Work Less, Get More Done: Analytics For Maximizing Productivity

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/10/04/work-smarter-not-harder/

by patio11 • 17 years ago

109 39 17 years ago

patio116• 17 years ago

This was inspired by a recent post to HN about how "Working Harder Is The Only Alternative". I respectfully, but strongly, disagree.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=858679

ellyagg6• 17 years ago

So, two people of equal intelligence, insight about automation, wealth, etc. are in a field...who is more successful? The one who works 10 hours a week or the one who works 70?

As I've pointed out elsewhere, the stories of great things being done by workaholics are absolutely overwhelming. Warren Buffett, Edison, Franklin, Jefferson, Einstein, Carmack ad nauseaum.

That's anecdotal, but then you dismiss the science behind long, targeted training to become good at things elsewhere in this forum.

I really hope that other folks don't use the current voting pattern in this thread as evidence that doing more work isn't helpful. Trust me (or don't), other people in your field are smart. They are automating tasks, etc. Working more is a battle-tested method of gaining an advantage (or at least staying even in fields where everyone is working as hard as they can).

jimbokun2• 17 years ago

"As I've pointed out elsewhere, the stories of great things being done by workaholics are absolutely overwhelming. Warren Buffett, Edison, Franklin, Jefferson, Einstein, Carmack ad nauseaum."

Anecdotes. I bet there are a lot of workaholics who are total failures and certainly not many workaholics become a Buffett, Edison, etc.

Warren Buffett is certainly not working for an hourly wage. He is fabulously wealthy because he found ways to leverage other people's hard work to make him rich as an investor. Number of hours worked has diminishing returns if not tied to a strategy to make each hour worked increasingly valuable.

lorax• 17 years ago

So, two people of equal intelligence, wealth, ability to work long hours, etc. are in a field... who is more successful? The one who spends a lot of time doing repetitive tasks or the one who automates those.

As I am pointing out now, the stories of great things being done by people with insights about automation are absolutely overwhelming. Eli Whitney, Cyrus McCormick, Henry Ford, Jeff Bezos ad nauseaum.

That's anecdotal, but then you dismiss the science behind using automation and productivity enhancement to become good at things elsewhere in this forum.

Sure, if everything except hours worked are equal, working longer hours helps, but if everything except intelligence is equal, the more intelligent will win, and if everything except wealth is equal, the wealthier will win. In real life, all other things are never equal and assuming they are in order to prove your point is a strawman argument.

JacobAldridge• 17 years ago

My father started his career as a lawyer in a big city firm. Growing up, we kids were often told why he left:

"If I work to 6pm, the guy next to me works till 7. If I work till 7, he works till 8. If I work till 8, he brings in a mattress."

In my first full time job I used to joke that the only thing they paid me for was to wear a tie between 9am and 5pm. At 5pm, the tie came off, and at 6pm I was entitled to wear it around my head like a bandanna. It was an obvious reminder, to me most of all, that I was there to add value to the business, and that was linked to the work I did, not the time I put in or the appearance I projected.

Mz2• 17 years ago

"“Working harder” is a poor strategy which your competitors can trivially replicate."

Actually, working longer hours can ultimately lead exhaustion and burn-out, which leads to poorer quality work, less productivity per unit of time...etc. And, no, not everyone can replicate it. Some people don't have the physical energy and basic health to do that.

(Obviously, I am in the "work smarter" camp. :-) )

ellyagg6• 17 years ago

Everyone tries to work a smart as they can. You can't get an advantage over your competitors by working smarter if they're smarter than you are.

If you truly believe that working harder, while still working as smart as you can, doesn't significantly aid your efforts, you're simply deluding yourself, and self-delusion always leads to suboptimal results.

The public record is rife with minutely detailed cases of hard work leading to out-sized success. Hard work by people who were already working very smart, as smart as they could.

