Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been contemplating my ability to juggle my responsibilities—leader, manager, parent, partner, pup valet—and was reminded, once again, that we need to give ourselves slack. No one and nothing operates at 100%, let alone the cliché commonly brought up of 110% now that we’re in American football season, on a regular basis. If you are feeling overwhelmed, it may be that it is time to dial it back.
Within Limits
I was reading this piece by Cindy Cavoto on productivity and she referred to research known as the 85% rule. The researchers describe finding that “the optimal error rate is around 15.87%” (so this should really be the 84% rule but I digress). The researchers’ goal was to find the optimal balance between being challenged and the ability to learn: “We found that the rate of learning is maximized when the difficulty of training is adjusted to keep the training accuracy at around 85%.” (yes, they refer to the Goldilocks principle).
It is worth being clear: I am not into optimizing, min/maxing my life or the work lives of those who work with me. There will never be a time when I think, “hmm, this is only 78% difficult” or “gosh, this 94% difficulty is really chapping my hide.” There are times when I do not want to experience 15% failure; sometimes I just need the positive feeling of seeing that my expertise really exists. I am not a machine and I battle with imposter syndrome and self-doubt; failure at any level isn’t always the medicine I need at a particular moment. Sometimes people need an opportunity to succeed; there’s a reason the gimme exists.
Most of the time I just want to make sure I have time to explore; I don’t even think of it is as failure. It is more like walking down a long hall and just trying every handle, to see which door opens. Some won’t and some will lead somewhere that, at that point in time, may not be relevant. Each door, whatever is behind it, accumulates some information or experience for immediate or future use.
As I thought about 85%, though, I started thinking about what else we do at 100%. If you think about your car (if you have one), it probably has a speedometer that far exceeds the speeds you are actually allowed to go. Similarly, it may have a tachometer that allows for revs far above what you would want to run your car engine at, certainly not for a few moments.
We operate stoves that can be turned all the way up but it’s the rare recipe that wants us to run hot for the entire process: bring it to a boil and then reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes. The point is that we do not run hot for 100% of the time when we are doing anything unless it is for a short time. We talk about sprints at work because we are acknowledging that very short energy bursts, like actual foot sprints, are meant to be short.
This need for slack is at odds with a lot of modern workplaces. The places where they expect you to show up for 40 hours a week. The jobs that are trying to time shift back to when people were in their chairs, in their offices, visible and controllable. One of the benefits of the last 5 years since the start of the pandemic is that we started to see opportunities for that slack to exist. We might work 40 hours but we need not make every one of those hours be contiguous to 7 others each day.
When we focus on getting work done rather than on completing hours, we are closer to our optimal state. Employers want 100% of those 40 hours, which means that, if they account for your optimal productivity, the 15% or whatever is on your own time, in addition to the 40. It’s a great deal for the employer. It’s not so great for anyone else.
It ignores the reality that knowledge workers like librarians tend to think about work—actively or laterally—even when we’re not “on the job.” It may not be literally about the work: I may be tinkering with technology or re-ordering and organizing some information collection. But the underlying things that make us excited about and good at our work are going to be active whether we’re sitting in our office chairs or not.
When Is My Time?
I had to laugh that The Zuck felt it necessary to share that he adopts the 80% rule, as though anyone cares what an oligarch’s productivity approach is. I have not seen it referred to as the pareto principle as such, although I think that’s what it is. Before Google became evil (I mean, they specifically chose to no longer “don’t be evil“), they were renowned for the 20% of time allowed for staff to work on their own projects (although they have not been consistent) and we were blessed for a time with Google Reader because of it. Contrast that with Google Gemini, a product of the 1% 80% that encourages us to gargle with lye; I just want my RSS.
But the 80% rule aligns really well with the 85% rule. 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts. It’s not just that our employers would be better off giving us a time schedule split between 80% (theirs) and 20% (ours). It’s that we need time within our 100% for failure.
This is a top down message and it requires incredible consistency to be believed. It’s not just the organizational leader that has to say it (and believe it). Everyone below them needs to hear, communicate, and believe it too. When organizations act in ways that are focused solely on extraction (the 100%/0% rule?), it is incredibly hard to carve out the correct balance on an individual basis.
I had to laugh at the law firm King & Spalding setting its new billable hour requirements for associates: 1,950 minimum billable, 2,400 “productive”. I mean, come on. For comparison, 52 weeks in a year at 40 hours is 2,080 hours. Those lawyers will be giving their 115%. Or, alternatively, if we assume 15% for failure, they’ll be using the non-billable “productive” hours for all of their failure and experimentation, or the client will be billed for it. The NALP billable hour explainer from 20 years ago—with a billable range of 1,400 to 2,400 with most between 1,800 and 1,900— feels almost quaint. Talk about extraction. I guess it’s a recognition that they may only get a few years out of an associate before the lawyer moves on anyway. It makes me wonder, between the hour requirements and the professional ethics collapse of big law firms, why this remains a career path for any lawyer except to pay off student loans.
It’s not really funny, though. We are already facing the elimination of learning at entry level roles as organizations look to artificial intelligence. We will be shifting from no time for learning to no opportunity to learn. As I start to work with the students who will eventually be graduated into this sort of extractive industry, it makes me wonder how I can help prepare them to think about alternatives.
There was a time when I really thought that a 4 day – 1 day split would make sense but I think that anything that is constrained by an hourly expectation misses the mark. We do not know when the spark will occur. We cannot know how many door handles we will need to rattle. And, if you’re a morning lark like me, some of that has to happen in the wee hours of the morning to be the most effective, when I’m at my sharpest. I need to be open to the idea that the folks I work with also need that sort of flexibility.
It really comes down to whether the measured 40 hours take place when the employer wants them to or whether they take into account when the employee wants them to. We have already learned through this pandemic that we are able to make this more flexible, more adapted to how each of our employees works. If we want to maximize the likelihood that the experimental, exploratory work can happen, we need to be thinking about allowing it to happen. If we proscribe a particular work week in a particular place and fill it with obstacles to failure and growth, we will get what we build and our people will suffer. This is part and parcel with flexible working time, flexible working locations, eliminating time rigid artifacts like meetings and even specific artifacts like “the lunch hour” (why can’t people eat whenever they want to eat?).
My own world is simpler. I am still juggling but it feels less chaotic, once I get passed a transition (like starting or ending a semester, or starting or ending a fiscal year). As a leader, I think the most important thing we can do around this failure and experimentation is to be deliberate ourselves and for our people. If we lose sight of the need, our people will too. And, despite law firms thinking they can monetize every hour of someone’s life, people find ways to create the appearance of productivity so that they can catch their breath, being neither productive nor learning and failing.