Why Dopamine is the reason you are struggling with time recording
Do you know this feeling: At the end of the day you feel pretty exhausted but happy. Actually it was an awesome day. You managed a lot of different things, you can’t even count all the tasks you finished. It feels like no break, just work, the whole day, but it felt good. What an incredible successful day!
Then…to finalize this great day, you want to be a good employee and do your time recording entry. You open the system, select the right day, and start to enter data. After 1 min you only have 6 hours of actual project work in…heck, where are the other hours of the working day?! Checking your calendar again…all the meetings…maybe even git checkins, slack history or phone call history…well…still only 6h. It felt like you worked 10h, but you can’t remember for what the time was used.
In the last days the scales fell from my eyes! I’m listening currently to one of Europe‘s leading Hypnosis and HighPerformance Trainer and Innovator Alexander Hartmann and he gave me the right hint: Dopamine is the reason!
Dopamine is an organic chemical which plays a big role in our brain and body. Dopamine is also called happy hormone, as you feel pretty happy after it is emitted. Love, Sex, Rock’n’Roll, Coding Agentry or HTML5… dependent on your character all those situations are perfect triggers for dopamine emission. (For more details, checkout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine )
As already mentioned in the introduction, the reason for the struggle you might have remembering your actual work at the end of the day, is the big load of micro-tasks you are doing and maybe even wasting your time with. Reading Emails, answering emails, checking fun channel on slack or other more important slack channels, sorting your inbox, going through the latest facebook/linkedin/news-site timeline etc. Why are you doing it? Because it feels good! For every small task you finish, dopamine is emitted and you feel just good. Every small item you can remove from your todo list feels good. 10 small tasks in 1h feel (in the beginning) better than one not finished big and important task after 1h. Some of you might know the feeling that they can’t go to bed and sleep until they are pretty sure that they consumed the latest and greatest news in the facebook timeline for today. Btw, a reason why social media is checked several times a day. After every check you have the good feeling that you know what your friends know as well and you are not outdated.
Thankfully I got the proof for this from my german colleagues beginning of the week. We introduced in Germany an emergency contact list. Basically a simple excel list with emergency contacts in case of emergency (surprise). No big deal. Hopefully we’ll never need it and at least till now no one missed that list. But it seems to be a good idea according from the feedback of most of the colleagues. I announced in the company slack channel this process and asked every employee in Germany to provide their emergency contacts to me that I can save it in the list. No mandatory task, voluntarily! Only people who are interested. Not super urgent (we survived till now without the list). No hurries. No deadline. Just a simple offering.
Now…what happened? The announcement was done at 5:10pm CET. The first contacts were sent 2 (!) minutes after the announcement. The first 6 responses within the first hour. Deducting time to see the slack announcement, entering the data or maybe even discuss with your loved one who to put…it seems that at least those responses were created immediately after reading the announcement. Maybe stopped the current work or task for a short break. Maybe disrupted the development flow or switched (mentally) from the ongoing call with the customer to that list.
No one is currently bored out in the company and eagerly waiting to fill out an excel file. If you talk to colleagues, you will in over 90% (maybe 100%?) of all cases get the answer that there is a lot of project work, deadlines are coming closer, workload is high, etc. Most of the colleagues are simply busy doing their actual job with highest passion. Now the question, why is the response rate that high and ultra fast? It’s well known that you should not disturb a developer (or any other role) being fully concentrated on a task or even in a “flow”. Nevertheless, those people stopped whatever they did (btw. I did it myself as well :d ) and filled out the excel file.
From my perspective, the reason is rather simple. It was a typical micro-task. Downloading the template, entering the data and sending it to me was less than 1min I would guess. So an ultra easy task which you can finish in no time. And I would say for all colleagues the task had even a personal meaning. It made sense. So the perfect chance to get a break, tick one more task from a todo-list and consume a fast and easy dopamine shot.
This is just an example. It feels good to “feel” busy. To finish small but a lot of things. Get things done. We all know that you might better concentrate on the big tasks/problems. On the big picture. But reality shows, we all are dopamine junkies and want to have the fast success in many situations.
So next time you sit in front of the time recording system (or reflect the day for any other reason), don’t feel bad. You can’t cope with the chemical needs of your body. And it’s ok. Like chocolate. Small bites every now and then will not kill you, just stay disciplined and avoid big junks.
Cheers
Timo
