In the first Results-Only Work Environment training sessions, we used to do what we called the Calendar Exercise. In the exercise, we asked people to go up to a calendar we had posted on the wall, and mark down what days they would like to work at the Best Buy campus (green), what days they would like to work off-campus (yellow), and what days they would rather not work (red).

What was cool about the exercise was that there was never a day when people on the team weren’t working. You might think that the majority of people would want the whole weekend off, but in fact there were a number of yellow, and even green, dots on Saturdays and Sundays. There ended up being a lot of red (not working) dots on the weekends, but they were distributed throughout the rest of the week more evenly than you might imagine.

This was one of the factors that helped reassure management about ROWE. They were encouraged to see that people genuinely wanted to contribute (no one went up to the calendar and covered it with red dots). They also noticed that there was never a time when someone wasn’t working. Leaders could see that in an “always on” economy, there could be a huge benefit to having their employees’ efforts spread out across the entire week.

By the time you get to our most recent migration, however, the calendar exercise has long since disappeared. This spring, when we helped transform J.A. Counter & Associates, Inc. from a traditional work environment into a ROWE, we still talked to people about taking control of their time. We still emphasized the importance of doing whatever you want, whenever you want, as long as the work gets done. But we didn’t teach that principle in terms of the calendar.  What changed?

What happened was that one day, one Best Buy employee challenged the nature of the exercise. He stood up and said, “I want to put a green dot on a Wednesday, and a yellow dot, and a red dot.” He explained that he could see how in a ROWE, every day would be slightly different. If he were truly allowed to put results first, then he might decide one hour to the next where he would be and what he would be doing.

His insight was one of the huge turning points in the history of ROWE. From that point forward, we realized that the true power of ROWE was giving people complete freedom to design their day. As long as the work got done, they were free to make decisions about their work and their lives on a day-to-day, hour-by-hour, even minute-to-minute basis.

So here’s our challenge to you: working under the assumption that the logistics have all been worked out, and setting aside whatever overall reservations you have about the feasibility of ROWE, how would you design your day? If you had complete control over your time, what might your day look like? When would it begin? When would you work? Where would you work? What else would you like to accomplish? What might you not have time for now that you would build into your life?

Post your day in the comments, and please, no pooping on other people’s dream day. In a ROWE, we don’t judge people for how they decide to use their time.

We said we [hearted] them before. And we still do. We especially [heart] this post: Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor.

As they note:

“Software development is rarely a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s multiple marathons, actually. So trying to extract 110% performance from today when it means having only 70% performance available tomorrow is a bad deal. You end up with just 77% of your available peak. What a bad trade.”

You could substitute “business” for “software development” and that statement still holds true. It’s just common sense. Enough sleep = better performance. Ask any tired, overworked individual at any company and they’ll tell you if they got a little more sleep, they would be a lot more effective.

So why doesn’t common sense prevail? The problem is that one person’s common sense doesn’t stand a chance against the culture of a workplace. When managers reward employees for showing “dedication” by coming in early and working late, then the company will make those bad trades that the 37Signals blog talks about. As long as your work culture honors people putting in hours rather than people driving results, then sleep deprivation will always be a badge of honor.
We are reminded of a line from Men in Black (quote is courtesy the Internet Movie Database) when Will Smith’s character asks Tommy Lee Jones’ character why the truth about aliens living among us must be kept from the general public.

Will Smith: “Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.”
Tommy Lee Jones: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

Oh, Canada! What are you doing? We turn to you for cheap prescription drugs and commonsense and then you do this.

Silencing people’s “CrackBerries” will not create work-life balance. Even a well-meaning rule, like a BlackBerry blackout from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. and on weekends and holidays, is still a rule. And it’s the rules of the workplace (7:59 am is “early” while 8:01 is “late”) that are killing us.

This policy also makes a fatal assumption about work: that work happens at a specific place (the office) or when doing certain activities (using your WhateverBerry). Instead, we’d like people to start thinking about work in terms of what it really is: a state of mind.

If you’re sitting on a beach and you’re working through a problem you’re having on a project, then you’re working. On the other hand if you’re in your cube zoning out and wondering about who’s your favorite American Gladiator, then you’re not working.

In a Results-Only Work Environment, we don’t make any assumptions about what work looks like. As long as people get results, they can work in a cube or they can work on the beach. They get to define what balance means to them. They achieve that balance because they have the power to do so.