Timestamps and productivity

A few years back with the company that my current employer acquired there was this big death march development project. The project was crucial to all the good things that happened later and everyone was on board with it.

I was arriving for work at a crazy early time and working steadily through the day, leaving around regular end of day time.

There was this other guy I noticed who arrived shortly before 8 each morning. He'd still be there when I left. I noticed that he'd be sending out e-mails and doing check ins around 8:30 in the evening. I thought at the time, man that guy is putting in long hours, a solid 12+ hours a day.

A few months later in the lunch room we happened to get talking about that project. I mentioned about the long hours he'd worked on it. His reply surprised me. He said that he'd just been working around 7:45 AM to a bit after 5 PM each day. Then he'd log in remotely at night from around 8:30 PM to 9 PM. It was while logged in remotely that he'd continue with what he'd been doing during the day. Hence the evening e-mails and check ins. To me not realizing about remote desktop it seemed that he'd been working longer hours than what he did.

Remote desktop is nice. It's great when you have family commitments and such. You can get home at the usual time and when necessary log in from like 8 PM and work several hours from home if necessary, while not being disruptive to family responsibilities.

My company is good in that we care about the amount and quality of work that people do, not the hours worked. Some companies unfortunately are preoccupied with hours worked, although this has limited correlation to quality and productivity. There's stories over on Joel on Software about people staying a couple of hours late in the evening to work on something, then going home and waking up 3 AM to dash off a quick 'done' e-mail and getting all this credit for pulling an all nighter because some PHB was obsessed with e-mail timestamps.

Still, it's important to get credit for all the work that you do. So if you're topping up your regular work day by logging in remotely then it's good to send out an e-mail in the evening or do a check in. It makes you look good and draws attention to the extra work you do. Also it's not a bad habit to invest 10-15 minutes in the evenings to log in remotely and check your late day e-mail that might have come in after you left. It will make you look good if you can reply before the next morning.