You’ve surely heard people say how constraints are sometimes exactly what you need to jumpstart creativity or get more things done. I had a feeling this was indeed the case, but recently noticed how this profoundly influences my work and is part of the reason my business is successful.
Here are some of the ways this comes into play in my life.
Working less but getting more done
When I became a father, about a year ago, my partner and I started working only 7 hour a day, 2-3 days of the week (down from the “standard” in our industry of ~10 hour days). When we started this, we did it expecting and accepting that it means some tasks will take us longer to accomplish.
Surprisingly though, now that months have passed, we both feel that those days are usually our most productive days. Knowing that you have less time makes us actively be on the alert to time wasting. Less time browsing Facebook, more time actually working and staying in the flow.
Also, it means we favor getting shit done over talking all day long. If we see that a discussion is taking too long we just make a decision and roll with it, knowing that we can change course later if necessary. I can’t think of a time this push to just getting things done hurt us.
How we affect our clients
Our rates aren’t on the cheap side, especially as students of the Double Your Freelancing Rate lore. Turns out that our clients make better use of us because of the price.
Every developer implemented probably-useless features and wasted time getting rarely-used functionality to work. We noticed how this kind of prioritizing seemed to be happening less as our rate increased – a bit like having a rocket launcher in Unreal Tournament, you save the ammo for those bosses that are worth it. We do things that matter, and everyone around is happier for it.
Another side effect we noticed is that sometimes just our presence acts as sort of a catalyst for the whole organization, because everyone try to prepare better.
A few months ago we had scheduled a 2-day consulting gig with a company, about their plans for the upcoming months. In the time between scheduling the gig and the actual consulting days the team already did some hard thinking about their current problems and goals that we effectively had half of our job already cut out for us.
They later told us how those 2 days felt super productive, but we know a big part of that was their preparation work since they had a hard constraint – they only had 2 days of our time.
Of course we never intended for this to happen, but it’s quite amazing that sometimes a company will take its own tasks more seriously just because it’s spending more money on it.
A Code Retreat anecdote
This is an interesting micro-example of a constraint and how it helped developers in a specific task.
I facilitated a code retreat last week. During code retreats participants solve Conway’s Game of Life over and over again. That day, after 2 sessions were done, no one got to the point of actually solving the whole problem.
On the 3rd session, I added a new constraint – the world now had to be endless, an infinite grid. No one implemented it that way previously, and intuitively this should have made things harder – after all an infinite grid is more complex than a finite one. But, having this constraint made some of the pairs tackle the problem from a different angle and actually get way ahead of the previous sessions in the constrained, harder case.
As I’m writing this a few more cases come to mind, but I think you get the gist. Yeah, constraints can sometimes work against you (like absurd deadlines that turn a project into a death march) but when used wisely they can turn whole problems around.