
Workaholics fixate on inconsequential details - naish
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1017-workaholics-fixate-on-inconsequential-details
======
axod
37signals advice seems like it comes from a really really narrow set of
experiences. Best to take with a large pinch of salt I'd say.

~~~
aneesh
Sure, but _anyone's_ advice comes from a narrow set of experiences that they
try to make more applicable. Take _anyone's_ advice with a pinch of salt.

In Paul Buchheit's words: Advice = limited life experience +
overgeneralization

~~~
pg
I think what he's saying is that they haven't paid sufficient attention to how
well they generalize. That's the other half of essay writing.

------
pg
You don't need to cite research to establish this: it's a tautology. The word
"workaholic" has several senses. The one they mean is someone who works long
hours but gets little done. The only way you can do that is to work on
inconsequential things.

~~~
gruseom
_The word "workaholic" has several senses. The one they mean is someone who
works long hours but gets little done._

Can you cite a definition of "workaholic" that has this sense? I can't find
one (in a few minutes of googling). The definition that seems to come up
everywhere is "compulsion or addiction to work". If they're arguing from that
then it's not tautological.

The closest thing I found to the sense you mention is in the second-last
paragraph of the (rather good) Wikipedia article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workaholic>. Which makes me imagine the
following thread: "Ask YC: Are you a "bulimic" or "relentless" workaholic?" :)

~~~
pg
I'm a native English speaker, and since the word is a colloquial one of
comparatively recent origin, I've probably been using it for longer than it's
been listed in most reference works. I know from my own experience that one of
the senses (in fact, the main sense) is someone who works a lot but gets
little done.

In any case, that's implied by definitions like the one you cite. Someone with
a compulsion to work works a lot; otherwise you wouldn't call it a compulsion.
And it's clear from the article that they're not talking about the kind of
people who work a lot and achieve great things, since otherwise the message
would be "Be Mediocre." So the only remaining possibility is that they're
talking about people who work a lot and don't achieve much.

~~~
derefr
I usually take "workaholic" in the Japanese sense--someone whose boss assigns
them 12 hours of work to do in an 8 hour day, is culturally expected to
complete it all, and has this view internalized to the point where they feel
bad when they can't.

~~~
cstejerean
That's a bad definition of workaholic. I think the similarity with alcoholic
is there to indicate an addiction to work. Having a boss that makes ridiculous
demands (which you must complete or get fired) doesn't make one addicted to
work, it just makes it a shitty job.

------
bigtoga
I think the article's author confuses a perfectionist with a workaholic. A
perfectionist isn't by definition a workaholic and vice-versa yet the article
seems to infer that your perfectionists are killing your productivity.

Look - I'm guilty as anyone of spending three hours on a 120x120 .gif to get
the right font in exactly the right place but that doesn't mean that the
company is worse off as a result. I do that about 1-2x a month (waste too much
time on a stupid task in order to perfect it) and I chide myself on it each
time but that doesn't mean I'm a perfectionist or a workaholic; it means I'm
just prone to getting caught up in my work and not realizing how much time
I've spent on something b/c I'm enjoying it. When I look at the clock of
course I think, "That's good enough. I can't justify spending three hours to
choose the font!" and I feel bad but it's a necessary process AFAIC.

------
kirubakaran
I was a workaholic in my first job for about a year, bragging how late I had
to stay the previous night etc until I heard a manager I respect tell another
"Some slog, not knowing how to plan work".

The person I was trying to impress was thinking all along that losers stay
late.

~~~
tokipin
pwnt

------
KirinDave
Maybe this article and the sources it cites are correct, but how do you
distinguish this from passion for the work? Some people work long hours _and_
are extremely productive, because they feel passionate about the work.

It would be extremely dangerous to dismiss all hard workers as workaholics,
especially for a small startup. Perhaps it's just me, but I get a distinct
feeling that this article's author thinks long hours are a sign of wasted
time.

~~~
baha_man
To misquote Ambrose Bierce, a workaholic is someone you don't like who works
as hard as you do.

------
wallflower
As a former workaholic, it can be cured. Workaholism can be fueled by an
intense drive to show others how hard you can work (the classic I'll show them
attitude). Which is good because you can divert it to other interests (e.g.
not your job). For example, I diverted my workaholism to Toastmasters and it
simultaneously saved my job (was going to quit, feeling underappreciated) and
I stumbled into a great group of people (many, still friends).

------
goodkarma
"The person may look like a hero, coming in to solve crisis after crisis, when
in fact the crises could have been avoided. Sometimes, the workaholic may have
unwittingly created the problems to provide the endless thrill of more work."

I've had a few jobs with big organizations where they expected long hours, and
it would be a stretch to say that I created the problems.

I think whether or not your organization hits "crisis mode", and how often, is
something that company leadership and management needs to control. They can't
cry wolf all the time - it is not good for your people's morale (and sanity)
to push them that hard all the time.

~~~
Tamerlin
Most of the time in my experience, the "crisis mode" resulted from poor
planning. The leadership tried to fix the situation by convincing the
employees to work longer hours, which invariably made things far worse in the
long run.

The reality is that very rarely did the longer hours help to get things done
more quickly, instead the sweatshop mentality resulted in more bug-hunting and
less progress.

I have not yet in over ten years encountered a situation where the long hours
approach actually worked, though the management thought that it was working
because people were working long hours churning out lots of code.

