Re: Time management

So said  Bill Walton  on  2002-12-13 --------------------

>Laurent Bossavit wrote:
>
>
>> Bill:
>>
>> > Perhaps you meant to ask / learn ...
>>
>> OK, let's phrase it that way. I sense a lot of passion in this topic,
>> which tells me it is one that will elicit fruitful conflict. I sense
>> that I'm going to be the sand in the oyster with this one, so let me
>> state beforehand that any criticism of a person's opinions that I
>> might offer is not intended as a criticism of the person.
>>
>> Now, to my way of seeing, free time - time with the family, time to
>> read, time to have fun, time to see people who call me up and suggest
>> lunch - is a key part of becoming a better programmer. As a
>> programmer the "people systems" I deal with are typically small, from
>> one to a few people.
>>
>> I would assume that a person dealing with more complex people systems
>> (such as that 4000 person company) need *more*, not less, free time
>> to recharge. I would assume that at higher levels of pay and
>> responsibility, one has to invest *more*, not less, time in learning.
>
>"Needs" is not the same as "gets."  Each of us has planned-for
>deliverables.
>My experience is that it's fairly typical that the planned-for deliverables
>are accomplishable within an 8 hour day.  The difference between my day as
>a
>technical person and my day as a manager has primarily been the time it
>takes to handle things that are not planned-for.  It's not been possible,
>in
>my experience, to predict the personal and interpersonal problems I had to
>deal with.  It's not been possible to predict the number or severity of
>fires I would have to fight.  These are things that it has been my
>responsiblity to handle, and which took away from the free time that would
>have otherwise been available for recharging.  It's been both my experience
>and observation that the higher up you go in an organization, the larger
>the
>number and the larger the severity of those things. 
<snip />

It sounds as though you need to build some slack into your (personal) schedule. Since you don't know how much slack, you can either measure and adjust or guess.

I am currently starting to see managerial duties creep into my job. My work day is therefore more interrupt-driven than I have become accustomed to. As a result, my plan mandates a 7-hour day with slack time to deal with problems as they arise, including one-hour phone calls from one of my guys complaining about how they have no time to build quality into our courses. If my manager asks, I can tell him that I have to build about five hours of slack per week into my schedule to deal with problems on an as-needed basis. This is based on observation, and not just fear.

My alternative is to measure the velocity of my progress towards completing planned deliverables. If I simply include known deliverables in my plan and ignore the things that just "come up", I will measure -- over time -- a velocity. This velocity is just like a programming team's velocity: it's a measure of how much planned work I can complete in (say) a two-week period. If my manager is dissatisfied with the amount of planned work I am able to complete in that time, we can work together to see whether we can plan some of the unplanned work in an effort to make it more predictable. I'll just have to see how it goes.

<snip />
>It appears to me that
>one of the determining factors in achieving higher positions in large
>corporations is a willingness to subjugate ones personal needs to the needs
>of the organization.  I'm not saying it's smart, right, etc.  Just that
>these are my experiences and that those seem to be the rules by which large
>U.S. corporations operate.

One of things that attracted me to XP was the way it humanizes programmers. A friend of mine calls it "Humane Programming". The idea is that XP recognizes that there is a balance between the needs of the programmer and the needs of the customer that provide maximum value over an indefinite period of time. XP attempts to reach that sweet spot; otherwise, the company throws many down the toilet retraining people to replace the perfectly good ones they've burnt out.

Another basic impedance ch I detect between XP and the business community is that I want (and XP wants) to eliminate the "throw-away programmer" mentality, but enough business folks think that they can throw away programmers as needed.

J. B. Rainsberger,
President, Diaspar Software Services
Let's write software that people understand.
http://www.diasparsoftware.com/
telephone: +1 416 791-8603
All correspondence (c) 2002 Diaspar Software Services.
If you want to use it, just ask; don't steal.



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