Let me begin this post with a few words about my great friend Mark O’Brien. Mark and I have been friends since early 2001, when we were both living in Providence; since then, Mark has moved to North Carolina, I’ve moved to California, and I don’t get to see him nearly as much as I would like. The projects White Whale has undertaken for Duke University have given me an excuse to visit him occasionally over the last few years, but it’s just not enough. Fortunately, he’ll be the best man at my wedding in September, so we’ll have some quality time then. And we both run Web companies now (his is called Newfangled, and has a better Web site than mine), so we talk shop from time to time.
Mark and I played in a band together in Providence (that’s how we met). He plays bass, and he really is one of the best bass players I’ve ever known. A lot of dudes who play the bass are really just guitar players who dabble on the bass, usually as a way to get into other people’s bands; Mark really lives and breathes the bass. He’s just awesome.
Not long after moving to Oakland, I joined a band myself, as a bass player. (I’m a guitarist, but I dabble on the bass, usually as a way to get into other people’s bands.) In order to pass as a real bass player, I figured I needed some respectable equipment, so I called Mark for advice. And I have thought a lot since then about what he told me.
Playing the electric bass in a band, Mark said, is all about headroom. In other words, what matters in bass amplification isn’t volume so much as potential volume. In order to be properly amplified, the bassist has to be loud, but with the constant potential—which may never be taken advantage of at all—to be louder. So when looking for an amplifier setup, you have to find something that will let you be as loud as you need to be at, say, 6. If you have to turn up to 10 to be heard among the other instruments—even if that seems loud enough— it’s not.
I got a loud enough setup (an Ampeg SVT-350 head with a cheap Behringer cabinet) and lo and behold, you could really hear the headroom in action. It’s all about those little trebly peaks, like in the brushy transitions between notes and such; when you can hear those well, the bass jumps right out of the mix.
(If you’re still reading, thanks for indulging my lengthy setup. I’m ready to talk about Web design now.)
So White Whale is busy lately—working almost to capacity—and I have found myself thinking about headroom in different terms. It’s sort of a cliche that Web developers work much more than 40 hours per week— along with bloggers, programmers, and just about everyone who works with computers for a living. We can generally take our work home with us, which means that if we feel compelled to work hard at our jobs, the only thing standing between us and a 90-hour workweek is our hobbies and our social lives. If we don’t have anything personally enriching to do, we work.
That’s true of us at White Whale as much as anywhere else. (I’m typing this on my front porch at 8pm.) But what I’m realizing is that in order for WW to stay engaged, creative and productive, it is absolutely essential for us to maintain a level of headroom in our workload. We have to have the *potential* to work more, in order to do our work well.
With this in mind, we have a brand new rule:
Nobody at WW is allowed to work nights on a project unless (a) it’s really, really important; (b) it’s super fun; or (c) we literally have nothing else to do.
If we have a big deadline tomorrow, OK, maybe somebody will put in some late hours. And if my fiancee’s out of town, or I’m in a motel room on a business trip, fine. And sometimes nothing can stop Donald from geeking out over the single most cross-browser and standards-compliant way to render PNG transparency But if anyone at WW is working more than, say, 45 hours a week or so on a regular basis, then we need to make changes, either shifting some work to someone else or looking to hire new people.
Maintaining headroom in our work process will enable all of us to achieve the trebly peaks of creativity and discovery that we need to keep our minds engaged, our work fresh, and our lives interesting.
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I love this. Particularly paragraph’s 6-11 (but thanks so much for the kind words). Newfangled struggles with this same thing. We have one project manager that was routinely putting in 50-60 hours a week. You’d think this was a good thing, but I actually gave her a bonus as incentive to figure out how to get her hours down to that <45 mark. In our business, the work is never done, there is always a little more to do. Making room for a life, even forcing a healthy lifestyle outside of the workplace is essential to cultivating expertise in house.
Our people are far more valuable than any client. If our people weren’t with us, we wouldn’t be able to serve our clients properly. If excessive work weeks are the norm, you (the general you, not WW) have a serious and unsustainable resourcing problem on your hands, and that can only lead to poor financial performance and bad service.
A great work environment with smart workers being led by smart people with reasonable productivity expectations leads to long term quality employees which foster long term quality clients and honest stability for the corporation.