Yes, other people can work really hard, too, and so it can be an unwinnable race. Sadly (perhaps), that's life. That doesn't change the fact that working harder is under your control, being smarter isn't.

Yes, some people get burned out. Yes, taking a break can help some people find insights they wouldn't have otherwise. However, some people don't get burned out. If you don't realize this, you're fooling yourself.

Bobby Fischer is the only American to be world chess champion. Read about the complete immersion in chess that was required to achieve this.

It takes 10,000 hours of directed practice (directed practice means "working smarter") to become an expert at something. No amount of working smarter makes the 10,000 hours go away.

jamesbritt2• 17 years ago

"It takes 10,000 hours of directed practice (directed practice means "working smarter") to become an expert at something."

Any links to solid research (i.e., not Malcolm Gladwell) regarding that number?

plinkplonk2• 17 years ago

Peter Norvig refers to research showing 10 years of work required to hit expert level in his essay "Teach Yourself Programming in 10 years" (http://norvig.com/21-days.html).

No references to "10,000hours" other than Gladwell I think.

ellyagg6• 17 years ago

I've never read the Gladwell you refer to, although I know who he is. Over the last several years, I believe several studies have come out claiming it takes 10 years to build up expertise. Just a couple years ago there was a survey study that purported to review the literature and found the consensus to be 10 years/10,000 hours, although I can't find it with a cursory search and don't make a habit of tracking citations of things I read.

A quick Google search did find published papers referring to this phenomenon, though, e.g.: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118000156/abstrac...

Not being a specialist I'm not qualified to evaluate whether it's "solid" or not.

Did Gladwell not cite sources? That seems crazy.

Edit: I believe I was thinking of the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.

navanit• 17 years ago

Yes, Anders Ericsson is the authority on the subject: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson.dp.html

Here's the paper "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expertise": http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...

patio116• 17 years ago

It takes 10,000 hours of directed practice (directed practice means "working smarter") to become an expert at something. No amount of working smarter makes the 10,000 hours go away.

This claim is:

1) unevidenced

2) untestable

3) curiously specific (10,000, but not 9,000, nor 12,000, those being numbers less than and more than required, because the number required is 10,000)

4) claimed to be totally undeniable

5) claimed to accurately cover every field of human endeavor from cooking hamburgers to designing circuits to pole vaulting to understanding the intricacies of canon law

ellyagg6• 17 years ago

Yep, I'm pretty sure it's not exactly 10,000 in all cases. Your complaint is a "gotcha", not a real argument.

Unevidenced? Did you not read the rest of the comments in this thread?

Actually, you're being curiously specific about the strength of the claims. I didn't realize hackernews comments were to be written as peer reviewed journal articles, but I note that your own have not risen to that standard either.

Why don't you respond to my other points?

plinkplonk2• 17 years ago

Interesting post, but I wonder if even when you are working smart, sustained intense effort isn't sometimes worth it. The late Randy Pausch, in a lecture on Time Management mentions the importance of working smart but also refers to the years he worked late into the night working on his research.

I suspect regularity/ sustaining effort maybe the key. Work a solid 8 hours a day every day without fail for a few years might be a "harder" thing to undertake than a couple of months worth of eighty hour work weeks. You still use metrics to optinmize what you are working on of course, though it maybe harder for something like a research effort or a PhD thesis to get meaningful metrics.

gwern6• 17 years ago

> Work a solid 8 hours a day every day without fail for a few years might be a "harder" thing to undertake than a couple of months worth of eighty hour work weeks.

Follow-through is really valuable; look at FLOSS. How many projects are not as successful, or are very successful and then decline, because there was no follow-through?

gwern6• 17 years ago

> I used to write my bingo cards myself, and I’m fairly good at it, but eventually I figured that while it was a worthwhile activity it didn’t really get all that much more worthwhile as a result of me doing it. Instead, I put out a call on my blog for freelancers, and eventually worked out a mutually rewarding relationship with a highly-educated American teacher. She bangs out the cards on her own schedule, and once a month I click “Post” on my backend interface and then mail her a check.

