Tim Berry over at Planning Startup Stories reminded me of one of my (many) golden rules that focuses on employees maximizing their quality work time and avoiding the pitfalls associated with pure quantity of work time.
Remember the debate about quality time vs. quantity time? It was a popular topic a few years ago, but back then it was about parenting. I think we should consider applying that same concept to the workplace in business. As an employer, do you want people staying late working? Is that productivity? I don’t think so. In fact I’m thinking we should be talking more about “quality time” in the workplace, and make sure we don’t substitute quantity time instead.
Over the last few years I’ve gone so far as to quantify quality work time as somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5 hours out of an 8 hour day. That translates into 5 hours of focused, concentrated work with the other 3 hours being taken up by distractions like email, meetings, socializing, and the general realities of any work place.
Once you get outside of the 5 hour sweet spot I’ve found that you tend to have diminishing returns on the work output. For example, a developer who tries to code for 8, 10, 12 hours straight is much more likely to make mistakes and get sloppy over that time. I’m sure they don’t do it intentionally, but the human mind and body just can’t sustain that much hyper focus for that long. On the flip side, there are lots of people who may spend vast amounts of time “working” on a task but waste a lot of that time procrastinating and never really getting anything done. With that in mind, quality work time is really just another spin on the mantra of “work smart… not hard”.
If you can make the 5 hour work day part of your corporate culture, you’ll start to see the benefits pretty quickly. You should hopefully see fewer errors and “silly mistakes”. Your resources should feel less stressed which should allow them to focus on the tasks at hand more easily. Deadlines and deliverables that take the 5 hour rule into account should also be much more attainable. In the rare occasion that your team might need to push beyond the 5 hour sweet spot (eg. work some overtime or come in on a weekend) they’ll be much more motivated and willing to put in the extra effort since it’s an exception to the norm. From what I’ve seen in real life, the 5 hour rule tends to be a great morale sustainer over the long term.
To date, the 5 hour work day has served me and my teams very well and I’d encourage anyone out there to give it a try.