The good hours and the bad hours.

In our day there is a time when we are bright and full of energy and ideas, there are other times when we are tired and slow and there are those times in between. I’m refering to jobs like ours (software development ofcourse!) that require some form of thinking but this can apply to other jobs as well.

There are what we can call the creative hours; those couple of hours of peace and illumination where we’re really top notch. Our mind is clear, no issues are clouding our mental machinery. We’re not hungry, we’re not lonely, we’re not tired. We’re typically so much at peace with ourselves that we seem to be tapping the ether for creative and brilliant ideas. These are the most productive hours by far. Not because we can do a lot of work in that short period of trance, but because we can come up with ideas/solutions that can effect the way we’re working or the direction or our work. For example we might come up with a solution that will save us 100 hours in one such hour. Such an hour is than worth as much as 100 hours of work. These are the hours we like, but unfortunately we can only get a few of those in our working week.

The productive hours. These are the hours in which we’re bright, efficient and profitable. Typically we’re fully concentrated, fully focused, almost hyped up on our task at hand and we deliver. We deliver a lot. We solve problems, we find solutions and most importantly we create value. Most of us can manage from 2 to 6 of these hours per day and those having over 6 productive hours a day will be the most productive people in any organisation. Some people can manage more than that but they’re not very common.

The low hours. These are the hours here and there in our day in which we cannot really focus properly on the task at hand. For example: when we’re manning a telephone, when we’re supporting customers, during and after meetings, after a heavy lunch, after a traffic jam, in the late hours of the day or at a busy office. We’re working but we’re not really thinking. Some work maybe coming out, but its because we know it by heart, we cannot do anything original. These are our worst hours in terms of efficiency.

As an organisation that focuses on creativity to meet our customer’s expectations, as a team we’re after the creative hours and the productive hours. Knowing that we’re all able to identify and dedicate the most productive hours in our day to our work, we give ourselves the flexibility to adapt our own schedule to the task at hand. This is what works for us!