> The economics of this arrangement are so staggeringly efficient that people tell me I have to be lying about it. The pages my freelancer writes for me were visited 65,000 times in September, producing roughly $1,300 worth of sales for me through getting people into my various conversion funnels. I did less than five minutes of work to maintain the freelancing relationship in September. Do you want to do the math?

I find myself hoping that she sees this post and ups her prices.

patio116• 17 years ago

I detect a bit of resentment here, as if I'm some rapacious capitalist baron exploiting the poor teacher. That's one way of looking at it. Here's another: teachers are expected to produce teaching supplies on their own time, for use in their day jobs but without receiving any compensation for them.

The market price associated with these teaching supplies is zero: there is absolutely no one, in the entire world, who cares enough about what one particular teacher's opinion on good bingo topics is to pay her a dime for it. Except me. I paid her a few thousand bucks to copy/paste her activities into a web form.

Importantly, without me, she'd have 750 activities and no money because she has neither the time, skill set, nor inclination to produce a Ruby on Rails application and then market it on the Internet. I'm the guy she outsources that to.

gwern6• 17 years ago

I am looking at it economically.

If you are clearing so much thanks to her that you can chortle about it so happily, then that suggests to me that she can get more from you; if she can get more from you but isn't, then you're underpaying her, which I have a strange irrational urge to call 'unfair' and cast all sorts of moral connotations on (but I'm sure at Hacker News I'm just an outlier in that regard).

The other alternative is that you are over paying her (no doubt out of the goodness of your heart), which I think can be rejected given that your whole post is about optimization of things like that.

(The third option of course is that the price is exactly right, but as you are neither of you _Homo economicuses_ with unlimited computing power, perfect information, and working in efficient markets, that's extremely unlikely.)

ellyagg6• 17 years ago

Perhaps words are confusing things. Instead of "working harder" let's say "working more". For some people what they're doing is not work. There are plenty of people who can work on something they enjoy almost every waking hour for 10 years on end. Burn out is a non-issue. So if you intend to compete an a business or field for which the bar is that high, and you don't really love what you're doing, you may be in trouble.

oliverkofoed• 17 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but the cd-company mentioned (swiftcd.com) has a brilliant frontpage headline: "At SwiftCD, we create custom CDs and DVDs one at a time, and ship them world-wide directly to your customers."

Nobody that ends up at that website, accidentally or not, will be confused about what that company does.

paraschopra• 17 years ago

My response to Patrick's post on his blog, which I am replicating here

-----------

Hi Patrick, thanks for writing a detailed post which you say is an anti-thesis to my post. I agree to most of your key points here that measuring the output for each unit of effort put in is ultra important and that there can be no real progress without measuring productivity.

However what I fail to see is that it cannot be an excuse for not working harder. In fact measuring productivity makes you even more motivated to put in more hours as you can (and often do) clearly see that the amount you derive from a business correlates to the hours you put into it. Of course there are gazzilion other factors which determine eventual success such as vision, rightness and smartness of effort, big competitors like Google, intellect, funding. However, somehow I fail to comprehend why such factors should be considered a case against hard work.

Regarding your point of “working hard” as a bad strategy because it is easy to copy, that is my point exactly. One may not be subscribing to “working hard” strategy, but that doesn’t guarantee that his competition also doesn’t adopt that stance. Irrespective of his beliefs, competition will work as hard as they can. So you have no other option but to take the best guess (and worst case) and work even harder.

No doubt your points on outsourcing, automating and delegation are valid and make sense. Good thing about such activities is that they free you from sub-optimal activities such that you can work harder on the stuff that matters. You can make an exponential dent to your chances of success, if you put in MORE efforts doing things that really matter.

Anyhow, I thoroughly enjoyed your post but I still subscribe to my philosophy of working harder. Of course, one should realize when he is bordering at insanity. Mental and Physical Health first. Work later.

