Holidays every week? [LWN.net]

Holidays every week?

Posted Jan 4, 2008 19:20 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: Holidays every week? by AnswerGuy
Parent article: Quote of the week

I'm not sure Dave's "really dumb emails" are what you're imagining: dumb technical questions. They might also be, "please give me a schedule showing how many lines of code you will have done at the end of each week" or "I think you should sync files at every close." or "Please tell me why you did this project in 4 phases instead of 2."

I think the basic point about getting more work done during holidays is that if you don't have to spend any time participating in larger work that involves other people, you can accomplish a lot more of the things that involve only you.

Work that involves only me is more fulfilling; I feel like I get more done when I do more of that. But it may be an illusion, because teaching others, supplying information for planning, and such are also valuable.

I can remember a few attempts to eliminate "meetings." They always failed, because you eventually have to face the fact that a meeting is called, and attended, when at least someone believes it will be more productive than everyone spending the time working alone. And I've had the same experience with programs where a worker goes into hiding for a while.

If there actually is something to learn from the apparent holiday productivity boost, it's that work should be modularized and workers centrally managed. When that happens, workers spend more time working heads-down. But there's plenty of downside to that too.

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