And fix twelve while we’re at it too!

Exactly! I spent an entire night playing a football game over and over in my head that didn’t happen and wasn’t important to the team. But John Elway just could not throw for a first down to save his life…

Good choice, a favorite of mine as well. In the middle of the night when I’m supposed to be sleeping with a theme that often makes no sense in reality but I’m bought in 100% anyway until my alarm goes off.

Just do it in one 20 hour sitting with hyper focus. Ignore eating, bathroom breaks, and all.

Am ADHD and have done this…

😂

The phrase applies to negative results not positive ones because the rest of the phrase is it’s not the people it’s the system which implies a problem not a good result. Going through all the details of the system is more than I’m willing to type. If you’d like to know more these are a few of my favorite resources.

Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

Beyond Command and Control by John Seddon

First Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham

The Effective Manager by Mark Horstman

Dare to Lead by Brene Brown

The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker

You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

I sort of do that and have most of my career with my people. If I’m aware they’ve put in a bunch of hours I’ll ask them to take time off on me. I’m sure I’m not always aware and I know it’s against company policy but I’ve never been busted for it. But I don’t make it an official policy just to stay on the safe side of company policy. I’m sure if someone found out and complained I’d not be able to do it anymore.

Culture for most people begins and ends at their boss. And if they don’t feel empowered it’s often because of their boss and the culture their boss creates.

This topic like most are more nuanced than this, sometimes it’s that person’s own history and issues and not the bosses, like maybe past locations are childhood and so on. But this things aren’t really something a boss can do anything about. The boss is responsible for creating a healthy environment that encourages healthy boundaries and the measurement is that they are getting the results from the majority of the people the majority of the time.

You’re right, for sure.

I think this is a great point. One thing I haven’t mentioned is I’m clear with my folks if it only takes 20 hours to get the job done they can do whatever they want with the rest of the time, they’re exempt afterall. I’ve only had one person fully take me up on it and he was referred to as 7’ Jesus. To be clear he was 6’6” but I guess rounding was fine. And he only worked about 25 hours a week for me but killed it with what I needed and was happy.

Most people work about what I do but they know they can take time for themselves wherever and regularly do.

One person has a new born and doing half Fridays for the foreseeable future which I think is great. I encouraged more but that’s all she wants.

It’s a swing, see, 30 - 55. In 2023 I averaged 46 hours a week with a low of 30 hours and a high of 57 hours. That’s excluding the 5 partial weeks due to PTO and the full weeks off due to PTO and holiday weeks. I feel this for me is a healthy amount.

Lol you’re welcome, and thank you…?

Here is the one that got me started on it, I’m particularly happy with it. Do you know the movie? I may or may not judge you if you get it wrong 😂

I’m not sure why you got a down vote for saying someone should help change the whole system but here is an up vote to help fix it.

And bottom line that won’t work. It won’t because American organizations are dictatorships and dictatorships always end up that way. I do what I can to fight it but I know my efforts have limited impact outside of my departments.

For some “light” reading, try The Doctors Handbook and Cultish. Both amazing books that do a great job outlining why the systems work the way they do and changing the system is what’s needed to change the default output.

Germany to an extent and some Nordic countries do a good job of this on paper. I can’t say I’ve read enough to speak intelligently about their solutions though.

This is pretty close. It’s hard to get exacts but I’m happy with it!

In a broken or toxic system, yup that very much could be it.

If the majority of the people the majority of the time have the same result then it’s the system not the people.

So yeah it could be a systemic issue, it’s my job to prevent or correct that.

Once the hiring freeze is over we should have two positions in one of my departments open. Both requiring heavy automation, AI, analytics skills.

Mostly irregularity of what needs to happen. Some weeks everything you can imagine needs to happen now, other weeks not much needs to happen. I’ve learned not to shove my slow weeks with irrelevant busy work so I can ebb and flow with the work.

Last week with this SaaS implementation I was so busy I couldn’t see straight. Right now I’m chilling on Lemmy and thinking about what other famous movie scenes I can enhance with Muppets lol.

Agreed! Luckily they’re fairly easy to replace as long as you don’t build systems that won’t allow them to fail.

A decade or more before COVID my favorite tool was to let everyone work from home. Those that sucked at their job wouldn’t get anything done. HR would just ask we bring them all in and I’d refuse. If they can’t be trusted to work without supervision they can’t be trusted to work with it.

Now keep in mind we have to be reasonable people and not driving our people beyond reasonableness.

Here’s my view as an executive, if my folks regularly add hours to their day/week to get their job done they’re not good at their job. If they’re good at their job they know how to prioritize and they also know how to optimize and automate constantly so they can do more with less. They also do their form of zero base reporting or zero base budgeting constantly to get rid of what was once important that no longer is.

To be fair in senior leadership a 40 hour week probably isn’t going to happen but you should swing between 55 hours and 30 hours depending on the week and average it to the mid to high 40s.

I suspect this isn’t going to be a popular post, and I accept your down votes but would also like to hear your contrary view along with it if you don’t mind.