The Fallacy of a 6 Day Week

TL;DR: A 6 day week mentality permeates some founder / start-up mindsets. Working an extra day is not going to give you productivity and will play a slow and steady hand in burning out your team. Instead, strive for work:life balance and gain productivity through better planning and actually taking your foot off the gas.  

Parkinson’s Law : Work expands to fill the time available

The 6th Day

If you’ve never heard about this law before, well, now you have. Lately I’ve had the chance to see more Indian startups closely and interact with different types of entrepreneurs in India. One of the more worrying conversations has been around working Saturdays.  

Here is the essence of that pitch:  We’re a startup, there is so much to do and everyone needs to be delivering at 200%. There is a lot to deliver and we’re a small team, we need to work Saturdays as well. 

Now, I’ve been lucky, In my 19 years of working and counting, I’ve very briefly had to work Saturdays because it was mandated. That too was in the course of working to get that policy reversed. Even briefly, it sucked.  

Henry Ford figured this out in 1926 [read this] (albeit in a bid to drive consumption) and I am not convinced that there is a good reason to force people to work a 6 day week. It smacks of exploitation, almost! This piece does a great job about telling you why you’ll flame out and be prone to all sorts of drama in your life if you stick with a 6 day week.

Productivity is not a function of the number of hours you spend at work! It’s what you do when you work and the level of focus you bring to your work-day.  

The Treadmill

I was meeting with a founder recently and he was reading a book about Google. I was explaining to him how his 6 day work policy should be abolished. I asked him if Google mandated working a 6 day week? If you’re willing to copy other aspects of companies in the (silicon) valley, then why not this one?

In my career I’ve worked with and in several teams and we’ve pulled all nighters / weekends and non-stop work. There was a period that I can recall where we used to go home every other day and only just to freshen up and then get right back to work. Even now, if the work demands it, if the prize is worth it, I’ll do it. However, it cannot be routine. That’s just a recipe for burn-out. Also, nobody ever forced us to put in those hours, we did it because we wanted to. Huge difference. 

A startup means fewer resources and plenty of things to do. Everyone pools in and does whatever needs to get done. This is a great period and people will generate many war stories to regale over drinks, however, this chaos cannot continue as the norm. People confuse this state of execution as “startup-culture”. Over time, this sort of execution simply is a result of failing to plan.

At some point you need to bring sanity to ALL the stuff that needs to get done and prioritize , plan / estimate and execute. If you don’t have a plan you’re going to be working really hard and not really getting anywhere because you’ll constantly be reacting and do just enough to douse all the fires, which is never the best work that you can do - you know this. You’re constantly tired and you’re constantly stretched. 

Your entire team is on a treadmill, you ain’t going anywhere. 

Fall Out

It’s said that that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. Please don’t find out the hard way that working Saturdays means - strained personal lives / added stress / plummeting creativity and a general feeling of entrapment. Over time you’re going to burn out your team that was too afraid to speak up about a 5 day week. Good talent will leave and the best talent will stay away. I’ve seen this and I’ve had to deal with the fall-out of this first hand. Feel free to re-discover at your own peril. 

Working an additional day gives you just more hours in your work week - so you think. This is classical thinking (person weeks) that assumes that people are machines that “work” 8 hours a day x number of days, so, your project neatly fits into whatever arithmetic this robot formula is giving you. People are people, real living breathing people. Treat them like people and not robots.

A typical work day in India is filled with distractions. Teams start their days almost at lunch time, because they were working super late the night before, which happened because they started work late and then it was lunch, then it was time for snacks and what-not. Indians are super social, which is great, but it means your work day and your team is *not* going to be working a constant number of hours. This is just a vicious cycle. Adding another day to this cycle is NOT the answer. 

Keep Calm and Plan

Instead, focus your team. Mandate core working hours, get your team to available to each other during the same time window so that they can collaborate. That rock star engineer who insists on working from 5pm to 5am is not doing your team any favors. Plan maniacally and be realistic about what your team can achieve. Measure what their output is and then set about tuning them upwards. If you’re finding that they’re burning out, step off the gas and let them recoup. Then push again. If people are working late, treat that as a smell (ala Code Smells). Working late by choice is cool, it’s the employee’s call, but having to work late constantly is not cool, that's a planning fail.

Projects will always be late, this is a fact I’ve learnt in my time in the trenches. This is because we suck at estimation and we cannot predict the future for surprises. However, execution in the absence of any planning is just plain suicide. Rather than add another day in some mis-placed attempt at making person-day arithmetic work, work on your planning, tracking and execution. 

Giving your team the room to recharge also means that when you do need to make that push, nobody is exhausted from constantly doing the 6 day death march. Infact, consider giving your team an alternate day off if you do make them work Saturdays. If you respect your team’s need to have work:life balance, they will happily go the extra mile for you, without asking.

I always make it a point to check on my team if I spot them working late, to figure out what the deal is - because it’s an indicator how we’re all doing as a group. Most times, people are just plugged in and enjoying their coding. Enjoying being the operative word here. 

Decelerate

There is plenty of literature that abounds which says that when you join a startup you need to abandon your personal life and work all the time and basically disappear off the face of the earth. Sure, some days / weeks will be like that. However, it cannot be a constant feature. Some people are driven and have a single minded focus. If that’s your deal, go for it. However, don’t assume that everyone should be like that or work like that all the time purely because they joined a startup. 

Startup culture should be about innovation. Innovation requires creativity and time. Fighting fires is NOT the way to allow your team to create magic and it’s not startup culture in my opinion. 

An engineer who used to work for me had a job offer recently from a well known Indian startup, he wasn’t going to join it. I asked him why - he said - in the interview they said you *must* work 12 hours a day. Now, this was an awesome engineer, who often worked like crazy even when I used to ask him to slow down - his call - and still that draconian policing attitude was a total turn-off for him. This is not the only tale that ends like this.

Treat your team like adults. Police culture does not work. 

Founders and leaders need to take a hard look at their execution before forcing a 6 day regimen, it’s a ticking time-bomb that will erode employee trust and productivity. Rather, focus on getting your game up on execution and get your team to be that finely sharpened blade that they have the talent to be. 

Breathe.