3 ms·

The 120% Solution

11 points by Shamiq 18y ago

tome 18y ago
The biggest challenge we face in the near future is vast: it's the energy crisis. The economic downturn is doing us, if anything, a favour: it means we use less energy, and are slowly prepared for the realisation we're going to have to work incredibly hard to dig ourselves out of the fossil fuel hole.
petercooper 18y ago
However, using 20% of your resources to pursue random projects is highly inefficient. [..] Well, our entire country has been taking 20% time for at least the past five years. [..] We’ve overspent, taken expensive vacations, built absurd homes (in both scale and quantity), run our savings into the ground and skyrocketed our debt to record levels. Linking between Google's 20% time to our culture of hoarding and overbuying is unfair and tenuous to the extreme. The former produced a lot of R&D and contributed to the greatness of Google's products - the other was economically unsound stupidity by a consumerist society. R&D can not be equated with wasting time and money. Anyone who does so is setting themselves up for failure when the economy rebounds. Yep, move the standard 35-40 hour work week right up to 48 hours. More hours spent at work does not increase productivity unless you are actually producing for more hours (assuming your quality doesn't drop, which it will). France's productivity in the late 90s was a lot higher than the UK's, despite the former having an enforced 35 hour work week. Productivity and time spent at work do not correlate. Indeed, spending 10 - 20 hours more at work each week would probably hurt the economy further as people spend less on leisure activities. If you skip everything until In the technology industry, a 48 hour work week would be, for most, a vacation. most of Jason's advice on what to do next is very good, however.
- wynand 18y ago
  I think he's been a manager for too long. I can see the same reasoning coming from my father (who owns an architecture firm). With business you're spending a lot of time in meetings, travelling for business or in various phone calls. To be sure, these things are taxing, but I get the feeling that one can do many more hours of these things in a week than one can with something like programming. From that (business) perspective it seems natural that everyone else should work more. And I think that it's here where a wise manager will work longer (if it is in his or her interest, of course), but will not require the same of people whose jobs cannot support such a routine. And I agree, Jason's advice is, in general, very sound.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
jon_dahl 18y ago
Personally, I get a lot less done per hour in the 35-50 hour/week range than I do in the 1-35 hour range. But I've also found that this is mostly true when I'm working on the same project for 50 hours/week. Give me 35 hours of primary work, plus 10 hours on a secondary project, plus 5 hours on something totally different - and I do pretty well. Just me, of course.
mcargian 18y ago
I thought he stopped blogging. Why does he pick his craziest email rants to publish online? Just to tilt the rest of us?
- PStamatiou 18y ago
  I was going to mention the same thing.. what's the point of his private list if he publishes most of them anyway?
  - bd 18y ago
    Marketing? Private list to create appearance of exclusivity. "Republishing: PLEASE DO NOT REPRINT WITHOUT PERMISSION Forwarding: PLEASE DO FORWARD TO SMART PEOPLE"
  - fendale 18y ago
    I think a few of the recent ones were getting posted online elsewhere, so he just started putting them on his own site - cannot remember where I read or heard that though!
out_of_it 18y ago
I advise a different rank of priorities. If you can start a company now, do it, even if you have a ton of credit card debt or are way under water on a mortgage. This is exactly what bankruptcy is for. It does society no damn good to have you working for the next ten years to stay current on a mortgage for more than your house is worth. That mortgage represents misallocated capital - this is both your fault and the bank's fault. Dedicating the next ten years of your productive life to paying it off doesn't make that capital any less misallocated from the societal perspective. Much better to build something valuable for people in that time. This is what bankruptcy is for.
pwim 18y ago
I was in Japan recently and was amazed at the personal productivity of each individual when compared to the U.S. workers. As a generalization, appearing productive is more important than being productive in Japan.
- laut 18y ago
  I too was in Japan recently, and was amazed at how much time they spent at work. Yeah, not the same thing as productivity.
  - danielrhodes 18y ago
    Being productive means getting things done, regardless of your definition.
andreyf 18y ago
What a gross misunderstanding and over-simplification of the economic problems we're going through...
andreyf 18y ago
> If you're a college student thinking of getting trashed this weekend, or taking a year off, don't. Isn't college students "taking a year off" the way Google and Microsoft were formed?
andreyf 18y ago
While I an advocating [...] stop–the debt associated with unnecessary consumption, I’m very much in favor of investment in new companies, ideas and eduction Investment isn't debt. When I found a company and sell stock to investors, I'm selling them a piece of the company - something I've convinced them is worth more than the money they're paying.
- whatusername 18y ago
  Buying new plant, running a startup on cc's, etc - are all business debt. (and "investing" in your own company)
johnrob 18y ago
Yeah! Let's all work like we're in startups, even though most of us aren't.
noonespecial 18y ago
The premise is a little bit off I think. We didn't "take 20% and do whatever we wanted" as he suggested. We just mis-allocated. We got overly interested in houses. We have to produce before we can consume. Many of the brightest minds and much of our productive workforce became involved in building over-sized houses. There was much money/paper shuffling that basically boiled down to pretending lots of stuff about over-sized houses. We didn't need so many houses. Unfortunately, we borrowed that production capacity from ourselves in other areas. Now we're short on all sorts of the things we should have been producing instead of too many houses. We have to work extra hard now to get caught up on those things. Oh and all of the businesses that basically existed in order to make pretend money based on too many houses are hosed. There. Mine's shorter.
emilis_info 18y ago
Wasn't there a research done by Ford, which has shown, that long periods of overtime decrease productivity? Mentioned in: http://lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html http://lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presenta...
bd 18y ago
V. I. Lenin: To The All-Russia May Day Subbotnik http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/may/02.htm http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/may/02.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subbotnik http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subbotnik History has made a full circle.
DanielBMarkham 18y ago
I bailed on this after I realized the entire article was along the lines of "The economy is bad. Really, really bad. It's so bad that I am now going to compare it to a salad fork for the next 26 paragraphs."
dmix 18y ago
I love reading really light gray text on a white background, thanks Jason!

