Sustainable Pace

Description

> XP really doesn't demand a 40 hour week. For one thing,
> it's expected that the team will determine what the
> standard working week should be. A team may decide that a
> 50 hour is sustainable, for example. The cuurent common
> term for the pratice is now Sustainable Pace to avoid this
> confusion.

I hear that from time to time at BayXP? meetings and in online discussions and it always bugs me. It often seems like the person saying it is giving in way too easily. Sometimes it even comes from a manager singing the praises of XP, but saying their teams "decided" that 50 hours was sustainable.

Someone (Joshua?) mentioned at BayXP? last week that the real reason it's not called 40-Hour Week anymore is that teams in many European countries are legally forbidden from working more than 36.5 hours (I don't remember the number exactly).

A big part of 40-Hour Week for me is that in accepting a job I'm making a certain commitment to the project, and the rest of my time is already committed to my loved ones (including myself!). It's not something I can give up lightly.

-- JustinSampson?

Most of us have encountered the situation where we have been working so long that we cease to make much progress, or where we even make negative progress. I encountered that situation this week after about two hours of work, in fact.

I suspect that there are at least two important numbers that go into sustainable pace, and neither of them is a constant.

First, for each individual, and for the team as a whole, there is some number of hours today that will keep forward progress at the maximum possible. The Sustainable Pace rule suggests working that number of hours.

Second, for each individual, there is some personal level of commitment to work vs family vs whatever, that will keep life moving as well as possible. I would suggest that people know that number as well, and honor it. It seems the right thing to do, but I'm not sure that it is part of what is meant by the Sustainable Pace rule, which can be taken as a project-oriented rule only.

Like all the XP rules, this one is meant to be practiced fully and all the time, but not stupidly. When there is a fire, the firemen don't go home after eight hours because otherwise tomorrow they'll be really tired and ineffective. Nor should we, when there is an important problem or deadline. But if every day we are really tired and ineffective, it's bad for us and bad for the project.

Therefore we should seek to work at a ... Sustainable Pace

-- RonJeffries?

I understand the impulse that makes a manager want to see more hours; going home means nothing is happening, & if people were there there might be progress. It may not be easy to tell when the 0 productivity point hits, and it's hard to tie it to the impact later on when people are tired, or burnt out from spending an hour to get 5 minutes' work done. (My test question is, "If 2 more hours would yield no net benefit, would you rather see people give their all, or just go home?")

For myself, I went through a phase when I was oblivious to all this. Then I learned to see when I was nearing 0 productivity. Then I had an interesting phase where I could feel myself getting stupider but I couldn't bring myself to stop (but I was aware enough to nudge others to stop who needed to). Now I usually know when to call it a day.

-- BillWake?

-- SteveHayes?

Other artists, often writers, give the muse fifteen minutes, allowing themselves to retreat if she fails to show in that time. Usually, the muse appears and the work flow starts. But their logic is that creative work has to be a choice to be juicy, so the option must exist to simply decline the work without guilt if it ain't happening.

Since time is a flexible entity, it can expand to fill the task or shrink to fill the time box, calculating such things as sustainable pace seems like a fool's mission. It might be better characterized as a felt sense, but then I usually don't feel that I've overrun my pace until well after I've exhausted myself. Most project managers believe that time is a constant regulating factor, and their fantasy is reinforced by their scheduling tools, which are incapable of calculating any but linear extensions of time (When 50% of the effort is complete, we're half way there). Work simply doesn't work like this. It unfolds in tenaciously non-linear ways, where for 90% of the time, no apparent progress is made, for instance, or where for 10% of the time progress is made, followed by 83.23% of the time where no progress is made, followed by a brief, satisfying period where it's all done. This nonlinearity might be why Woody Allen's rule works.

One more thing, sustainable pace is a function of juiciness. Where you call the spouse and say you'll be leaving in fifteen minutes, then wake up four hours later understanding that you've just spent the most productive and satisfying time you can ever remember, when the "juice is in", sustainable pace is a very different value than when you're wondering where the juice went. I could easily sustain a lifetime of such transcendent experiences. Couldn't you?

-- DavidSchmaltz?

I just wanted to flag this line from David's previous and excellent posting regarding showing up, writers' time, artists' time, and juice.

It seems to me that almost all the Important Things "cannot be calculated".

It seems to me that true quality of life might come from observing these things and consciously trying to optimize them. -- RonJeffries?

Thanks for commenting on my comments.

I was with you 1000% until this last sentence. Then I suffered a severe brain cramp. Sometimes I think better when I have a brain cramp. Here's what happened for me whan I read that last sentence:

First, my hobbled brain said, "How can you optimize something you admit you cannot calculate? Since optimization suggests that I understand something about a limit AND have a means for approaching that limit, which seems to require some calculating ability, ... ... another cramp.

