by other researchers found that after an interruption it takes 15 minutes to get into a state of "flow," that Spock-like trance where you're one with the computer. Yet the average developer gets interrupted every 11 minutes. Yet the cube police will rarely listen to data and reason. They've invested in the cubes, and they've made a decision, By God! The cubicles are here to stay! This is a case where we can only wage a defensive action. Educate your boss but resign yourself to failure. In the meantime, take some action to minimize the downside of the environment. Here are a few ideas: * Wear headphones and listen to music to drown out the divorce saga next door. * Turn the phone off. If it has no "off" switch, unplug the damn thing. In desperate situations attack the wire with a pair of wire cutters. Remember that a phone is a bell that anyone in the world can ring to bring you running. Conquer this madness for your most productive hours. * Know your most productive hours. I work best before lunch; that's when I schedule all of my creative work, all of the hard stuff. I leave the afternoons free for low-IQ activities like meetings, phone calls, and paperwork. * Disable the email. It's worse than the phone. Your two hundred closest friends who send the joke of the day are surely a delight, but if you respond to the email reader's "bing" you're little more than one of NASA's monkeys pressing a button to get a banana. * Put a curtain across the opening to simulate a poor man's door. Be sure others understand that when it's closed you are not willing to hear from anyone unless it's an emergency. The ultimate irony of cubicles is that shortly before he died in 2000, Robert Propst railed against cubes, calling them "monolithic insanity." ( Robert Propst invented the Action Office, which was eventually perverted into the cubicle .)

I would bet that the most significant work on software productivity in the last 20 years is Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister. For a decade they conducted coding wars at various companies, pitting teams against each other on a standard set of software problems.   The results showed that, using any measure of performance (speed, defects, etc.) the average of those in the 1st quartile outperformed the average in the 4th quartile by nearly a factor of 3.   Surprisingly, none of the factors you'd expect to matter correlated to the best and worst performers. Even experience mattered little, as long as the programmers had been working for at least six months.   They did find a very strong correlation between the office environment and team performance. Needless interruptions yielded poor performance. The best teams had private (read "quiet") offices and phones with "off" switches. Their study suggests that quiet time saves vast amounts of money.   Think about this. The almost minor tweak of getting some quiet time can, according to their data, multiply your productivity by 3x! That's an astonishing result. For the same salary your boss pays you now, he'd get essentially 3 of you.   Too many of us work in a sea of cubicles, despite the clear showing how ineffective they are. It's bad enough that there's no door and no privacy. Worse is when we're subjected to the phone calls of all of our neighbors.   We hear the whispered agony as the poor sod in the cube next door tries to work it out with his spouse. We try to focus on our work... but being human the pathos of the drama grabs our attention till we're straining to hear the latest development. Is this an efficient use of an expensive person's time?   Later studies by other researchers found that after an interruption it takes 15 minutes to get into a state of "flow," that Spock-like trance where you're one with the computer. Yet the average developer gets interrupted every 11 minutes.   Yet the cube police will rarely listen to data and reason. They've invested in the cubes, and they've made a decision, By God! The cubicles are here to stay!   This is a case where we can only wage a defensive action. Educate your boss but resign yourself to failure. In the meantime, take some action to minimize the downside of the environment. Here are a few ideas:   * Wear headphones and listen to music to drown out the divorce saga next door.   * Turn the phone off. If it has no "off" switch, unplug the damn thing. In desperate situations attack the wire with a pair of wire cutters. Remember that a phone is a bell that anyone in the world can ring to bring you running. Conquer this madness for your most productive hours.   * Know your most productive hours. I work best before lunch; that's when I schedule all of my creative work, all of the hard stuff. I leave the afternoons free for low-IQ activities like meetings, phone calls, and paperwork.   * Disable the email. It's worse than the phone. Your two hundred closest friends who send the joke of the day are surely a delight, but if you respond to the email reader's "bing" you're little more than one of NASA's monkeys pressing a button to get a banana.   * Put a curtain across the opening to simulate a poor man's door. Be sure others understand that when it's closed you are not willing to hear from anyone unless it's an emergency.   The ultimate irony of cubicles is that shortly before he died in 2000, Robert Propst railed against cubes, calling them "monolithic insanity." ( Robert Propst invented the Action Office, which was eventually perverted into the cubicle .)