» Working Longer Hours Make You MORE Productive or LESS Productive?

Working Longer Hours Make You MORE Productive or LESS Productive?

I don’t think productivity is directly influenced by time alone. There are other important factors which make it or break it.

There are days when I can get a lot done in lot less time and other days life moves slower than a snail.
There are days when I can stay very focused and productive for up to 15-16 hrs and there are days when couple of hours of work seems like torture.
There are certain type of tasks that I can get very productive very quickly and certain type of tasks which takes times to get into the flow.
If I have a vested interest (financial, reputation, learning, etc.), I train myself to stay focused and productive longer (can back-fire as well.)
There are phases of one’s life when one can clock in more hours and there are phases where one cannot; other things are higher priority. If forced (soft or hard), it usually leads to wrong behavior.
I’ve seen many people who are very deadline driven (including myself.) I get a lot done when I’m working against hard deadlines. Yes, quality certainly takes a hit, but in many cases delivering slightly lower quality stuff is more important than not delivering at all or delivering later.

If we look at these various aspects, we get close to a start-up environment. And under these conditions, we do see teams being quite productive and delivering interesting products.

Applying this in a different context/environment usually back-fires.

What do you think?

This blog post was trigger by Tim Berry's blog post on Productivity Paradox: Maybe Less is More.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 15th, 2011 at 7:49 PM and is filed under Cognitive Science, Organizational, Product Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Stacy

What does it matter , you sound like someone with Stockholm syndrome, with your company being the kidnapper.

I only offer for trade 40 hours of my time per week. I don’t care if more will make another (or myself) any richer.
- http://blogs.agilefaqs.com Naresh Jain
  
  Thanks Stacy, I’ll take it as a compliment (Stockholm syndrome)
  
  The point I’m trying to make is, we don’t really know if 40 hours per week is a sustainable pace. It varies based on many factors. Hence putting a 40 hours number does not feel right.
Suresh Rayasam

Well ! Long hours are productive if and only when you have a well defined objective to achieve. slogging long hours on a series of random, undefined tasks makes one less productive [and at times less effective too]. I have had my stint of long hours [and i still do] and those are mostly on focussed activities and they have indeed yielded results that i am proud off. Having said this, i also have not so proud achievements where in i put in effort on to prove to some that i am doing my best to contribute to the greater cause of solving world hunger.
- http://blogs.agilefaqs.com Naresh Jain
  
  Good point Suresh.
Carlo Pecchia

Interesting. Your points can be true in a so called “start-up environment”, but generally I can’t see them apply well even in a medium sized team (20/03 ppl) on big project (18 mo). So maybe, productivity is more tied to time when we are in bigger scope.