Urgency and activity

I've noticed that I tend to get work done best when I'm nearly out of time to do it. Presumably, I'm not the only one who works like this, but it definitely causes... let's call it "friction" with the people I work with who seem to work at a constant pace.

I wonder sometimes if my life would be different if I could maintain that constant pace. Given my irregular output, I see myself as a miracle worker who would thrive in an environment of being called in to get stuff done in an emergency. However, my co-workers tend to see me as unreliable, which has occasionally been career-limiting.

A few years ago, the team I was part of was introduced to Scrum, an Agile methodology. At the time, we were told in training that one of the goals was to even out the crisis humps, replacing the "mad rush" at the deadline with a series of smaller deadlines, so there'd be no all-nighters to get things done. Looking back now, I wonder if it was a compromise to try to get "bursty" workers to increase their output, or at least make their output more predictable to schedule-keepers.

Driving home today, I wondered about what a crazy frenetic work environment would be like, in which goals for the day were handed out in the morning. After a while I know it would be maddening, and that very few people would survive working there. However, if they could put the right team together, imagine the output!

Some of this thought is driven by just having read The Phoenix Project, a novel about DevOps. It's a great read, and if you're an Amazon Prime member with a Kindle, you can "borrow" it for free. That's what I did before buying it. :-)

What it got me thinking about is how to overcome "impossible" challenges. In the book, one such challenge is going from a deploy every 9 weeks to a deploy of 10 times per day. It's called "impossible" by some characters, but, since the novel is a polemic about DevOps, of course they figure it out quickly. The key is to challenge your assumptions about what's possible. At my current job, we recently had a semi-successful meeting where some team members argued that what was being asked for was "against the laws of physics". That to me is a sign that you need to approach the problem differently, set aside the "impossible" label, and look at what obstacles are in the way. If you can re-route around those obstacles, or wave a magic wand to streamline them (by several orders of magnitude), then the solution becomes possible, and the new challenge is driven by the excitement of doing what you knew yesterday was impossible.

I guess the challenge for me now is to figure out how to find something impossible every day... make each day a mini-sprint, and see what happens to my output.