You’ve probably followed my journal about summer camp (if not - here it is) and noticed that there were not much about work, but more about fun. That was the idea of a journal - to find something special in every day. I bet it wouldn’t had so many visitors if I were pointing out only work part.
Imagine how it would look like: day 1 - we were coding, day 2- still we were coding, day 3 - we were coding again and so on. Not so engaging as croissants, wine tasting tour or basketball championship (by the way - hurray!! We won silver!).
So this post is mostly about what left behind my journal.
On the last day of summer camp we made a review and retrospectives of what we’ve done during these sunny days. It was a nice thing to find out that during those 8 working days we’ve manage to accomplish twice as much work as we usually do in Vilnius in 8 days. But this was not a surprise, because guys were coding all the time except those moments that were described in journal. Literally, they were coding in a train to airport, in airport, on a plane, during basketball match, after the dinner and so on. But not only this made our performance better I think. There are a couple of possible reasons.
You’ll get more done, one task at a time, than you could have even imagined when you were “multitasking”
It’s a quote from Jason Fitzpatrick blog post: “A Case for Singletasking: The One-Task-At-a-Time Method”. Exactly the same focus we reached off-site: we had no meetings, minimum interactions with other teams and colleagues, no switching between projects. For 5 days (out of 8 working days) we were concentrated on one feature only. This I think influenced our performance a lot.
I firmly believe that people should strive to integrate work and life
A quote by Jurgen Appelo from a blog post: “Work-Life Integration and Work-Play Balance”, where he writes about taking next step out of work-life balance to work-life integration. Working and living in a villa all together was I think the best work-life integration possible. Our lifestyle there was similar to freelancers. And with freelancers I thinks it’s the matter of motivation: if you are interested (this was true in our case) - you work all your possible time.
Most were interested how would it go with spouses around, would we be able to concentrate for work enough. I think we got lucky with our spouses :) - we were working all together but each his/her own job: one was writing her master thesis, one was busy with a child, others were just doing their everyday jobs remotely.
Now I can say this was a successful experiment. We did twice more work as usual, people are happy, we enjoyed sun, we visited beautiful places - what not to like about it? Moreover, we became more connected as a team, now we have our own stories we share. Though it took lots of energy and money to organize, I am sure - I’ll try it once again: maybe next year, same team, different scenery, better internet connection.