Thread by @jlengstorf

This is a Good Tweet™. I’ve seen a tendency to only count certain parts of our jobs as “real work”, which leads to trying to do the rest outside of business hours so we can really “make the work hours count”.

That’s not how work works.

https://twitter.com/jhooks/status/1180943563850338304

There are subcategories of work for tech workers (let’s use a hypothetical developer):

First, there’s writing code, which is the part we usually call “real work”. If a developer goes through a whole work day and doesn’t write any code, the instinct is to call that day a waste.

But what about everything that has to happen before the code?

We have to figure what we should be coding. This typically involves a combination of email, meetings, Slack discussions, writing/reading planning documents and specs, talking through desired outcomes with other teams.

We have to decide what code to write in the first place. How does it fit into the greater system? Is it separate from the rest of the codebase, or does this extend existing software? Where are the edges? How do we make sure this isn’t going to be a maintenance nightmare later?

We have to communicate what we’re doing with our team *and* keep up-to-date with their progress. This means status meetings, code reviews, feedback sessions, emails, writing docs, and so on.

And then we get to the logistics. How do we fit all of that into our week without burning up the whole day on context-switching? We have to schedule our days, block out time to focus, keep tabs on when we need to check in, protect our time without being inaccessible.

We haven’t even talked about career development yet. Manager 1:1s, team meetings, setting and measuring personal goals, etc.

This is what I call “meta-work” or yak shaving), and it tends to make the difference between feeling on top of things and feeling buried. You can’t code your way out of most business problems. lengstorf.com/yak-shaving/

So with *all* of that work (and plenty more that I’m forgetting about right now) on our plates, it seems reasonable to expect that we need to dedicate significant time toward handling those tasks.

But the default is to feel guilty taking company time for meta-work.

This is a sneaky, dangerous lie we tell ourselves, and that many companies wittingly or unwittingly profit from.

See, if we have 10 things to do, but only 4 of them are “real work”, we feel pressure (imagined or otherwise) to only work on those 4 tasks during business hours.

But the other 6 things still need to be done.

So we “prep for the week” on our weekends. “Catch up” in the evenings.

Put another way: we feel pressure to handle 60% of the tasks we should be getting paid to do *as volunteers, in our free time*.

This works out great for businesses: you do a ton of work outside business hours and they only have to pay your 40 hour a week salary. That’s 💰 in the bank, so they don’t have an incentive to save you from yourself. “We’d never expect it, but hey, knock yourself out!”

(If they were *really* smart, though, they’d see that this is short-term thinking and curb it aggressively. The second- and third-order effects are super costly, but that’s another rant for another time.)

But businesses (at least the non-evil ones) aren’t actually expecting you to work outside business hours.

Keep the meta-work in your work day. If it causes delays, that points to a business problem: why do you have more work assigned than you can handle in 40 hours a week?

Identifying bottlenecks like this helps prioritize headcount, gets you additional support (e.g. maybe your team needs a project manager to own the scheduling/cross-team collaboration and coordination), and prevents you from burning out trying to keep up with too much work.

Businesses spend *way more money* to replace a burned out team member than they do to keep and support healthy team members. Teams suffer huge productivity losses due to turnover.

Saying that you work outside of business hours “for the team” is just lying to yourself and others.

Which is a long-winded way of saying: @jhooks isn’t being rebellious by doing meta-work on Monday instead of the weekend. He’s doing his work more effectively and sustainably.

We should all be more like Joel. 40 hours is plenty of time for work & it’s all our salaries pay for.

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