How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Traditional ideas of measuring productivity have tended to rely on some kind of "work rate". You know the sort of thing : You can make ten widgets per hour, you work for seven hours per day. Therefore 70 widgets a day, 350 a week, and so on.
Job performance is therefore based on how well you produce widgets compared to this figure. The righteous exceeds targets every month while the slothful and the wicked fall behind.
As we've moved away from industrial production work targets have obviously got a bit more sophisticated but there is something quite seductive about this idea of a "work-rate" and so we still feel it's influence. It's got a good pedigree after all, and it's nice and simple. I watch how long it takes you to do one letter, I can then work out how long it should take you to do the other 1999.
There's problems with this sort of thinking though, as I'm sure you're aware.
1. The work people do is not necessarily as measurable as our "widgets per month". Even in call-centres (where calls per day is a simplistic target for anyone to work out) straight-forward targets are frowned upon for failing to measure quality and customer service.
2. Regardless whether the work is measurable, it's often not as straight-forward as the above example. I can type 50 words per minute, but I cannot write a 2000-word report in 40 minutes. The majority of the time will be taken up in research and in actually thinking about the issues. It's debatable whether you can measure either of those at all.
And so sometimes we have to abandon linear work rates (and with it, completition estimates). A problems I'm given may take a week to solve, but if Google is my firend then it might minutes or even seconds. And until it's done, you won't know.
3. A third, slightly more controversial argument is that "work rates" ignore the fact that people get bored. I can stuff ten envelopes in perhaps 2-3 minutes and by the time I've reached 50 I've become an expert. By 100 I'll have probably passed my peak. By the time I get to 1,000 I will be in tears, almost incapable of continuing.
And it's not just dull repetetive work where this happens. I personally find I can only do certain kinds of work in short bursts (perhaps only ten minutes at a time). Beyond that and I simply start to shut down.
It could be that this is because I have some sort of brain defect and that my concentration span is simply too low. But even if this is the case it seems universally true that humans find it difficult to concentrate on certain things for very long. There are mountains of psychological theories on this subject, but the consensus seems to be that there are limits to how long we can do a single activity. What this limit is depends on the individual (or the theory) and the type of activity. 18 minutes is one wall, 40 minutes is another, while 30 seconds is the top end of one theory. In any case, most agree that it's not very long, certainly not more than hour.
Surveying the landscape...
To look at the problem in another way, let's look at modern offices. Or more specifically, the office worker. What we find is that (especially among those in junior positions) the amount of time wasting reaches epic proportions.
Now time wasting is not a new phenemenon - indeed the British institution of tea-drinking seems to be built to achieve maximum work stoppage without officially engaging in industrial action. But the modern world has given us different avenues for our time wasting.
Combined with a web-accessible PCs, office workers are along with perverts looking for pornography and teenage girls wanting to attention whore one of the primary forces that drives the internet. Visit forums, blogs, social networking sites and a good proportion of the posting will come from the army of office workers & students, both of whom should technically be busy doing other things.
In their time wasting they are capable of reading and writing enormous amounts of information. I have been told by more than one person that my entire blog has been read in a series of time consuming activities. To put that into perspective, that's well over 200,000 words - easily the length of a paperback novel. I can assure you that this was not particularly compelling subject matter which gives you an idea of the power of this force. The only excuse for reading such drivel is a kind of pathological, unstoppable boredom.
Indeed, one blogger noted that most office jobs these days could, if all time wasting was ceased, be completed in a single hour of total focus. They were probably correct.
Who dares to defy the company internet usage rules?
In some cases it is likely that some of these people simply lazy, not doing their jobs and therefore are engaged in gross misconduct. What proportion of people this is true for, I do not know. But I do not hear of that many people being fired for such activities, although it does happen.
What is interesting to me is that I know from first hand experience that some of these people who spend hours reading blogs (or whatever else) are not bad employees. They are not people who are not doing their job. Indeed, in many cases they are keeping well up to date with all of their work duties. Some I have known to rise through the ranks even while maintaining this extraordinary time wasting habbit.
The immediate reaction is to think therefore that these people are simply under-utilised. If they can afford to waste time - they've obviously not been given enough to do. Or so the logic goes. If they usually complete 10 invoices in their 7 hour work day, and we know they waste at two hours a day, then logically they should be able to 14 invoices a day, right?
Wrong!
