Sustainable Pace
We love doing things fast. Fast food, fast cars, crash diets, overnight successes, winning a lottery, etc. No one considers limits of human mind. You can’t win a marathon in the same way you win a sprint. You need sustainable pace, both in life and at work.
Sustainable Pace
Story time. I had a pleasure to work in a wonderful environment where I witnessed many teams. The most interesting dynamics were at play in two neighboring teams that we can call Overtimers and Comedians. That should you give the impression of the general atmosphere present in those two teams.
Overtimers, as you can probably guess, was a team that constantly stayed in the overtime. Every evening, they were last to get out of the office. On one hand, you might think that their found their sustainable pace at 12 hours every day plus some weekends. But no one can work like that forever.
At the same time, on the very same project, Comedians had a laugh every single day. They did produce results, occasionally staying after the hours to finish something important but you’d rarely find them sacrificing their personal lives. They were definitely working at or below their sustainable pace, as they never had any issues or complaints regarding work-life balance.
The thing is, they weren’t lazy and no one would ever think of them like that. They did their job professionally, on time and with pretty standard and expected rate of failures. But the Overtimers wanted to be seen as hard workers. A quality that we’re going to demythologize today.
Burnout
It’s very easy to guess the outcome of either approach. Turnover rate was crazy high for Overtimers and a source of many of their problems. They were committed to unreasonable schedule and they were dead set on keeping it. And they did but at what cost?
High turnover rate led to inefficiency, which led to growing backlog, which in turn resulted in more overtime. Vicious cycle with no escape. That definitely wasn’t a sustainable pace, even though they did sustain it by letting their team members burnout.
On the other hand, the Comedians worked as they did for years without any problems. After those years, they knew their part of the project inside out and they were true experts capable of working fast and efficient. It was a positive feedback loop – less stress resulted in people learning more and understanding deeply.
I’d say that on average the Comedians delivered about 80-90% of their capabilities. Every now and then, there was a need to go the full 100% and they did but after that they always had to recover. Never in my life I’ve seen such a clear example of what exactly is a sustainable pace.
Loafing
I’m from Poland and it’s very common here to exploit rules and twist words of advice. “Pick a sustainable pace” far too often turns to “be lazy”. That’s why the sustainable pace is only a part of the bigger picture called the agile mindset.
There is no place in your life for slacking off. If you don’t want to do your job good, then you don’t want to do it at all. Find yourself a new one. It is even worse when you’re doing things for yourself. If you run your own business or you want to learn something, how could you avoid doing it?
If you want to do something, then it’s only reasonable to do it effectively and as fast as possible while still looking at the long-term consequences. You can mow down your lawn fast. Even if your back hurts, you can probably push trough pain and rest afterwards. Nothing unreasonable about that.
However, there are things where you just can’t go faster. You really can’t speed up writing a book or training for a marathon. Eventually your body will give you a clear sign that enough is enough and recovery is required. If you push yourself too hard, then the time lost for recovery will make your pace much slower than if you’d operated at 80% of your maximum the whole time.
“Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” – Agile Manifesto
This applies to everyone you’re working with – you, your fellow team members, managers, clients, users, etc. You have to find a sustainable pace for everyone and avoid leaving someone behind. It doesn’t make any sense to write 20 articles each week if your editor is going to read and publish one or two.
Finding Your Sustainable Pace
If you’re starting a new training regimen, the worst thing you can do is to schedule a workout every day. You’re essentially setting yourself up for failure, as you have no margin of any sort. It takes a single day when you forgot your gym to fail. Besides, given the inevitable soreness I doubt you could manage an everyday workout.
As with everything agile, the proper process to optimize any pace is empiric. Start reasonably low, lower than you think you can handle and iteratively work your way from there. Weightlifting is a great example of that mindset as the most common advice is to increase the intensity (weights, sets or reps) after two successes in a row.
We tend to overestimate our efficiency and underestimate the amount of time we waste. If you’re doing something new, leave out a big margin. E.g. you might estimate correctly how long it will take you to run 10 kilometers but you have no idea how much time you need to prepare and recover.
You can easily inspect anything you are doing iteratively. Time for reflection and improvements is at the end of iteration. At first, don’t bother with exceptions and rare events. Weightlifting’s “two in a row” is a good rule of thumb. You failed with something twice? Address it. Everything went smoothly last two times? Try to do more.
Eventually you’ll find a point, where in the last two iterations you were trying to do too much. That’s the sustainable pace. Scale back and revisit that issue after weeks or months. Maybe you’ve improved and you can handle more. Maybe not and that’s your target velocity.
Never become a victim of “endless growth” mindset where you have to improve constantly. Endless growth is simply unsustainable.