Second, my hobbled brain observed: maybe he means optimize as opposed to pessimize, that is, approaching an Important Thing optimistically "optimizes" it, while approaching it pessimistically "pessimizes" it. If I use optimize as a pragmatic, rather than a rational, mathematical concept, the charlie horse in my brain begins to relax. My brain felt well-exercized and stronger for the next encounter with such a seeming contradiction.

Okay, so here's the learning. Where you're dealing with a calculatable value, rational, mathematical optimization is a ... er, rational thing to do. Where you're dealing with a non-calculatable value, such optimization is irrational- even crazy-making. But there's another side to this curious coin. This side is called pragmatic or non-rational (as opposed to irrational) method. When dealing with a non-calculatable value, pragmatic optimization, fueled by an optimistic outlook, is always possible, and I would argue, beneficial, if only because it leaves you (the optimized) in better, more flexible shape for whatever presents its self next. Approaching such pragmatic values in a rational way, as if they could be mathematically or rationally optimized, is a recipe for insanity.

This difference explains many of the difficulties XPers must face when proposing their methods, which are based in pragmatic judgment, to the hyper-rational project management orthodoxy. The waterfall method is a rational method, it offers a well- formed model for software development. The fact that it works poorly in practice doesn't disturb the ideologues who embrace it, because further optimization will always to them seem like the resolution for any shortcoming. In short, the rational method should work, and if it fails, it fails due to some shortcoming not in the model for how it should work, but in the inept implementation of the model.

The XP method is not rational, in that it is based upon Important Things: felt senses, judgment, and the kinds of synchronicity that occurs in collaboration and purposeful reconsideration. The conversation about XP easily degrades into an attempt to rationally explain the utility, which is a conversation that seems doomed to merely continue a dialogue of the deaf. Deaf because of the different contexts each hold for interpreting the other's story. This is an ancient argument, carried on between those who have a model for how things should work (but don't) and those who have a practice that does work, but cannot be explained rationally (and cannot be rationally optimized.)

So, the argument begins with the pragmatist saying, "We should work at a sustainable pace."

The rationalist responds: "How many hours a day is sustainable?"

This is, of course a double-binding question, supported by the notion that time is a fixed quantity, and sustainability is therefore a claculatable value.

The arugment seems simply doomed to degrade from there. The more the pragmatist tries to rationally explain their non- rational sense, the more they undermine their own argument. The conversation degrades into a theologic war, with the pragmatists (turning rational) citing various expert opinions and adopting, not a personal felt sense based upon judgment, but some rationalized rules for engagement that are no more useful, in practice, than the rational ideologue's rules. Both become rationalized. The rationalists win these arguments because the rules for engaging in them are, themselves, rational. If the discourse could be carried out pragmatically, of course, the rationalist's perspective would bind up in the same way that the pragmatist's perspective binds within the rationalist's frame.

For instance, the rational notion that one plus one equals two conflicts with the pragmatic notion that pair programming produces a synergy greater than the simple sum of its parts. Prove it? Any sample might rationally demonstrate the pragmatist's error. Over time, the contribution becomes inseperable from the context, and the comparison degrades into what was versus what might have been (a rational discourse). The pragmatic simply cannot be understood or explained by rational decomposition. It seems to require faith, which I define as belief without rational proof. Without faith, which is fueled by optimism, the pragmatist's world crumbles into an unexplanable pile: Important Things, judgment, and sychronicity. The pragmatist's proof is in the pudding, which can only be assesed later. The rationaist's proof is in the recipe, which can be rationally optimized from the outset (albeit without regard to actual result.)

The world is, of course, much better explained by the pragmatist's stories, but their explanations fail the goodness test required by the rational model. The pragmatic model is messy. It fails to even try to predict exactly what will happen. Where, in the rationalist's world, prediction is more important than realization, the model is more important than the result. Further, in the rationalist's world, due to an effect called "creeping determinism," the rationalist's model seems to have in retrospect, pretty well predicticted what happened. We are model-seeking organizisms.

IXP faces two extreme dangers: attempting to explain itself rationally and not attempting to explain iteself rationally. This is, of course, a damned if you do and damned if you don't dilemma. eXtremely normal.

I'll have more to say about this tangle in a later post. Until then, Amy found this wonderful piece on the web. It's written by a professor who's done a lot of study on the dance betwen rationalism and pragmatism where planning is concerned. It blew me away!

http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/details/issue/sample/a023004.pdf

Thanks, again, Ron for cramping my brain.

-- DavidSchmaltz?

See SustainablePaceTurnaround