Hill Work

Tags: programming career

I ran cross country for a couple of years in high school. Not well, but I did it. I’ve since learned that diet and consistent training outside of the season would have greatly improved my chances of success, but that’s water under the bridge.

Every Monday afternoon we’d warm up, jog past the school entrance, down Reinhardt Drive, and assemble at the corner of Howe and 52nd Place. For a group of kids that normally measured progress in one mile increments, we were in for a particularly rough work out measured not in miles, but in hills.

Hill work breaks down pretty neatly:

1. Sprint up the biggest hill available to you
2. Jog back down at an easy pace. Don’t run, don’t walk.
3. If not dead, go to 1

I exited that loop before dying, but we’ve already established that I wasn’t a fantastic team member.

There was a bit of good cop/bad cop dynamic going on with our coaches. The head coach would scowl his scowl of disapproval (your mom was right when she said your face can freeze that way) and occasionally yell that we needed to push up the hill hard. Coach Anderson was much more likely to tell us to take it easy on the way back down.

Why the emphasis on an easy jog back down the hill? Wasn’t this a work day? Sure, but we were pegging our ability to move oxygen through our body and convert it to energy, and the run up the hill is where we would get the most benefit. Better to really rest on the way down and go all out on the way up than to do both poorly.

Recent studies concerning interval and Tabata training claim that regular short sessions of intense work punctuated by even shorter rest periods are, minute for minute, far more effective at keeping us healthy and growing our capability for converting oxygen into work than equally regular long sessions of distance and endurance training.

I’ve long felt the same way about work. Work hard when you’re working, and rest when you’re not. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that a 12 hour day 5 days a week with “easy” 4 to 8 hour days on the weekend are doing you and your company a comparatively amazing amount of good. The burden of proof is certainly on you if you insist that hours equal productivity. Track how much time you’re really working, how many bugs you’re writing. I’d love a real time widget that would pop up when my typos per minute rose significantly above average, as that’s a pretty good indicator of fatigue for me.

The 40 hour work week came into fashion for a scientifically studied reason, and it wasn’t for your comfort.

Sprint

Work hard when you’re working.

I recently had a self imposed 12 hour work day spent developing some lab material for a workshop. I’d been making decent progress in fits and starts, but the workshop was coming up quick, so I applied caffeine liberally and cranked through a ton of work in short order. The work was good, and I felt fantastic about my progress. I had grand plans of an early bedtime so I’d be effective the next day.

A bit of misfortune changed those plans, and I ended up working through most of that next night. It was intense. It was focused. It was fruitful. It got a little stupid toward the end. Typos shot through the roof, as did hardcoding values, as did copy and paste coding. A younger me would have plowed through, bestowing upon the team a pile of code that would be trouble.

I was done. Caffeine had extracted my maximum sustained effort. I sprinted up the hill as long as I could, and it was time for a gentle descent.

Jog. Don’t Run, Don’t Walk

Work hard when you’re working. Rest when you’re not. Rest well, rest actively. Plowing through the better half of a bag of Reese Peanut Butter Cups and vegging out in front of Arrested Development is probably not the rest you deserve, even if it is the rest you want, and even if I’ve done this very thing and other things like it several times in my life.

Sleep well and make time for activities away from the keyboard to give your subconscious time to do what it does best: work on tricky problems without you. Solitary real world activities seem to work best for me: painting a room, plumbing, building stuff like desks and shelves, and even cooking. (It’s the eating of things cooked where I’m at risk of overdoing it…)

You’re probably different. Maybe it’ll be yoga, meditation, wrenching on cars, or practicing music. Find your non-programming activity that keeps your brain active while giving your programming muscles a rest.

I went home after my two day sprint, and I landed in bed for a long time. I didn’t play video games, and I didn’t surf reddit. I slept. It was gloriously comfortable, and I felt recharged when I woke up. After a day of cutting in paint around the house I was ready to get back into emacs and create.

Acknowledgments

I’m very happy to work in an organization that values effectiveness over hours clocked.
It’s almost like the lessons of Peopleware have made their way into the subconscious of managers so many years after its publication.

I’d also like to thank Dave Haygarth for posting his photos under a CC license. The photo I used in this post is available under the title Knowle Hill fell race.