Time Management: Part 5. Automation

It's the series of articles that won't die!  I thought it was going to be a trilogy when I started.  This must be what happened to Frank Herbert.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

There's two ways to diet - you can A) write everything down or B) do "the Jared diet" - eat pretty much the same thing every day.  Or you can do a mixture - write everything down at first and then automate.

It's the same with time management.  You can track your time each day, or you can have a daily regimen - get up X, exercise until Y, go to work at Z, check your e-mail, do a morning meeting from A to B, code from B to C, lunch, more e-mail, manage by walking around from E to F, more coding, home, dinner, practice guitar, whatever.  And the hassle of writing things down is eliminated.

Regular business hours are pretty rare in the games industry.  We come in whenever, immediately turn around and go to lunch (at Treyarch we called this "the bounce"), work until 9 or 10 PM (sometimes with catered pizza), and then play network games until our wives make us come home.  For example.

But two of Activision's best studios -- Infinity Ward and Neversoft -- do have "regular busines hours".  10 AM to 7 PM with an hour for lunch.  Regular for the games industry, anyway.  It does take some vigilance, I'm told - people start coming in later and later, and then the e-mails and reminders go out, "Hey, people, we work from 10 to 7 here."  Infinity Ward has even managed to avoid the mandatory crunch at the end with both Call of Duty 1 and 2.

Ideally, it wouldn't come from upstairs.  A policy like that can get you to your desk but it can't make you productive.  And I imagine there's a lot of talent out there that doesn't fit with the IW culture, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we definitely had a few superstars at Treyarch that worked all hours of the night and then were nowhere to be found during the day.  In the perfect world, everyone in your studio would manage their own time effectively, whether they were perfectly synchronized with everyone else or not.  But maybe the IW / Neversoft way is a good, realistic alternative? 

Comments

[davidicus]

i'm a firm believer in flexible, not wide open, hours. a lot of communication needs to be synchronous to be effective, so core hours are a good thing; but, requiring all humans to wake up and get hungry etc. the same as the boss is too restrictive. there is an element of responsibility to your colleagues, too. how many man-hours are wasted when meeting appointments are +/- up to an hour?

group of humans: organic. business: mechanical. there needs to be balance.

[foobar33]

Infinity Ward and Neversoft are also two of the only Activision studios near affordable housing, so people don't have to fight against a brutal commute in order to get in on time.

[Dimiter "malkia" Stanev]

Jamie,

In the interview you are saying that the best game Treyarch ever did was Spider-man 2.

In fact it was NHL 2K3, and even NHL 2K2 beats Spider-man 2 in the game rankings score.

Kudos to the little frenchie-canadian that was behind the AI of that game, and to all other folks aswell on the team.

[Paul Senzee]

I've often wondered if it's even possible to have normal hours in the game industry. If Infinity Ward and Neversoft are able to pull it off and still make phenomenal games we need to figure out how they are doing it and how they avoid slipping back into 'the crunch'. There -must- be more to it than simply declaring 'we -only- work from 10 to 7'..