Working in sprints

What do you do during a working day? Do you do approximately eight hours of work fairly steadily? By which I meant to say, do you achieve roughly the same amount of stuff during each hour? Or do you sit around apparently fidgeting for several hours then have an attack of productivity and get a day’s work done all in one go at very high speed and then go back to apparently doing nothing? I do the latter, and I’m rather embarrassed about it so it’s difficult to write about. But I’m coming to realise that it may be a brain-wiring thing rather than a “being a dysfunctional idle pillock” thing. Incidentally, if you were expecting this blog to be about the kind of Sprints in Agile, well, I’m really sorry, and you may be reading the wrong blog…

I’ve always been what I’ve characterised to myself as a “sprint worker”. What I mean is that I can have bursts of intense productivity and then need to do something else. The same pattern as a sprinter who might run incredibly fast for a short time and then need a break. The opposite would be a marathon runner type of worker, who can maintain a steady rate of progress for a long time – they won’t be as fast as a sprinter over short periods, but will get at least as much done in total. My impression is that in professional life we value workers who fit the marathon pattern – it’s easiest for a manager to keep track of productivity if it’s fairly consistent through the day, so you know that any one hour of work is going to be roughly equivalent to another. Ideally, I suspect many firms would like people who can sprint continuously all day – some can, but many try and burn out. It’s a pattern of working all too often expected of people in graduate entry schemes – relying on their “youthful energy” to carry them through. How many times have you heard a junior colleague referred to as working “like a Duracell bunny“? That’s what I’m talking about.

I can’t work like that, but I feel the pressure to fit in and keep going consistently through the day. That leads me to mask my working pattern as well as my autism. For example, I stay at my desk during the day even if I know I’m not going to achieve much for a while, because I know that’s what’s expected of me. And in a way, being here is my job – as a leader I need to be on hand to respond to people if they come to me with issues, problems or questions. But while I’m at my desk/computer I feel that I need to be achieving a consistent amount of stuff, continuously and I really can’t work like that. I never could – even when I was on a graduate entry scheme.

As an example, if I’m working on a problem then the way my brain seems to reach the answer is by collecting information, letting it churn around in my brain for a while (during which outwardly nothing is being achieved) and then suddenly it all crystalises in a moment in my head and I complete the task in next to no time (the “sprint”). It wrong-foots colleagues not to be able to see continuous progress – when everything happens all in a lump at the end of a period of time, they suspect you of having been secretive and not involved them. When in fact you yourself had no idea what you were going to come up with until the last minute either.

You can imagine how a manager seeing me sitting around apparently achieving nothing (during the churning around in the brain phase) might imagine I was doing nothing useful. Indeed sometimes I probably am doing nothing useful… So it looks better to give the impression of spreading the “sprint” moment of productivity out evenly across the working day/week and as far as possible to show colleagues interim steps of progress. Even if I’m having to invent them in order to look like I’m working in a “normal” way. I was talking to some autistic colleagues last week and it became clear that they worked like this too. Maybe lots of us are working in this way but all dutifully covering it up because it’s not what neurotypical society expects.

It may be really useful to managers to have a team of “Duracell bunnies” who can churn work out continuously and never get tired. And it may make most sense to colleagues to see progress being made continuously and regularly in an orderly fashion. But real people aren’t all like that, and even the people who are like that now, may burn out (or get tired/have kids/get sick/some other life change that affects their productivity) in the future. In reality people aren’t machines and a more resilient way of managing teams would be to accept that. For now, though, I’m feeling the social pressure to be continuously productive so I shall have to go and appear to do something useful…