What’s your weekly work pyramid?
Since the 1970s, the proper balance of nutrition for a healthy, balanced diet has usually been represented in the shape of a pyramid. The food groups you should consume the most go at the bottom of the pyramid. Ascending upwards, you find the groups you should consume in decreasing amounts.
The shape of a pyramid lends itself to how nutritionists want you to envision your daily diet. A well-balanced diet actually doesn’t balance your food groups. There’s a dominant group to the diet — the bread and butter items you should consume to support most of your nutrition (though, in this case, far more bread than butter). Yet, you still need the other groups at the top like dairy, fats, and oils — just not a whole lot of it.
I believe a healthy dose of weekly work also represents itself like the food pyramid. It’s both imbalanced but diverse. Everyone’s optimal pyramid is slightly different. It depends on what you do and where your interests lie. Mine looks something like this:
I’m a “maker of things” at-heart. My appetite at work is satiated when most of that week is spent creating something. Hence, I need that base diet of code augmented by some time spent writing (I’m consuming tier 2 right now).
I also do a fair amount of what I’ll call “general support”. This means a few things: Customer support on DoneDone, managerial support of the staff, and mentorship. It doesn’t take up the lion’s share of an average week (in real time, probably somewhere around 6–10 hours a week).
At the same time, I’m one of the partners at We Are Mammoth. Some portion of my week is invested in business matters — strategy discussions with my partners or working on company presentations. By design, I do comparatively less than my other two partners (who likely would put strategy toward the bottom of the pyramid).
That’s how I fill up my version of a balanced work week. When my weeks head a different direction, I can feel it. A week mired in strategic discussions — not typically my “bread and butter” — put me naturally off-kilter. Too much meat. Not enough vegetables.
Then again, I’ll experience weeks where I’ve consumed far too much of my staple time writing code. In one sense, I feel really satisfied. But, the carb-overload makes me lose track of the bigger picture.
In the end, my best weeks (the ones where I leave on Friday fully satiated but not “gross feeling”) require I consume the right servings of each tier of my personal pyramid. Even the stuff I do comparatively sparingly is important work to do.
For the past year or so, we’ve asked members of We Are Mammoth and potential hires to take a quick self-assessment to measure their “wavelength.” It’s a handful of questions that puts you on a 10-point scale where — roughly speaking — a low number indicates someone who’s far more risk-averse and thrives on concrete initiatives and a high number indicates someone who prefers risk and ambiguity.
Those numbers have helped us learn a lot more about which individuals might work better together. (For example, a person with a 2.5 might collaborate better with a 3.5 person than a 9.3, but involving a few folks with distinctly different wavelengths might provide a more complete perspective on a problem).
I think knowing everyone’s preferred weekly work pyramid is invaluable. Along with other tools, like wavelengths, we can better assimilate the needs of an organization to the individuals within them. It’s especially true for a small one like ours where folks typically aren’t working in silo and are often asked to do things outside their prescribed role.