11 points by Shamiq 18y ago

tome 18y ago

The biggest challenge we face in the near future is vast: it's the energy crisis. The economic downturn is doing us, if anything, a favour: it means we use less energy, and are slowly prepared for the realisation we're going to have to work incredibly hard to dig ourselves out of the fossil fuel hole.

petercooper 18y ago

However, using 20% of your resources to pursue random projects is highly inefficient. [..] Well, our entire country has been taking 20% time for at least the past five years. [..] We’ve overspent, taken expensive vacations, built absurd homes (in both scale and quantity), run our savings into the ground and skyrocketed our debt to record levels. Linking between Google's 20% time to our culture of hoarding and overbuying is unfair and tenuous to the extreme. The former produced a lot of R&D and contributed to the greatness of Google's products - the other was economically unsound stupidity by a consumerist society. R&D can not be equated with wasting time and money. Anyone who does so is setting themselves up for failure when the economy rebounds. Yep, move the standard 35-40 hour work week right up to 48 hours. More hours spent at work does not increase productivity unless you are actually producing for more hours (assuming your quality doesn't drop, which it will). France's productivity in the late 90s was a lot higher than the UK's, despite the former having an enforced 35 hour work week. Productivity and time spent at work do not correlate. Indeed, spending 10 - 20 hours more at work each week would probably hurt the economy further as people spend less on leisure activities. If you skip everything until In the technology industry, a 48 hour work week would be, for most, a vacation. most of Jason's advice on what to do next is very good, however.

wynand 18y ago
I think he's been a manager for too long. I can see the same reasoning coming from my father (who owns an architecture firm). With business you're spending a lot of time in meetings, travelling for business or in various phone calls. To be sure, these things are taxing, but I get the feeling that one can do many more hours of these things in a week than one can with something like programming. From that (business) perspective it seems natural that everyone else should work more. And I think that it's here where a wise manager will work longer (if it is in his or her interest, of course), but will not require the same of people whose jobs cannot support such a routine. And I agree, Jason's advice is, in general, very sound.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

jon_dahl 18y ago

Personally, I get a lot less done per hour in the 35-50 hour/week range than I do in the 1-35 hour range. But I've also found that this is mostly true when I'm working on the same project for 50 hours/week. Give me 35 hours of primary work, plus 10 hours on a secondary project, plus 5 hours on something totally different - and I do pretty well. Just me, of course.

mcargian 18y ago

I thought he stopped blogging. Why does he pick his craziest email rants to publish online? Just to tilt the rest of us?

