Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

A task-accounting scheme that records flow hours instead of body-present hours can give you two huge benefits: First, it focuses your people’s attention on the importance of flow time. If they learn that each workday is expected to afford them at least two or three hours free from interruption, they will take steps to protect those hours. The resul

“Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them.”

A dozen other interruptions and the rest of the workday is gone. This is what guarantees, “You never get anything done around here between 9 and 5.”

Once locked in, the state can be broken by an interruption that is focused on you

“Overtime is a fact of life.” This implies that the work can never get done in the amount of time worth allocating for it.

Many of the everyday tasks performed by professional workers are done in the serial processing center of the left brain. Music will not interfere particularly with this work, since it’s the brain’s holistic right side that digests music. But not all of the work is centered in the left brain. There is that occasional breakthrough that makes you say

People in the roles studied needed the space and quiet in order to perform optimally. Cost reduction to provide work space below the minimum would result in a loss of effectiveness that would more than offset the cost savings.

Managers jeopardize product quality by setting unreachable deadlines. They don’t think about their action in such terms; they think rather that what they’re doing is throwing down an interesting challenge to their workers, something to help them strive for excellence. Experienced (jaded) workers know otherwise. They know that under the gun, their e

The uniqueness of every worker is a continued annoyance to the manager who has blindly adopted a management style from the production world. The natural people manager, on the other hand, realizes that uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and effective. It’s something to be cultivated.