This sort of thinking assumes the old industrial / linear work-rates we discussed earlier. We cannot make assumptions on what someone could do in a given time because they may not be able to concentrate on invoices, or reports for seven hours a day, even with breaks. Without this time on other tasks they might simply go mad, or start stealing or making serious errors.
But all of this probably seems fairly unrelated to "many eyeballs". So what, our staff can't concentrate on their work and therefore they take unauthorised breaks. What does this mean?
Well, what I find interesting is that the things people do to "waste time" (or take a break) is not get a breath of fresh air or stretch their legs. It's not even to rest their eyes from a PC screen. It's to go and view a website on the same PC screen and spend long periods of time, reading often fairly dull information, or writing posts on forums.
I remember when I started my first full-time job - just after leaving university. I went from a 2 hour day of self-directed study to an eight hour day plus two hour commuting, talking on a telephone all day. And so for the first three months of working almost every day I got home from work in the evening, walked into my bedroom, and fell fast asleep. I was simply not used to that type of regimented work day, and could not cope. I was exhausted.
Now, I suspect if you asked me how I felt at the end of most of my work days I'd probably still say "Tired.". Yet I rarely fall asleep when I get home. Instead, I spend hours on my PC, or hours talking to friends, and last year I worked for another four hours in the evening in a second job.
The point is that while I am tired of whatever I am doing, I am not tired generally - at least not compared to how I was. I can still function mentally, and carry out a range of work-like tasks.
I suspect the same applies to the vast legion of office workers who can't do any more work beyond 3:30pm and are simply waiting for for 5pm or to come. They are bored of what they are doing, but they stll have mental energy left. If their work was more diverting, perhaps they would feel differently. Indeed - I would note behavoiur from my own office. When 5pm comes, the people who staff our call-centre collectively rush from their floor to leave the building. However, two hours later it's not uncommon to see Senior Managers or Directors still at their desk. A range of differences are at work here (career mindedness, varying domestic obligations, dedication, salary differences, autonomy etc) but I would suggest that some of it could be put down to the type of work each undertakes. Senior managers generally have a varied working week. Different locations, different tasks, sometimes on the road, sometimes heads in figures, sometimes recruiting, and so on. For the call-centre staff there is almost no variation. Certainly, the calls might be different but one is basically sitting at the same desk, performing the same basic task over and over again, seven hours a day, almost every day. Is it suprising the latter is in a rush to leave the office?
Now, while we may not want peope to stay past 5pm, it does seem rather wasteful their mental energies are not at least being utilised from 3:30pm onwards.
So what's the solution? I would suggest that this would be a perfect opportunity for an overview role of other parts of the business. There have been times where I have read documents entirely unrelated to my area of work. On occassion this has been noticed and managers have remarked something along the lines of : "Don't waste your time on things like that".
But these people don't understand. They were still in the old industrial work-rate mindset. My *time* (in terms of time at my office) is not particularly scarce. It's why I waste some of it every single day. What is scarce is my concentration, or rather, my work-role concentration.
So instead of scolding reading of other departments procedures we should be encouraging it. Procedures, policies and projects should all open and structured precisely so anyone can view them, understand them and most importantly, comment on them.
Why shouldn't the accountant, while he rests his mind from the monotony of invoices comment on the building surveyors project? We all realise that a fresh pair of eyes can sometimes spot a mistake, or that someone from outside a discipline can bring a fresh approach. So why don't we use it?
Now there is a training issue here. Not everyone would feel confident commenting on an area of work they are (basically) totally ignorant of, and some might find it rude to look at other teams work. But these are irrational fears for the most part, and things we can overcome. Moreover, external scrutiny might help encourage people properly document their projects (all but the most technical of projects should be easily comprehendible to an educated laymen with a brief explanation) and avoid sloppy work.
How such a mass-cross-collaboration exercise might be encouraged in staff is another matter. It would certainly be possible to make participation mandatory in such exercises, and even have set time periods where people do this. I feel this misses the point however, and indeed put us back into a position where people will feel that this new "work" is identical to their normal duties. If however people could do this under their own steam (with it understood that people who were helpful across the organisation would tend to do well in the long run) I feel the benefits would be enormous.
Postscript
Finally, I would add that one of the reasons why time-based deadlines are so unreliable is because of the issues discussed here. Saying a report will take 2 weeks to complete is of course nonsense - it will take about 2-3 hours, but when and how these hours will be put in is not clear. By avoiding the larger deadline I feel we'd avoid the "leaving it until the last possible minute" strategy so many of us engage in time after time.
