Improving productivity - two tales

These two links caught my eye as I agree with them a lot. I find that increasing the hours that you work on something (crunch time) also increases your error rate and it would be much better to quit work and come in the next morning with the benefit of a good nights rest and a decent breakfast. I used to work for MSFT doing hardware and lab management and I would see programming teams doing crunch time and always cringed knowing that their bug rate would just go up and up and up. Not the way to deliver a quality product people (as the recent Vista release goes to show)... #1 -- from the International Game Developers Association:

Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons
There's a bottom-line reason most industries gave up crunch mode over 75 years ago: It's the single most expensive way there is to get the work done.

One excerpt:

The History
In 1908 -� almost a century ago � industrial efficiency pioneer Ernst Abbe published in Gessamelte Abhandlungen his conclusions that a reduction in daily work hours from nine to eight resulted in an increase in total daily output. (Nor was he the first to notice this. William Mather had adopted an eight-hour day at the Salford Iron Works in 1893.)

In 1909, Sidney J. Chapman published Hours of Labour, in which he described long-term variation in worker productivity as a function of hours worked per day. His conclusions will be discussed in some detail below.

When Henry Ford famously adopted a 40-hour workweek in 1926, he was bitterly criticized by members of the National Association of Manufacturers. But his experiments, which he'd been conducting for at least 12 years, showed him clearly that cutting the workday from ten hours to eight hours � and the workweek from six days to five days � increased total worker output and reduced production cost. Ford spoke glowingly of the social benefits of a shorter workweek, couched firmly in terms of how increased time for consumption was good for everyone. But the core of his argument was that reduced shift length meant more output.

I have found many studies, conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military, that support the basic notion that, for most people, eight hours a day, five days per week, is the best sustainable long-term balance point between output and exhaustion. Throughout the 30s, 40s, and 50s, these studies were apparently conducted by the hundreds; and by the 1960s, the benefits of the 40-hour week were accepted almost beyond question in corporate America. In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce even published a pamphlet extolling the productivity gains of reduced hours.

But, somehow, Silicon Valley didn't get the memo.

And #2 -- from Yahoo News/AP:

All-nighters may not improve grades
Students who rely on all-nighters to bring up their grades might want to sleep on that strategy: A new survey says those who never study all night have slightly higher GPAs than those who do.

A survey of 120 students at St. Lawrence University, a small liberal arts college in northern New York, found that students who have never pulled an all-nighter have average GPAs of 3.2, compared to 2.95 for those who have. The study, by assistant professor of psychology Pamela Thacher, is to be included in the January issue of Behavioral Sleep Medicine.

"It's not a big difference, but it's pretty striking," Thacher said. "I am primarily a sleep researcher and I know nobody thinks clearly at 4 in the morning. You think you do, but you can't."

A second study by Thacher, a clinical psychologist, had "extremely similar" results showing lower grades among the sleep skippers.

Many college students, of course, have inadequate or irregular sleep, for reasons ranging from excessive caffeine to poor time management.

Prav Chatani, a St. Lawrence sophomore who wasn't involved in either study, said the findings made sense. The neuroscience major has been pulling fewer all-nighters, but recently stayed up all night to prepare for an organic chemistry test and a neuroscience presentation, he said.

He had difficulty remembering some of the material he studied around 4 or 5 in the morning.

No shit sherlock -- not only do you study poorly, you then have to present your material the next day having spent a stressful night without sleep... A few solid hours of REM sleep does wonders for the brain's function. And the guy mentioned in the last article is a Neuroscience Major for cry'n out loud -- remind me not to go to his clinic when he sets up practice...