PS: Google being my competitor gives me even more kicks to put in more effort. I know I can never match them in resources, that is why I avoid working average hours which would eventually spiral to not working at all because, hey, I am competing against Google and of course I stand no chance.

patio116• 17 years ago

In fact measuring productivity makes you even more motivated to put in more hours as you can (and often do) clearly see that the amount you derive from a business correlates to the hours you put into it.

I think it would be interesting if you described what your setup for measuring that was and, in rough terms, what your productivity was at various levels of labor per week.

Eric Ries had a phrase called "shadow belief": the unvoiced, unquestionable assumptions we make about the business world we're operating in. My day job had, for decades, a shadow belief about engineering productivity: namely, that it was a constant number per hour, and that therefore the number of kousuu (a unit of engineering production) produced could be computed as kousuu = constant * # engineers * # hours.

Then one day quite recently we sat down and said "Hey, we keep obsessive records of how many kousuu we produce. We keep obsessive records of how many hours each engineer works. Let's divide."

And we found that the constant changed. Some changes were not unanticipated: our best senior engineers were routinely more productive than our new company employees, OK, training period and whatnot. Some of the differences between expectations and results were so vast that I could not tell you them in good conscience.

Don't just say you're measuring. We did that, for decades. Measure. Then, act on it.

(I wish I could tell you what my day job found when actually started to measure. I think I can tell you this: there was audible skepticism and derision when we introduced a "temporary, experimental cost-cutting measure" obligating employees to leave at 5 PM two days a week. It was thought that, aside from the sheer un-Japaneseness of it all, it would throw schedules into disarray, necessitate extra crunching on the other days, and be widely ignored anyhow. That was months ago. On Friday, we received word that, on review of Actual Results, the experimental policy was henceforth merely Policy. 90% of the office was not there to read about the news, as the news arrived at 5:02.)

sachinag• 17 years ago

It would be really interesting to hear 1) how you measure - what data do you track, and what tools do you use to do so and 2) how you analyzed (simple Excel, something more sophisticated?). I imagine it's not simply RescueTime.

I think many, many people would love to have this to take to their employer and also for themselves.

edw519• 17 years ago

One thing bothers me about this whole WorkHard / WorkSmart / BeProductive meme: it focuses too much on "the competition".

I know my approach is heresy in these parts, but bear with me...

I understand that there's always some potential competition, but I choose to not pay much attention to it. The only thing I compete with is another version of myself in another universe. "What would that other Ed have done?"

And that's awfully hard to measure. I've tried all kinds of metrics to keep my projects going, but the only one I use now is how much progress I make each day on my most important task. Pretty subjective.

I have seen tons of good software and services and have done a lot of work deploying them. What invariably happens is that there is no solution for something the consumer wants, so that's what I write. I like to think, "If I had good competition, I would just go out and sell it for them. But since I'm writing something no one else has, I won't worry about competing with anyone but what I would have been."

This may sound a little silly, but it works for me. Provide something that no one else is providing and working harder or smarter than the competition suddenly doesn't mean so much. I just have to be a whole lot smarter and better than doing nothing at all.

patio116• 17 years ago

I choose to not pay much attention to it

I'm mostly with you on that one, actually, but some folks feel like the big bad Competition Vampire will suck their blood if they don't pound a timesheet through its heart, so I try to keep it to one major heresy per blog post. (For my next trick: you can work less and ignore the competition while running your software business on Microsoft Vista.)

Even if you're one guy sitting at home (hi, me) I recommend tracking productivity simply because using time more efficiently gives you more time to spend on things which are more important to you than, e.g., licking stamps. (No matter how good you are at what you do, and how much you enjoy everything you do, you have done one thing this week that was less important than all the others. Ask yourself: what could I have done to not have had to do that?)

ellyagg6• 17 years ago

There are two issues here: What you should tell yourself and what actually is.