~~~
tokipin
when i was in high school and college i wanted to get into game development.
but stories about multi-month 'crunch times' eventually turned me away. in
fact the games industry was renown for them. it was likely through a
combination of poor planning and wishful hoping. it's quite sad, because not
having me is about the biggest loss the videogame industry ever suffered

<http://www.igda.org/qol/whitepaper.php> (download requires account, but page
has few stats)

~~~
Tamerlin
That's the main reason that I also stayed out of the games industry, even
though playing games is what lead me into programming during high school.

One thing that always makes me wonder about the perpetual crisis mode folks is
that the vast majority of them despise Microsoft for producing such low-
quality products, but follow exactly the same microserf development model that
lead Microsoft to doing that.

A lot of the developers working there left as soon as their options vested,
and for years MS has been paying the price in terms of maintenance overhead
and a plethora of security holes and bugs in released software, which has lead
to a reputation for having software that's full of security holes on top of
everything else.

Joel Spolsky has also commented on the value of encouraging developers to work
sane hours rather than sweatshop hours, though I don't know which of his
articles it was in.

------
mojuba
_Sometimes, the workaholic may have unwittingly created the problems to
provide the endless thrill of more work._

This one rather sounds like a pathology. Many if not all great things were
created by workaholics.

Psychologically, every workaholic has reasons for being it that are very
personal, oftentimes latent, and from what I can tell unrelated to the actual
performance.

So, workaholism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being able of
creating great things, but otherwise it means nothing.

------
marvin
This is obvious, but it doesn't really contradict good startup advice...to me,
it seems as if many independent observers assume that doing a startup is
synonymous with doing nothing except sleeping and working.

There are times in a startup's life when this is necessary, but even then it
isn't sufficient: everyone needs to work all the time _on the details that
matter_ because there is too much work to be done and not enough time to do
it.

I guess 37signals's stories are popular because the apparently pose a
counterpoint to the standard Silicon Valley startup culture, but in fact they
are only pointing out obvious things that most successful startup founders
already live by: you can't work non-stop for two years without a _lot_ of
positive feedback on the way (and for five years maybe not at all), breaks
with no work are necessary, perfectionists can get derailed if not careful,
etc.

An undertone in other 37signals stories is that you can create wealth slower
but with more certainty than most startups are trying to do, and that people
shouldn't try so hard to create a successful startup..but I can't see that
these views are mutually exclusive. To each his own. Both these kinds of
companies are important to technological development.

------
gruseom
37Signals tend to pontificate, so I think a little extra skepticism is
justified. In this piece, all they're really doing is quoting an interview
with someone a newspaper called an expert. Also, they subtly change the
subject halfway through.

Still, if you define workaholism as addiction to work, I think it's foolish to
defend it on the grounds that startups require hard work and long hours. In my
observation, the "work" in "workaholic" does not mean "getting things done".
It's closer to just "being _at_ work". It's more often a zombie-like state
than an efficient one.

If you are sensitive enough to your inner process to work long and hard when
you're productive and step back from work when you're not, you're not a
workaholic, you're a Zen master.

~~~
tokipin
there actually are people who need work in a psychological sense. but
abstraction and creativity aren't their fortes (they are detail-oriented are
rule-ish) so most of them stay away from technology development

------
wumi
every company should have a blog, yeh? And most use it for advertising, but is
anyone else tired with the incessant preaching (and linking to news.yc) of
37signals?

I have great respect for their business, their founders and employees, and
their theories about work.

But seriously, is that article going to change the way people work or think
about work? Let each man and woman decide how they'd like to apply their own
resources (namely: time and money) and let 37signals worry about building
products.

Great marketing, but news.yc readers are more than aware of 37signals and most
have probably already made up their mind of whether or not they agree with the
company's methodology.

~~~
petercooper
Nah, I'm not tired of it. It's obvious 37signals want to "change the world" in
some way, and if you appreciate that, subscribe. If not, don't.

What /does/ tire me is that they set up a special "product blog" separate to
SvN, but then continue to crosspost almost everything to SvN on a weekly basis
anyway.. why bother?

------
lux
Or they're biting off more than they can chew ;)

I'm trying to manage my main software business right now, plus starting a new
startup which now has a fairly firm deadline of delivering our beta release by
the week of May 20th (some promotional opportunities arose that we wanted to
take advantage of, now we're booked for those so it's do or die!).

I know I have workaholic tendencies, and I agree they ought to be curbed
(balance produces so much more and so much faster in my experience), but right
now I don't have much choice. I imagine many startups, esp. those funded by
day jobs, find themselves in similar situations.

So maybe temporary or binge workoholism is worth it, as long as it's not habit
forming :)

------
edw519
edw519's thoughts about workaholism (with apologies to the original
author(s)):

To every thing there is a reason, and a time to every purpose under your
project

A time to study and a time to write

A time to code and a time to pluck up that which is coded

A time to kill ideas and a time to heal that patch

A time to break down algorithms and a time to build up frameworks

A time to weep about bugs and a time to laugh about clean compiles

A time to mourn that dead end and a time to dance when it works

A time to cast away duplicates and a time to gather common functions together

A time to embrace someone else's code and a time to refrain from embracing it

A time to seek advice and a time to lose illogical prejudices

A time to keep and a time to refactor

A time to clean up variable names and a time to rewrite

A time to accept and a time to keep testing

A time to love your idea and a time to give it up

A time for plowing onward and a time to rest.

~~~
wumi
just in case some don't get it, it's a play on a Bible passage in Ecclesiastes
Chapter 3.

~~~
edw519
Also in popular culture, here:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNopQq5lWqQ>

------
swdesignguy
I'm at the airport now! Going to europe!

