Tortoise and Hare Schedules
Remember the old story of the tortoise and the hare? Aesop’s old fable about a race between the extremely fast hare and the slow tortoise is a famous one, appearing in countless children’s books. It also made its appearance on Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Bugs Bunny Show. In the latter case, the role of the hare was played by no less a personage than Bugs Bunny himself, which is almost, but not completely, totally unlike getting Sir Lawrence Olivier to appear in a high school production of Hamlet.
The fact is, though, the story has tremendous longevity. This little race fable has, as it were, “legs.” If there is one thing that story tortoise, it’s that speed simply isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Indeed, one of the fastest people I’ve ever met was a 75 year old Judo master. He never seemed to move all that much, but no matter how fast we tried to hit him, somehow we always hit the ground instead. His secret, he told us, was that we simply had to be in the right place at the right time. As long as we could do that, we didn’t have to move very fast.
This same question of speed plays into how we experience time and, by extension, how productive we are. When we feel that we don’t have much time, we try to move faster. This is tiring: the hare, as you’ll recall, fell asleep before the end of the race. Not only that, and odd as it may sound, the faster we move, the less time we feel like we have. In a shocking counterpoint to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which says that the faster we go the more time slows down, when we go fast, time seems to speed up as well. My physicist friends assure me, however, that this would change if I could simply move at a rate approaching the speed of light. Failing that, we need to learn to experience time differently, and use time in ways that maximize our productivity without leaving us exhausted.
Fortunately, there are ways to do this. Instead of viewing time as ticks on a clock or blocks on a calendar, we need to step back from that rigid construction of time and instead view time for what it actually is: Nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen all at once. Time imposes a sequence on our activities, and it does that no matter how much we may wish otherwise. That sequence, however, can be used to our advantage. Instead of being locked into a rigid, clock-based image of time, we can instead view time as a series of events. Each event triggers the next event. What does this mean?
When we are locked into a clock-based view of time, we attempt to start and stop activities according to the number on the clock: 3pm have pre-meeting meeting, 3:30pm meeting, 7pm post meeting discussion, and so on. When we are working with others and need to coordinate a variety of different people, use of space, and allocation of other resources, then we need to impose some of that clock based ordering. Too much of it though just slows us down: if something takes longer, or shorter, than expected, suddenly the whole schedule is thrown off. We get distracted and suddenly find ourselves running behind or forget to take breaks and wear ourselves out too soon.
Instead, within our blocks of time, and whenever we are working in a relatively unstructured environment, we need to think in terms of events. What events are happening around us? What events are we causing? Our events can be used to trigger us to change activities or take breaks. In one office, the coffee cart coming around was the trigger for people to take a break and move to a different task. An engineer working at home used the school bus driving by in the morning and mail deliveries in the afternoon as events to trigger him to switch tasks. We can even take this a step further, and create explicit linkages of events for our own uses: when I finish testing this piece of code, I will make a cup of coffee. When I finish my coffee I will review the documentation. When I finish… and so on. When we plan and connect events this way, it’s amazing how much time we don’t waste just trying to decide what to do next.
The other piece of managing our perception of time is to create a schedule that we can beat. It’s quite amazing: when we’re ahead of schedule, we are simultaneously more relaxed and more energized. We focus better and come up with more creative solutions to problems. Unexpected obstacles are fun challenges. When we are behind schedule, we feel rushed. Every delay feels like a crisis. We take shortcuts and make more mistakes.
Ultimately, teams that are ahead end up further ahead. Teams that are behind, end up further behind. People who are rushed don’t see what is in front of them, lose track of where they are, and exhaust themselves too soon. If you want to win, design a schedule that you can beat not one that beats you.