I read a sports psychology textbook which quoted a study or studies showing that folks who concentrated on improving themselves and not worrying about the competition were winners. A long distance runner should care most about beating their own time.

But note that in focusing on themselves, they end up winning.

There are many areas of human effort. Some are more competitive than others. The post that this one claims to be refuting was specifically about competitive fields.

Surely we can agree that some fields are competitive? Then the question is, in these fields, where winners abound (people focusing on their own efforts), are outcomes actually improved by the principal or executive investing more work.

Although the voting patterns in this forum don't appear to agree, this is basically settled both in science and commonsense.

It almost appears that people are conflating the issue of whether it's a good idea from a quality of life perspective with whether it works. Those are separate issues.

jimbokun2• 17 years ago

I think those studies also say that spending time doing something without consciously trying to find ways to steadily improve is not of much use.

I think patio11 describes a process of always improving the $ / hour value of his efforts. Someone who puts in a lot of hours but does not consistently look for way to make each hour more valuable or productive is going to lose to someone following patio11's approach, I bet.

dimas• 17 years ago

article should be titled "increasing hourly productivity to improve life balance" - working more hours do not have any negative impact on having less productive time

maximized hour/efficiency-productivity * maximized #hours/week = maximized output(not necessary value). The rest depends on how much you are willing to sacrifice to balance your life with other activities.

akeefer• 17 years ago

My company has always pretty explicitly discouraged working nights or weekends, though obviously some people will always end up working more because they want to.

While burnout and recruitment are both good reasons (you don't want core people to burn out and leave, and people don't want to come work for a bunch of slave-drivers), the less-often-cited reason to not work "harder," and one of our explicit motivations for it, is because often times saying "we'll just work harder" prevents you from having to make tough prioritization decisions, and that can mask bad decisions that have been made and that are costing you time.

As with all rules, there are exceptions, and there are times when you just need (or want) to crank hard on something. But in this case, we've found that the constraints imposed by working normal hours helps to improve your decision making and focus your priorities.

cojadate• 17 years ago

Working harder IS a good business strategy, but only if you've correctly worked out what's worth working on. Once you've identified what tasks produce the highest value, it makes sense to work on those tasks as much you can (i.e. as many hours as you can put in without inducing burnout). Good business strategies are not always good life strategies of course...

Nothing in the article contradicts that, even if the article title implies it does. It was a really great article and I particularly loved the idea about assigning monetary value to your tasks. Unfortunately it's difficult for me to do at the moment since so many of my current tasks are based on all-or-nothing gambles.

Mz2• 17 years ago

Re the Warren Buffets and such of the world. I think if you find something you love doing and can arrange to do it largely on your own terms, spending a lot of hours at it isn't going to lead to burn out. This is where I have issues with the mantra of "work harder". It implies that your job is about sweating and suffering. Those folks who have found their calling and love what they are doing may be putting in very long hours, but it isn't remotely the same experience that your typical worker has of their job. They also typically built themselves a custom niche. Warren Buffet used to work from home and arranged his work life such that he didn't have to do any of the things he didn't want to do. He found that, legally, as long as he kept the number of investors below X (I think 100), then he didn't have the reporting requirements, registering requirements, etc that most funds have -- ie he had the freedom to do whatever he wanted without answering to anyone else. So that's what he did (kept it below X number). I don't know what he is doing these days, but I seriously doubt he has some supervisor standing over him and cracking the whip.

You see the same thing with a lot of very successful people: They act like "rock stars" long before they "make it" and are infamous for indulging their personal peccadilloes. If I can work on my own terms, in my own home, at my own pace, on things I want to work on and love doing, you betcha I can put in much longer hours than if I am a wage slave.

shin_lao• 17 years ago

What matters is being better. How you are better changes from one individual to the other.

There is however a certain amount of work necessary to deliver appealing products.

Work Less, Get More Done: Analytics For Maximizing Productivity

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