4 ms·
As someone who also tracks time in some amount of detail (to bill clients for it), communication, and _written_ communication in particular takes a surprising a
by m0zg 5y ago
As someone who also tracks time in some amount of detail (to bill clients for it), communication, and _written_ communication in particular takes a surprising amount of time. All those Slack threads you might not even think twice of engaging in can easily destroy half your working day, even if you ignore the cost of context switching. Emails take longer than you think. Design docs take _much_ longer than you think. Code reviews take longer than you think also.
For me at least coding seems to take less time objectively than subjectively, but it's also quite obvious that most of my time is not spent on coding, sadly. A good chunk of it is completely unproductive bullshit that simply has to happen because that's how the company chooses to operate. I tell them it's not the only way to do things, but they insist on wasting ~1.5 person days a week on "standups" and "scrum" (the team is 12 people, excluding me). They could _easily_ move 50% faster if they shed that bullshit and just gave people sizable tasks and some degree of autonomy and personal responsibility. Instead it's down to who can _appear_ the busiest during standup.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago"Design docs take _much_ longer than you think. Code reviews take longer than you think also." I work in medical devices and this is so true. A thorough design doc or a thorough code review takes a very long time. It actually may take as much or more time as the actual coding. Somehow we never account for this time in planning so either things are rushed or the project will be delayed significantly. Add to that the fact we don't have good tools either for writing docs neither or for code reviews.
- m0zg 5y agoTry actually tracking the time using a free service like Harvest. You'll be surprised just how much longer some things take objectively than subjectively. I'm not saying do retrospectives every week or whatever, but do at least a few, then take note of time sinks and weigh their utility against the time they take. I don't think one can build awareness of this without measurement, something the essay also alludes to.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoI have done this but management can’t accept that the mandatory overhead is taking that much time. They just don’t want to hear it.
- m0zg 5y agoIt is still useful for you to know. That "overhead" often does very little to advance your career or even just advance _you_ professionally. And until you measure how much overhead you're incurring, you wouldn't even know. Much like how people didn't know they're spending 4+ hours on Instagram and YouTube every day until Apple started cataloging and surfacing phone usage. When I saw my own usage I was horrified, and I have cut it down significantly since then, and closed FB and Instagram accounts entirely. To translate that into the professional domain, there may be some optional bullshit activities you participate in solely because you don't see their cost. You'd be able to identify them and cut down on your participation, possibly either improving your career situation, or improving work/life balance, or both. There was a time when I worked at a BigCo where there was so much bullshit during the day, I only could do work from home in the evenings. So I worked ~14 hours a day for years - 8 hours spent on bullshit, then another 6 at home on actual work. That wasn't fun at all.