It will come as no surprise to those who know me, that I am a physically active person. Which, combined with some phrases that come up every now and then in terms of managing how hard I work, can lead to some fairly interesting places. Join me, as I ramble through a rather extended metaphor, aided with some statistics, and hopefully draw a conclusion about whether we should be aiming for consistency or bursts of productivity in our day to day.
Stats and Exercise
Technology makes measuring exercise really easy. Which gives me a nice way to introduce my two modes of operation. My two sports are road running, and field hockey. Both of these require a lot of running (surprise?). I track them as separate types of activities because I can, and because I get slightly different data, helping me achieve different goals. In both running and hockey there is a baseline of fitness and endurance required for success. If I can’t keep going for the length of the race, or the duration of the match, I need to build more fitness. Having reached that baseline, the training becomes very different.
Road running is more about endurance than about speed. If you want to run a very fast 5km then you will work on speed, and you will train speed from time to time for longer distances as well. More importantly you will simply spend long periods of time running. It is a great time to catch up on a podcast. Hockey is all about bursts of speed, and explosive movements. The furthest you can possibly sprint in a straight line is the length of the field, which doesn’t quite break the 100m mark. Most of the time you sprint 5, 10, 15, or 20 metres with a sharp stop or turn at the end. I have never wanted to listen to a podcast on the field.
So, where do the stats come in? Well, this is the difference between the two types of workout. One long and consistent, the other long and bursty. At my level of fitness, if I do a long training run at a relatively easy pace I can do a little over 8km in a little under 60 minutes. Or if I am pushing myself in a race, I can do 10km in just under 60 minutes. The training run is something I will do on a Saturday morning, and the only impact it should have on my day is the time it takes to run. The race will leave me more tired, but still pretty functional. By comparison, in a 90 minute training session for hockey I will run between 4 and 5km, and expect to still be fairly functional, or in a match, I can clock up to 8km over about two hours. After which I am slightly more beat up than after the 10km race.
Now you have the context. When I tell you that sprinting a marathon is a bad idea, you might understand what I’m getting at. Marathon runners carefully maintain their pace (plus a bunch of other things) so that they can reach their desired goal. The pros may seem like they’re sprinting compared to us, but they are going to maintain that pace for an order of hours. A serious sprinter holds their pace for order of seconds. The muscle groups used are different, and the shape of the strain on the body is different. Trying to sprint a marathon is going to end in serious injury, in the best case.
Working Smarter
A feature of the tech space, is that it moves fast. There can be one breakthrough, and everything you thought you knew is starting to shift and change. Look at the way machine learning took off. Look at GenAI and what it has done to the industry. We have phrases that get used like “move fast and break things”. In the agile world, we go so far as to call work cycles “sprints”.
I posit that your career is not a sprint, it is a marathon.
What does that mean? It means that if you try and keep going at a breakneck pace, you might just get hurt. It means that burning the candle at both ends just to meet some arbitrary deadline is not sustainable. You have to choose. Are you running a marathon, or are you playing in a hockey match? Because, at the end of the day, you need to be training, hydrating, eating, and planning, for the right sport. You might even switch it up, have a period of your life where the goal is consistency. Have another period of exciting new things with short periods of furious work and periods of time off in between to recharge.
What is dangerous to our health is when we try and do all the things all at once. It is easy to fall into that trap, helping the team get things over the line. Hyper-focus on the project leading to long hours. Feeling great while the caffeine is in the system, and then trying to maintain coherency after the crash. Not only do we fail to look after our health, we stop meeting our stated goals. If I didn’t pause on the hockey field to breathe, and I never went off the field to catch my breath (hockey allows rolling substitutions, unlike football), I would perform far worse than I do. Sprinting can gain you a lot of ground in a short period of time, but it comes at the cost of needing a break before you can go again.
The slower pace of a long distance runner might feel antithetical to the fast moving world of software. Job postings so often ask for “a person who thrives in a fast paced environment”. The thing is, if you can be consistent in meeting goals. If you are achieving what you say you will achieve each week. If you can keep doing that for multiple years in a row. You are going to build trust in your abilities. You may still have to turn a corner – most long distance routes are winding, and have hills in them (urgh). You don’t have to make the same ankle-breaking fast turns that are made on the hockey field. This doesn’t say you will never need to take time off, distance runners cut back on their training before a race. They take rest days. Rest is part of that consistency. It is just easier to plan for, and account for.
Coming back to the “fast paced environment” quote. That’s actually a red-flag for me in a job posting. All technology is fast paced. If you think you need to call it out because you’re going faster than the rest, then I’m sorry but this is a toddler running down a hill. You’re going to trip over your own feet, go head over heels, and be in tears when you hit the bottom. You’re asking people to run at the pace of hockey player without the space needed to recover from the sprints.
Owning the boundaries
I’m not poking holes in any one specific way of working here. I know that different goals require different approaches. What I’m saying, is that you should use the healthy approach for the goals you have set. If you value (or only function with) bursts of fast paced productivity, then go with that. But remember in the long term it is slower than the consistent pace, because you have to fully recover. If you’re aiming for long term growth and stability, slow down. Take control of the pace you’re working at and make sure it is sustainable.
And while you’re at it, add a bit of something new to the mix to account for cross training and conditioning. Else your knees might just give out before you complete a season in either sport, and you’ll find yourself in pain, unable to complete anything.
Pippa Hillebrand 