Ideas - Wednesday, March 12, 2008 17:07 - 2 Comments

On power outages and 50 hour weeks.

Sometimes life smacks you upside your head with a lesson you need to learn. Today was one of those days for me - not as bad as my friend Matt had last week - but definitely eye-opening.

Start when you wake up, ready for another day of trying to achieve your goals, complete your projects, move closer to the life you want. Except there’s no power. And it stays that way hour after hour, despite automated voicemail promises to the contrary, for 9 hours.

Now I can do with out running water, food, music and even coffee, but when my local utility has yet another outage and everything I need turns from cool empowering devices with happy little green lights to metal/plastic bricks, I get seriously bent out of shape. I feel like Neo in the Matrix movies when someone yanks the cord out of his head - this is not pretty.

[Please resist the urge to comment I could have gone to Starbucks, maybe I should have a backup generator, etc. etc. I was packing my laptop about to go to Starbucks just so I could get my email when the lights came back on. Keep reading a little longer, there’s a point to this post. Really.]

Two things I noticed as I sat around - it’s damn quiet when the power’s off and I could really think through various issues - technical, business and personal - for a few hours. It was as if by being disconnected from everyone else I was more connected to myself.

When the power came on, one of the first things I did was catch up on posts to approve over at the Business of Software forum I co-moderate. That’s where the other half of today’s life’s little lessons was waiting.

Gili posted a fairly innocuous post on moving from Canada to Israel for a better programming job and was commenting on how people there seem to work 11 hour days for the same pay as he gets working a 8-hour day. In part he said,

“I just can’t honestly understand how any Engineer can work those many hours on end productively, not to mention not burning out.”

You could tell by how many different BOSer’s commented, and how fast they posted, Gili really hit a nerve. Kind of like the nerve hit last week by Jason Calcanis when he posted How to Save money running a Startup (”#11: Fire people who are not workaholics.”)

Far too many of us in the IT/developer/microISV/connected world work 60, 70, 80 hour weeks, week in and week out. We hear about the 100+ years of research that has documented productivity falls when you do this, we read how over at 37signals they’ve cut the workweek to 4 days and are just as productive (and that’s very productive indeed), but we still rebel against the concept.

And at the same time in that 60+ hour week how much do we actually get accomplished? Nothing like 60 hours worth of accomplishment. And how many of us end the day, and the week, exhausted? We weren’t out there digging ditches, moving boxes, doing physical activity. We end up utterly exhausted after a hard day of sitting, wiggling our fingers and reading. It’s not the muscles in my back that hurt - it’s the one between my ears.

What’s the lesson?

It’s about focus and attention.

It’s about how being continuously connected and on the net is like all those devices in our lives that are never really off, except instead of running up my power bill they are running down my focus/attention battery. And if I want my $503 a month electric bill to drop I’d better find ways of turning off as much as I can, when I can. And if I want to have the focus and attention I need to accomplish what I want as a microISV/consultant/writer, I’d better find exactly where and how my attention and focus is getting used up during the course of my work days and work weeks. Those attention/focus leaks matter.

It really, really really isn’t about whether you work 40 or 70 hours a week, or “time management” or even Getting Things Done (GTD); it’s about focus/attention capability, usage, training and improvement. Definitely something to ponder as I gear up to do a completely new successor app to the task manager I started selling two years ago that started me on the road that lead to here. And hopefully an idea you find useful and worth pondering too.