Thread by @sjcallender

One of my culture goals at @fostercommerce is for it to be a calm company where the team can do deep work w/ few interruptions and be a team willing to be interrupted to help. I think we found our groove by categorizing time commitments into two groups: Primary and "+5"

Primary time is the core commitment of the job. At best, and often, it is spent on one project for the whole week. The work is defined for the engineer so they can do a full review on Monday to catch any last minute red flags before diving in for the week. There are no meetings.

Primary time is typically marked by 25 billable hours/week. This number varies for each engineer. Essentially, the engineer agrees to give a solid 25 hours of deep work toward the defined scope of work for their "weekly primary project." Once you've hit the hours, you're done.

It's up to the Project Manager to get solid estimates before handing the work to an engineer. We don't want many surprises during the week. But sometimes it happens.

Sometimes an engineer will run into unexpected roadblocks on their primary project. So they don't waste a whole day or week trying to get unstuck, we have a "1-hour rule." If you've been stuck for an hour, stop and tell the team what's up.

We'll get you unstuck as a team. If we can't do it quickly, we'll change your primary project until we can get that project back on track.

Sometimes the surprises cause minor delays of a few hours where the scope didn't get completed in the week. We need a couple more hours to wrap it up. I don't want my team working weekends if we can help it, so that's partially why we have the "+5" time.

The "+5" time is the non-scoped work that an engineer will most likely do throughout the week. It's "5 additional hours" of work during the week. The buffer time.

The "+5" time can include catch-up work from a previous week's primary projects, our weekly team meeting, one-on-ones with a manager, smaller support tasks, helping teammates, responding to internal communications and anything else unexpected.

It's not required that an engineer work a full 5 hours of additional work. It's simply there for them to realize they *can* do more than the primary project and I can expect them to without it impacting the primary project.

But what's funny is I'm often telling our team to "protect their primary project time." I want them to help each other without sacrificing their primary time. If someone is seriously stuck, we regroup and figure out how to get them unstuck without getting everyone else backed up.

Also, it's easy to get distracted by important but not urgent work. Or by spending too much time making up for a bad week last week. With us, every week starts fresh. So, protect this week. We'll figure out as a team how to recover any missed from previous weeks.

This combo of primary and +5 time blocks seems to be working. They can do deep work and be supportive. They can work long chunks of time with few interruptions. They know they won't work 50 hours. It's basically 25 hours and up to 5 hours and that's it. Go "home," you're done.