Photo by Magda Ehlers.
If you follow business or tech reporting, there’s a good chance you’ve read a piece about 9-9-6 in the last few weeks. Maybe you saw the one in Fortune or the other one in Fortune. Or maybe you saw it in Wired last month. Or in this weekend’s NYTimes. Perhaps, if you’re a specific flavour of nerd, you saw a pull quote from The SF Standard’s piece on the aging population of Burning Man.
However this narrative arc reached you, we promise there’s bound to be more. Controversial internet coverage begets editorial ambulance-chasing and a never-ending stream of follow-up pieces. Did you see the clicks that other publication generated? We should definitely write our own. This flood of similar articles similarly timed can make minor trends feel like major shifts.
Even as a minor trend, 9-9-6 is being heralded as an answer to several real problems. Keeping American workers competitive in some sort of who-can-work-the-most-hours-a-thon with China. Advancing the 95% of AI pilots that fail to make them fail faster. Hastening the arrival of the antichrist. There’s a lot on-the-go in the modern workforce. And we will simply need more hours if we’re ever going to get to the bottom of this burgeoning todo list.
Talking past each other
What’s that? You’re not ready to eliminate all of the small life distractions that make up living but get in the way of working? You’re probably not that hardcore. That’s fine. You can work somewhere else. And settle for mid. And if you are old enough to remember the first startup boom and point out that SF tech workers sleeping under their desks and getting flowbee haircuts in the parking lot is not only not a new trend but didn’t work out the first time we tried it. Nor the second. Nor the third. Well, again, that’s probably just because people in the aughts were insufficient at the grind.
The 9-9-6 crowd can’t hear you. Throw all the pot-shots you like. They aren’t listening to your rant about the importance of work-life balance. They don’t believe in work-life balance. That sounds like a phrase people use when their work is just a job and they’ve never chased anything big.
We know this story. We’ve lived this story. While no one ever mandated 9-9-6, we gladly clocked that and then some. And when family and friends and concerned acquaintances pointed out that this was unsustainable, a quiet voice whispered, “unsustainable for you.”
So if you’re struggling to understand how folks end up there, it’s worth noting that a lot of 9-9-6 happens with free-will. Free-will and colleagues who are already working in a dark office when you arrive. Free-will and how easy it is to do a bit more work at the kitchen table while you heat up dinner. Free-will and a global team where work happens a literal 24 hours per day so any time you check-in on work, there’s something to do. And any time you sign-on, you’re already behind. Free-will and that heady serotonin mix of esprit d’corps and a never-ending flow state. You can drop a lot of frogs in that pot and very few will feel their feet get warm.
New innovations in productivity management
This is the pitch for a lot of tech management right now, and as an employee you can have the carrot version or the stick. Be in your seat because it’s exhilarating and all-consuming to be changing the world alongside your brilliant and obsessive colleagues. Or be in your seat because our board member is spouting off publicly about how 85% of you should be laid off. Carrot or stick, obsession or fear, you get to choose! How’s that for free will? And what’s clear from all the coverage is that this approach to management is breaking containment and leeching into all kinds of other industries. Exciting times.
Do you work in an org like this? We’ve gotta figure that some of you do. And, even if you don’t right now, we suspect some of you have bosses (or board members) wondering out loud whether maybe these new innovations in productivity management would be right for your org as well.
It’s a popular thing to wonder! Particularly for people who are bad at thinking about this stuff! 1 in 8 British men think they could take a point off of Serena Williams, and we’ve never met a hardcore grindset war-time CEO with the faintest clue about how people work, but in neither case does it seem to slow them down. Oh, to be that uncurious.
Anyhow, two quick points that we should mention in case this idea starts to emerge in your workplace: it destroys productivity, and also your people.
Whoopsie
It’s not that management is always intuitive, or consistently counter-intuitive. It’s more that different people have wildly different intuitions. Different leaders have profoundly different models of how to effectively run their organizations and there are places where that boils down to management style, for sure. But there are also places where some of them are objectively bad at this.
Like, for example, we’ve known at least as far back as WWI that longer hours don’t get you more productivity. That working weekends doesn’t get you any further ahead than using them for rest. You often see a net decrease in throughput, especially over longer time horizons.
That’s true for individual factory-style piecework, and gets even worse in contexts where people need to work creatively and collaboratively on problem solving. People invoke authority more and consider edge-cases less. They trust less, silo more, and use less information when making decisions. You don’t get much more work, but you definitely make that work worse. This is old news.
In the meantime, the long-term impacts on employees are, as you might expect, brutal. Even the proponents of this kind of schedule acknowledge that, in a chest-thumping, it’s-not-for-everyone sort of way. And in that, they’re totally right. Burnout is a dose-dependent consequence of long working hours, and some people just don’t have the stomach for it. Long-term cognitive deficits are an acquired taste. Not everyone is devoted enough to the mission to sign up for the heart disease and strokes necessary to hit our OKRs this quarter.
Y’all this shit is really that bad. The consequences are super real, and all in service of productivity wins that are pure fantasy.
Look if you really genuinely care about the thing you’re trying to build then you’re gonna want to be doing your best work on it. Right? If we could go back and talk to prior, overworked versions of ourselves, we think that’s where we’d start. If you care about this work as much as you say you do, you should want to do it brilliantly.
Brilliant work happens when you can breathe. When you’re rested. It happens when you have time away. When you’re healthy. When you have things that push work out of your brain for a while, and other inputs that pull your brain in different directions. When you have time with friends who can re-ground you. When you have spoons left, reserve capacity to deal with surprises. And when your colleagues do, too. When everyone involved is loose, shoulders down, and able to get creative.
If you could go back and tell us that, we’d have listened. But we’d have told you that it’s no good to do that solo when everyone else is still running full speed into a wall. So the other thing you need to do is talk to each other. To compare notes, yeah, but also to conspire. To change the culture. People pattern-match off of the work habits of their colleagues — we definitely did. And that’s a really hard collective-action problem, unless people act collectively, by talking about what’s working, and what isn’t, and what to do about it.
For those of you in management, which we know is a lot of you, please pretty please let us add this, too: Push. Back. Or get out. If you are management in a culture that does this to your people, you’re helping it happen. We have been the ones retaining, and smoothing things out, and trying to protect them. We know. And still, bad shit is going to happen and when it does it will be too late to undo it and that is going to haunt you. Those hard-charging failsons will shrug and roll off the board just like they did last time. And you will be left wondering whether it was right that you worked so hard to keep your people in the pressure cooker.
Whatever you’re working towards deserves better. And so do your people. And so do you.
— Melissa & Johnathan
