Any of my staff from my days in Kansas City, reading this, will recall my first ever team meeting. I handed out a single page with about 10 bullet points on it. This represented my promise to them, the tenets by how I would manage the team. One of the bullets said, large scale software development is a marathon and not a sprint! I promised them that I would help the team achieve a sustainable pace and that we'd try to achieve a 40 hour working week for the team. At the time, I hadn't read Kent Beck's 1st edition of Extreme Programming Explained. My experience with the 40 hour week rule dated back to Singapore when Jeff De Luca and to a lesser extent Steve Palmer and I would tour the office about 6.15pm and ask individuals whether they were still working. If it was a "home job" (there own website or something similar) we'd let them stay, if it was project work, we'd strongly encourage them towards the door. In Singapore, the working week was/is 44 hours including 4 hours on a Saturday morning. But on week days, we tried hard to maintain a strict, 9am to 6pm with an hour for lunch, routine. We knew we had an 18 month project and we couldn't have people burning out. Sustainable pace focused around an 8 hour working day was the theme.

However, we had another related rule in Singapore. When Peter Coad arrived for his first month consulting with us in August 1997, he had us devise a set of norms - a set of rules by which we would adhere when working together collaboratively. I argued and insisted for the idea that we "respect our humanity" and "recognize that we get tired and need to stop." You can see it as the 7th bullet down on the original list from Singapore. My years in games development writing machine code and assembly language had taught me that when your tired you have to stop, go do something else to regain your strength, and then start again. It's too easy to type a "d" when you meant a "b" and then spend 3 days debugging the error. Work is a series of focused bursts of energy intersected by rests, meals, and generally goofing around, is the essential way to work when you are daily exposed the to the raw wilderness of nature that is "hitting the metal" in assembly language.

Anyone who has ever had a toddler understands this concept. Toddlers get tired several times a day. When they do so, they simply fall over. For a toddler walking is hard. It requires focused effort. As they get tired they toddle, toddle, toddle, stumble, stumble, recover, stumble, fall, thump! Then they pick themselves up and start again. The toddle to stumble rate falls and the frequency of falls increases. As they get increasingly tired they start to moan and cry. Until they reach a point where standing up is too much effort and they resort to crawling. They need a nap. So once delivered to the crib by a thankful parent, they fall off to sleep for 90 minutes or so. For a toddler, life is a set of small bursts of energy interspersed with naps.

All of this I knew, but I articulated it as "marathon not a sprint" and "40 hour week." So imagine how I was taken aback when I read The Power of Full Engagement by Loehr and Schwarz and saw that "life is a marathon" is old paradigm whilst "life is a series of short sprints" is _the_ in thing. And that you should "manage your energy not your time". This stopped me in my tracks as I thought back to that first team meeting in Kansas City - and much of what I've taught, coached and done since. The 40 hour week and sustainable pace seemed like the answer to all sorts of issues, and now here are two well respected psychologists telling me that it doesn't matter. What is really important is managing energy throughout the day.

So what did happen to the 40 hour week? Readers of Kent Beck's 2nd edition of Extreme Programming Explained will have realized that Kent dropped the use of the 40 Hour Week, and its more recent softer synonym, Sustainable Pace. Neither of them are to be found in the text of the second edition. It turns out that Kent has opted for a manage your energy solution and he describes it in the book very similarly to the way Loehr and Schwarz do. So I wrote to Kent to ask about it. Turns out that Kent's manage your energy came as a suggestion from his wife and co-author Cynthia. Kent hadn't read The Power of Full Engagement. But there it is, Kent is swinging with the new paradigm thinking in personal performance.

So, where does that leave me? I had to think about this for a while. Did I have to change my approach? It took me a week or two to think it all through, to think back to my teenage days hacking assembly code in the attic of my parent's home, to my more recent days in Singapore, Kansas City and Seattle. Thinking about it deeply, reminded me that managing my energy was something I took for granted and I'd had the presence of mind to make it explicit in Singapore. Meanwhile, what to do about the 40 hour week? Does it no longer matter? Well perhaps not, but I believe it will seem that it does continue to matter! Why?

Loehr and Schwarz also consider "rituals" as new paradigm whilst "self-discipline" is old paradigm. Hence, a ritual such as a morning standup meeting held at a set time every day is good for you. It's good for your health, your stress and your energy level - forget all that other useful stuff like synching the team, peer pressure, morale, communication, raising issues and so forth. At a more fundamental level, the ritual of the team meeting every morning is good for you. The self-discipline to manage your own time as you see fit every day, with no two days the same, is in fact bad for you (in all sorts of ways.) So, the ritual of starting and ending your day at relatively fixed times and building a life outside work - in Singapore I biked with my club Monday and Wednesday evening from 6.30pm, on Tuesdays and Thursdays I left the office and went to the gym, returning at 8pm for dinner with my then girlfriend (now wife). On Fridays it was boys night out. There was no way my life rituals would allow me to stay at work after 6pm.

Loehr and Schwarz argue that rituals are better. The 8 hour day is a ritual. Hence, the 40 hour week still makes sense but not as marathon rather than sprint, but as ritual rather than self-discipline.