PABCAS, the blog of Paul Martin Campbell

...is to stop working at a regular time at the end of the day.

It’s much harder than it sounds. In the startup world, leaving the office without feeling completely burnt out feels like you’re doing the fledgling business a disservice. I had a pretty unproductive day today. Morning meetings cut the day in half. I chucked away at some admin work; not fulfilling. As I was starting to get naturally tired, around 5.30pm, a colleague suggested “let’s go for a coffee and come back and do a power half hour.” Not having got much done all day, it was a tempting proposition.

Lately though, I’ve been seriously mindful of the ruckus last month sparked by Jason Calacanis and replied to by David Heinemeir Hanssen . DHH also followed up with a post on sleep deprivation and here’s the line that’s really been echoing round my head:

trying to extract 110% performance from today when it means having only 70% performance available tomorrow is a bad deal. You end up with just 77% of your available peak. What a bad trade.

This day last week I had one of the most productive days of my life. I got a lot of great work done, popped over to the gym and ended up drinking with mega VC Salim Ismail ... where he had a discussion with Marcus MacInnes about Google’s 20% time

Salim’s main point was that, as a benefit, 20% time is an illusion: apparently you have to apply for it and have your idea accepted. Moreover, internal projects in Google are like mini-startups, and like startups, according to Salim, employees should spend all their time focussing solely on the prize—the product. Salim said that every waking hour of a startup employees existence should be applied solely to that enterprise, that certain activities, for example, gardening, are wasteful, when getting a product to market on time is crucial.

I disagreed. At the time, I’d just finished reading A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young. The book is specifically tailored for the creative process in advertising. Young’s point distilled is: do your ground-work, play around with some ideas, then forget about what you’ve thought about and wait for your sub-conscious to spring the answer on you. I thought it apt to mention that space between hard work could be very beneficial to programmers and designers in the web startup world. My idea was quickly thrown down though, as I’d used an example from the advertising world. For the sake of the evening, I didn’t want to argue, but I feel I should try and expand on my point some here.

I suggested that the gardening part of the employees day could be when they get a bright idea to solve a particularly tricky design problem, or come up with a creative solution to one of the problem’s they’d been facing that day.

They can’t see the wood from the trees.

In “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” Stephen Covey tells of the two woodsmen who have a race to see who can chop their way through a thick forest the quickest. The first woodsman hacks all night and all day and laughs to himself when he sees the other woodsman taking lots of rests. Slowly, though, the other woodsman catches up, and soon he’s deep into the forest, after the first woodsman has slowed down; his blade is blunt and his arms are tired. When he finally reaches the other side of the forest, long after the other woodsman has cut his way through, he asks “how did you do it, you spent most of your time resting.” The other woodsman replies, “yes, but while I was resting I was sharpening my saw”

For certain projects, like perhaps event organisation, or movie-making, or getting a magazine to press, a single-minded focus and a huge push is what’s needed on a monthly basis to keep the project on track and within deadlines.

Software and design, however, are far more holistic enterprises. Software, particularly on the web, is malleable, always changing. Fresh design problems are always coming up and they need ideas, creative ideas to solve them. Taking time to read, to relax, to let the mind quiet down and let the sub-conscious do some work is really important. Taking time to sharpen the saw.

Creative solutions don’t come from tired minds.

As it happened today, we didn’t do the extra power 30 minutes. I got to the gym and feel great after it. I spent a bit of time tidying my apartment, winding down after the day. I know that I’ll be able to kill any work that would have pushed me at the end of today efficiently at the start of tomorrow.

The trick was leaving the office. It was the toughest thing I did all day. But because I did, I feel healthier, happier and brighter, and because of it I’ve cranked out my first blog post in three months.

If you’re finding yourself working too much, you should try it; I guarantee you the work will still be there in the morning and you’ll probably be 30% more able to to handle it then.