The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology of Work Time
[COMPLETE ARTICLE READ IN FULL AT SOURCE, the copy at interruptions.net, and the publisher's abstract also read entire at the Crossref item record] Perlow, L. A. (1999). 'The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology of Work Time.' Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(1), 57 to 81. doi:10.2307/2667031. SOLE AUTHOR, confirmed at api.crossref.org, which gives her affiliation at the time as the UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, not Harvard, and records 717 citations. This is the study the whole prescriptive protected-time tradition rests on. THE PUBLISHED ABSTRACT'S OWN CLAIM: that altering how the software engineers used their time at work raised their collective productivity. NOW THE MEASURE BEHIND THAT SENTENCE. DESIGN: a nine-month field study of one software engineering team at a company she calls Ditto, on a product she calls PEARL, with an average of four days a week on site; having documented a vicious cycle of mutual interruption she ran a collaborative intervention in three phases, phase 1 quiet time three days a week until noon, phase 2 interaction time five days a week from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and phase 3 a repeat of phase 1 run deliberately to test whether phase 2's poorer reception was structural or novelty wearing off. THE OUTCOME MEASURE: at the end of each phase she collected questionnaire data from the 17 members of the software group, including self-ratings of their productivity during the phase compared with their productivity before the quiet-time study, and written comments on their reactions. AND THE OBJECTIVE DATA WAS ABANDONED: she reports that the engineers stopped keeping daily tracking logs as accurately as in the first three tracked days, and so does not report findings from the three later rounds of logs. THE NUMBERS: the share of engineers rating their own productivity above average, meaning 4 or 5 on a five-point scale, was 59 per cent in phase 1, 41 per cent in phase 2, 65 per cent in phase 3, and 47 per cent a month after phase 3 ended. THE ONE HARD OUTCOME: three months after phase 3 ended, the division vice president credited the quiet-time study with the on-time launch of PEARL, only the second on-time launch in the division's history, and said the deadline could not have been met without the project and that the launch set a new benchmark. That is an executive's attribution, uncontrolled, n equals one project. AND IT DID NOT LAST: when she returned to Ditto six months after the launch, nine months after phase 3 ended, she found the lasting effects of quiet time were minimal. A year later the next product had slipped and management tried to reimpose quiet time; one engineer said that quiet time alone does not work, that there was no incentive to abide by it, and that nobody did. The durable change was in managers, who stopped constant status checks, and that persisted at the two-year visit. HER OWN CALIBRATION, MORE HONEST THAN ITS DOWNSTREAM USE, SUMMARISED: she says the results do not show quiet time to be the ideal way of structuring work in that setting, and were not meant to, but that the short-term results indicate that altering the timing of work activities can improve collective outcomes; the longer-term results suggest such changes are not sustainable unless the vicious cycle itself is altered. THE NEAREST THING THE LITERATURE HAS TO EVIDENCE ON BLOCK SHAPE, AND IT IS A PREFERENCE RATHER THAN A PERFORMANCE MEASURE: engineers preferred phase 3 partly because quiet time came in one piece, one writing that phase 3 was better because it gave one continuous interval for critical design and development work, another that it did not break the day into awkward blocks. CORRECT ONE CIRCULATED ERROR: the claim that her quiet time produced a 65 per cent productivity increase is a misreading, because 65 per cent is the share of engineers who rated themselves above average in phase 3 and not a percentage gain, and one secondary source found in searching makes exactly this error and also misplaces her at Harvard rather than Michigan.
[COMPLETE ARTICLE READ IN FULL AT SOURCE, the copy at interruptions.net, and the publisher's abstract also read entire at the Crossref item record] Perlow, L. A. (1999). 'The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology of Work Time.' Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(1), 57 to 81. doi:10.2307/2667031. SOLE AUTHOR, confirmed at api.crossref.org, which gives her affiliation at the time as the UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, not Harvard, and records 717 citations. This is the study the whole prescriptive protected-time tradition rests on. THE PUBLISHED ABSTRACT'S OWN CLAIM: that altering how the software engineers used their time at work raised their collective productivity. NOW THE MEASURE BEHIND THAT SENTENCE. DESIGN: a nine-month field study of one software engineering team at a company she calls Ditto, on a product she calls PEARL, with an average of four days a week on site; having documented a vicious cycle of mutual interruption she ran a collaborative intervention in three phases, phase 1 quiet time three days a week until noon, phase 2 interaction time five days a week from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and phase 3 a repeat of phase 1 run deliberately to test whether phase 2's poorer reception was structural or novelty wearing off. THE OUTCOME MEASURE: at the end of each phase she collected questionnaire data from the 17 members of the software group, including self-ratings of their productivity during the phase compared with their productivity before the quiet-time study, and written comments on their reactions. AND THE OBJECTIVE DATA WAS ABANDONED: she reports that the engineers stopped keeping daily tracking logs as accurately as in the first three tracked days, and so does not report findings from the three later rounds of logs. THE NUMBERS: the share of engineers rating their own productivity above average, meaning 4 or 5 on a five-point scale, was 59 per cent in phase 1, 41 per cent in phase 2, 65 per cent in phase 3, and 47 per cent a month after phase 3 ended. THE ONE HARD OUTCOME: three months after phase 3 ended, the division vice president credited the quiet-time study with the on-time launch of PEARL, only the second on-time launch in the division's history, and said the deadline could not have been met without the project and that the launch set a new benchmark. That is an executive's attribution, uncontrolled, n equals one project. AND IT DID NOT LAST: when she returned to Ditto six months after the launch, nine months after phase 3 ended, she found the lasting effects of quiet time were minimal. A year later the next product had slipped and management tried to reimpose quiet time; one engineer said that quiet time alone does not work, that there was no incentive to abide by it, and that nobody did. The durable change was in managers, who stopped constant status checks, and that persisted at the two-year visit. HER OWN CALIBRATION, MORE HONEST THAN ITS DOWNSTREAM USE, SUMMARISED: she says the results do not show quiet time to be the ideal way of structuring work in that setting, and were not meant to, but that the short-term results indicate that altering the timing of work activities can improve collective outcomes; the longer-term results suggest such changes are not sustainable unless the vicious cycle itself is altered. THE NEAREST THING THE LITERATURE HAS TO EVIDENCE ON BLOCK SHAPE, AND IT IS A PREFERENCE RATHER THAN A PERFORMANCE MEASURE: engineers preferred phase 3 partly because quiet time came in one piece, one writing that phase 3 was better because it gave one continuous interval for critical design and development work, another that it did not break the day into awkward blocks. CORRECT ONE CIRCULATED ERROR: the claim that her quiet time produced a 65 per cent productivity increase is a misreading, because 65 per cent is the share of engineers who rated themselves above average in phase 3 and not a percentage gain, and one secondary source found in searching makes exactly this error and also misplaces her at Harvard rather than Michigan.
Written from the cOMPLETE ARTICLE READ IN FULL AT SOURCE, the copy at interruptions.net, and the publisher's abstract also read entire at the Crossref item record.
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Perlow, L. A. (1999). The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology of Work Time. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(1), 57-81. doi:10.2307/2667031