
Work Less, Get More Done: Analytics For Maximizing Productivity - patio11
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/10/04/work-smarter-not-harder/
======
cojadate
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.

------
edw519
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.

~~~
ellyagg
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.

~~~
jimbokun
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.

------
oliverkofoed
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.

------
Mz
"“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. :-) )

------
patio11
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>

~~~
ellyagg
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).

~~~
jimbokun
"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.

------
ellyagg
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.

~~~
jamesbritt
"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?

~~~
navanit
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...](http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf)

~~~
jamesbritt
Thank you!

------
ellyagg
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.

------
gwern
> 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.

~~~
patio11
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.

~~~
gwern
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.)

~~~
patio11
Hmm. Well, you've got me, I self-identify as a capitalist. I am efficient in
most of my dealings because that lets me choose how to distribute my surpluses
rather than having no surplus to distribute. I do things which are not
strictly speaking economically efficient with my surpluses of time and money:
I play video games, I donate to charity, and I pay freelancers more money than
the lowest possible amount they would work for me for. That's the whole point
of optimizing away the things I don't care about, like time spent writing
bingo card word lists.

As I mentioned, I have a global monopsony on bingo card word lists. (A
monopsony is to buying as a monopoly is to selling.) As predicted by MicroEcon
101, the market clearing price for bingo cards is whatever I say it is. I used
to say it was $1 each, before I said it was $1.50 each, before I said it was
$3 each. I keep walking it up because I'm happy with the arrangement and like
to keep my freelancers happy. I don't need to, any more than I needed to send
her a Christmas card with a month's wages in it, but I do a lot of things that
I don't _need_ to do.

Could I say the price is $30 each? Yeah, sure -- all it would take is writing
another zero on my check. Am I under any particular obligation to do that? I
haven't heard a compelling reason why yet.

You are, of course, free to call me "unfair". You're also free to open your
own business, compete against me, break my worldwide monopsony on bingo card
writing labor, and pay her any price you darn well please. If you can beat a
few thousand a year, I'll happily forward you her contact information.

I'll refrain from giving my opinions as to the relative moral worth of
entrepreneurship and telling entrepreneurs how to spend their money, as they
would get political very, very quickly.

~~~
gwern
So you take option 2 of my trilemma?

That's an excellent answer; if you claimed #1 or #3, I was going to ask how
you expect 100/hr out of posting to and commenting on HN (since I can't see
that HN demographics would generate many bingo-card customers).

------
plinkplonk
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.

~~~
gwern
> 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?

------
paraschopra
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.

~~~
patio11
_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
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.

------
Mz
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.

------
akeefer
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.

------
dimas
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.

------
shin_lao
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.

