Be the Tortoise, Not the Hare
How sustainable pace supports people, teams, and products of all kinds
I recently had the privilege to speak at the Ability in Tech Summit in Berkeley, CA, and took a short weekend trip out to SF. This included an early morning westward flight and a red eye return flight, direct to the Pivotal NY offices on Monday morning. Let me just sum things up by saying that Monday was not an ideal work day for me. Although I had an amazing time at the conference, the extra work I put in to prepare for my speaking engagement, along with the travel, definitely put a drain on me and impacted my work for several days. This experience has prompted me to write about another one of our core practices at Pivotal Labs: the Sustainable Pace.
I’ve worked in several work environments that weren’t sustainable because of long hours, working over weekends, erratic and unpredictable schedules. At Pivotal Labs I work with clients who come to us to try to improve these schedules. A typical situation I have had is the looming deadline, pushing the team to work longer hours and weekends in the service of finishing features and squashing bugs for an upcoming release. There are even some work environments whose iterations make this a continuous tragedy.
An unsustainable pace has been proven to be detrimental to the software development process. Matthew Kane Parker recently pointed me in the direction of a study that provides a direct link between stress levels and poor code craftsmanship.
As an adult with ADD, I need a large reserve of energy on a regular basis to use the coping mechanisms that I have generated over many years. Even with efficient practices like pair programming and test-driven development, I will still tend to get distracted and need to work a little harder than some of my colleagues to finish certain tasks. This is simply a part of my reality that I have learned to accept since the day I was diagnosed in fifth grade. But this need for extra energy makes it that much more critical that I maintain a natural, sustainable work pace throughout each week. Even more than a typical developer, the ADD engineer can be burnt out and rendered inert within several cycles in an unsustainable “agile” organization.
What does this mean, to have a sustainable pace? At Pivotal Labs, we define this by 8 hour work days and 5 day weeks. My typical day starts at 8:30 because that is when our chef-made breakfast starts and I like to have a leisurely breakfast with my coworkers. But everyone has to be there by 9:06 for the brief office-wide standup, which gives everyone in the office a chance to ask for help, share something interesting, and keep current on events in the office. For example, I’ll likely share this blog post at the office standup during the “interestings” section. After that, we go into our individual project teams for the project standup to learn about what everyone was working on the day before, share any blockers, and pick out pairing partners for the day. By design nobody works through lunch, which is from 12:30–1:30 for everyone in the office. Lunch is a time to relax and recharge alone or socialize with friends. We often also have optional lunchtime activities like board game lunch, Professional Development Movie Monday, or Tech Talk Tuesday, activities that also include a company-catered lunch. The afternoon has more pair programming in store for us. We pair until 6pm, when all work stops.
We are also careful to take breaks during our pairing time. Ping pong is definitely the break activity of choice at Pivotal Labs, but I also have come to enjoy the pick-me-up-power of a good game of foosball. Sometimes it’s just a matter of getting up from the computer for a quick walk around the office, although now that the weather in NY has improved I’ve done my fair share of walks around the block, too. Another common break activity is to sit and discuss an engineering problem on a couch or in our kitchen/event space. The change of scenery is sometimes all we need to get some creative thinking going. Some pairs like to keep a schedule and take breaks at regular intervals while others take them as needed.
Everyone who enters the Pivotal Labs experience benefits greatly from all of the components in our culture that come together to make up the sustainable pace. The consistent, healthy work pace that we strive to maintain every day at Pivotal Labs especially fosters the strengths of our differently-abled employees and clients.
