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At a startup I worked at previously we introduced head-space and heads-down days. Head space was an experiment where every fortnight, at Friday noon it was too
by pan69 9y ago
At a startup I worked at previously we introduced head-space and heads-down days.
Head space was an experiment where every fortnight, at Friday noon it was tools down and do what ever you want. You were encouraged to go away from the office. Ride your bike, have lunch with your wife/husband or family. What ever you thought was giving you head space.
Heads down days were every Tuesday and Thursday of every week. This meant, on those days no meetings. Work from where ever you want. Turn off Slack. Close your email client. The idea here is "planned" uninterrupted time so you get into the zone for a long stretch of time.
Edit: Oh. Forgot about this. The other Friday afternoon every fortnight we would do "refactor" afternoon. It's were the dev team would come together and refactor parts of the code base as a team. You would get to see parts of the code you'd normally never work on and some really great discussions came out of that.
- nikkwong 9y agoAnd in your opinion, productivity increased or decreased?
- pan69 9y agoFor me personally, as a developer, the head-downs days were most successful. Having planned uninterrupted time were I know before hand that I will be able to tackle a big chunk of work or focus on a particular hard bug or whatever, was invaluable. Head-space is great. On Friday afternoons people are usually tired and mess around anyway, so why not do something useful with that time instead of hanging around to do your 40 hours.
- itronitron 9y agoone of my advisers in grad school would schedule the 'show and tell' meetings for his research group on Friday afternoons so the atmosphere was a lot more relaxed, plus there was a set time limit as he would leave at an exact time to pick up his children from school :)
- wutbrodo 9y ago> Head-space is great. On Friday afternoons people are usually tired and mess around anyway, so why not do something useful with that time instead of hanging around to do your 40 hours. Honestly, this has always been table stakes for me. I hope I never work at a place where I'm judged on "hours my butt is in a seat" instead of "actual productivity". Particularly for creative work, it's just not how the human brain works.
- hateduser2 9y agoIsn’t that most places? It kind of makes sense, because actual productivity isn’t necessarily the easiest to measure (although I think it comes across just in attitude.. how much they care about he project.)
- wutbrodo 9y ago> It kind of makes sense, because actual productivity isn’t necessarily the easiest to measure Not really: this is just the streetlight bias in action. A high-precision estimate of a useless metric isn't better than a lower-precision estimate of a relevant metric. I've only worked at places well-run enough (at least in that regard) that people are competent enough at their jobs to measure overall productivity: it doesn't generalize to an automatic rubric like "# of commits" or "lines of code", but it is doable.
- carlmr 9y agoI've never found a magic company where this isn't the case. Also when your boss doesn't have much to do with technicalities, hours will inevitably be used as a proxy for productivity measurement.
- wutbrodo 9y agoI guess I've only ever worked at "magic" companies, because I've never found a company where this _wasn't_ the case. You shouldn't be so quick to dismiss anything outside of your experience as "magic".
- cgb223 9y agoThat’s a great idea! I’m going to talk to my senior about trying this out tomorrow. They love stuff like this
- maxxxxx 9y agoWe had a proposal for meeting free days but then a lot of people got nervous and it got reduced to a meeting free afternoon and then nothing. It seems a lot of people ca't live without meetings. For me it was perfect though.
- colordrops 9y agoSeveral positions involve interaction between people and organizations as their main responsibility, such as HR, sales, pure management, etc. What are they supposed to do on meeting free days?
- nicky0 9y agoGo home and re-think their lives? "People who like meetings would have nothing to do" is so stupid yet a hilariously plausible reason why this would fail.
- kortex 9y agoOrganize. Go through backlogs. Read reports. Learn what engineers are up to. Meditate. People whose jobs are the non-programmatic glue in a company and thrive on human interaction would benefit a lot from stepping out of their domain in any number of ways, or destressing, sorting through their mind, etc.