Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably
another hour after lunch too… I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen
minutes of real, actual, work. – Peter Gibbons, “Office Space”

I had an interesting conversation with Mike the other day about billable
hours. Lawyers at his firm bill in increments of
0.1 hours. That forces him to be highly conscious of his time.

So I thought it would be interesting to try recording what I did in a day at work. Just as
an experiment.

The results were less than inspiring. Once I subtracted lunch, websurfing, non-work related
emails, walks around the building, and office chit-chat, I discovered that I had worked for
a whopping 4.2 hours. Now I’d had a vague feeling for a while that I haven’t been working
too hard lately, but to see it in such a cold, quantitative form was very unsettling.

My Tuesday night poker buddies put this into perspective. Justin is a UI team manager for
Ebay. “You know, Evan,” Justin said, “when I was a consultant, I worked about fifteen
minutes a day. I just worked at home, swam in the pool, and answered a few emails. For
about a year. But now that I’m a manager… I have no time for chit-chat. I do at least
12 hours of real work a day. No goofing off at all.”

Aha! So the lesson here is, don’t goof off too much, or they just might turn you into a
manager, and God help you then.

So I shall endeavor to do better. In the meantime, let me leave you with this error
message that I received today from Sun’s internal bug tracking tool (edited slightly
to remove uninformative numbers and process IDs):

SQL Server error: Your server command was deadlocked with another
process and has been chosen as deadlock victim. Re-run your command.

“Deadlock victim”. I love it. As far as I can tell, this means: I submitted
a command. Some chump elsewhere in the company submitted a command at about
the same time. And the other guy’s process totally kicked my process’s ass.
That if nothing else tells me that I need to shape up, and fast.