Vacate The Premises!

How much can you get done in a day? A week? What amount of output is "average" or "outstanding" or even "acceptable" today? How do you even quantify the work? Is there a quick and easy way to measure what you "got done" today? Finally, what can you do to increase your output, you know, without really increasing your effort?

An entire industry answers questions like this, today. You can go to any bookstore and choose from dozens of business, management and personal development titles, to say nothing of Dreamweaver, XHTML and database books. I'll just answer, as the old mapmakers used to say "Here Lies Danger." Be careful, because there is much advice out there, and not all of it is good.

Can you measure a Web designer's output by the number of pages they create? I'm not sure. I have built fairly elaborate pages and placed content in them that would require several minutes for most people to read, in only a few minutes of my time. And I have labored long and hard on pages where seemingly nothing changed for days, as I worked out database calls, string comparisons and output styling. Well, how about lines of output, then? Is there some number above which you are a "good" Web programmer, but below which you are in line for a job that requires you to wear a name tag or a paper hat? I don't know the answer to that one, either.

I once worked for a man who did measure output that way. A Web page was 325 lines on Tuesday, and 400 lines on Friday, so I had only accomplished 75 lines over three days, to him. That figure, of course, was net. It didn't account for two hundred lines I had actually written, then discarded as they led me down another blind alley. It also did not reflect efficiencies in using the language's tools to do more with fewer lines. I will admit I may have placed a carriage return here or there within the markup of a page, just to generate the necessary line count improvement. Hey, if more lines was all he needed, I felt I owed it to him, my wife and VISA to provide it for him.

It's easy to think that if you can do six units of something an hour, one every ten minutes, then you can increase your output by coming in five minutes early, staying late five minutes at lunch, coming back from lunch five minutes early and staying late another five minutes at the end of the day. There's another twenty minutes, and so there's another two units, right?

Not quite, because not every thing that can be counted, counts; and not every thing that counts can be counted. Life is a lot more fluid than multiplication and division.

At some point on your personal journey to maximum productivity, or even optimum productivity, you will burn out. You will reach a place where additional time given to a task actually reduces output. There is a measurable improvement in people's ability to concentrate and work, if they just get up and walk around for a while every couple of hours. Get up, go and get a drink, step outside and see what the weather is like and then return to your task. So say the efficiency experts.

There are dangers here, too, though. This is about the time I run into my Director or Coordinator. So in their experience Mark isn't always someone doing heroic work hand-crafting Web pages and hammering out usability errors and validation troubles… he's the guy in the hallway. So be careful when you take your little productivity hike.

And at intervals, it is good to get completely away. We Americans are awful about using vacation leave we accumulate every year as part of our compensation. That's like walking away and leaving money on the table—and it doesn't help us to either produce more, or to produce better.

With that in mind, I plan to take next week off, do a little travel and see some family. There's nothing wrong with me today that a little baby-drool on the shoulder won't fix.

Take it easy, huh?