PStamatiou 18y ago
I was going to mention the same thing.. what's the point of his private list if he publishes most of them anyway?
- bd 18y ago
  Marketing? Private list to create appearance of exclusivity. "Republishing: PLEASE DO NOT REPRINT WITHOUT PERMISSION Forwarding: PLEASE DO FORWARD TO SMART PEOPLE"
- fendale 18y ago
  I think a few of the recent ones were getting posted online elsewhere, so he just started putting them on his own site - cannot remember where I read or heard that though!

out_of_it 18y ago

I advise a different rank of priorities. If you can start a company now, do it, even if you have a ton of credit card debt or are way under water on a mortgage. This is exactly what bankruptcy is for. It does society no damn good to have you working for the next ten years to stay current on a mortgage for more than your house is worth. That mortgage represents misallocated capital - this is both your fault and the bank's fault. Dedicating the next ten years of your productive life to paying it off doesn't make that capital any less misallocated from the societal perspective. Much better to build something valuable for people in that time. This is what bankruptcy is for.

pwim 18y ago

I was in Japan recently and was amazed at the personal productivity of each individual when compared to the U.S. workers. As a generalization, appearing productive is more important than being productive in Japan.

laut 18y ago
I too was in Japan recently, and was amazed at how much time they spent at work. Yeah, not the same thing as productivity.
- danielrhodes 18y ago
  Being productive means getting things done, regardless of your definition.

andreyf 18y ago

What a gross misunderstanding and over-simplification of the economic problems we're going through...

andreyf 18y ago

> If you're a college student thinking of getting trashed this weekend, or taking a year off, don't. Isn't college students "taking a year off" the way Google and Microsoft were formed?

andreyf 18y ago

While I an advocating [...] stop–the debt associated with unnecessary consumption, I’m very much in favor of investment in new companies, ideas and eduction Investment isn't debt. When I found a company and sell stock to investors, I'm selling them a piece of the company - something I've convinced them is worth more than the money they're paying.

whatusername 18y ago
Buying new plant, running a startup on cc's, etc - are all business debt. (and "investing" in your own company)

johnrob 18y ago

Yeah! Let's all work like we're in startups, even though most of us aren't.

noonespecial 18y ago

The premise is a little bit off I think. We didn't "take 20% and do whatever we wanted" as he suggested. We just mis-allocated. We got overly interested in houses. We have to produce before we can consume. Many of the brightest minds and much of our productive workforce became involved in building over-sized houses. There was much money/paper shuffling that basically boiled down to pretending lots of stuff about over-sized houses. We didn't need so many houses. Unfortunately, we borrowed that production capacity from ourselves in other areas. Now we're short on all sorts of the things we should have been producing instead of too many houses. We have to work extra hard now to get caught up on those things. Oh and all of the businesses that basically existed in order to make pretend money based on too many houses are hosed. There. Mine's shorter.

emilis_info 18y ago

Wasn't there a research done by Ford, which has shown, that long periods of overtime decrease productivity? Mentioned in: http://lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html http://lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presenta...

bd 18y ago

V. I. Lenin: To The All-Russia May Day Subbotnik http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/may/02.htm http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/may/02.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subbotnik http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subbotnik History has made a full circle.

DanielBMarkham 18y ago

I bailed on this after I realized the entire article was along the lines of "The economy is bad. Really, really bad. It's so bad that I am now going to compare it to a salad fork for the next 26 paragraphs."

dmix 18y ago

I love reading really light gray text on a white background, thanks Jason!