Dear Coworkers,
I was totally hyped after the meeting yesterday. When Robin said he's being mean when telling us to track more time, he actually wasn't. He was raising our attention to a resource of "funding" that we might be able to get immediately. And when Jose suggested to make a game out of, it got me to the idea how we can account how much time we are able to devote to the "Project X"s.
Several team members have already been investing time to Project X, by writing down those ideas and preparing the pitches. I always felt it was okay to spend that time with the upcoming pitch session in mind, but to hack away on something is a different thing. I felt that I don't know how much resources I have available and ended up not doing it at all. That was kinda depressing as the pitches are just a start and the real progress would not happen.
So enough about feelings. How can we introduce a way of accounting that allows for innovation time?
- First of all, Moritz and Robin will have to find a sustainability treshold. This is the percentage of work time that we have to track on projects, to keep the company sustainable. It has to be a percentage, as we have different work times. (E.g. I just reduced my time to 28 h / week to have more time for the baby.)
- If we track more time and get over the treshold, the surplus will be put to our personal innovation time account and can be used in the next week or accumulated for later use. Example: Given the treshold is 50%, when I track 20 hours in a week, I get 6 hours on my innovation time account.
- If you don't reach the treshold in a week, the missing time is deducted from the innovation time account. This is to allow for changing weekly hours. Example: When we had the FV launch, I worked 50 hours instead of 32. So a week later I took two days of, to work only 14 hours that week.
- The time you use from your innovation time account to spend on Project X will be tracked as well. Example: When I work 12 hours on brand eins and 6 hours on Project X, I will get 4 hours more for the next week.
- What you do in this time is totally up to you. If you prefer using that time to watch cat gifs, fine. You did your part to keep the company sustainable. But I would much prefer shaping the future of this whole thing!
- The technical part can be very simple for the beginning. Every monday someone (like me or Tom) looks up the tracked times for the last week and puts them into a google spreadsheet to calculate the surplusses. Everyone has a personal innovation time ticket, where their surplusses are added to the "Geschätzer Aufwand" (estimated time) field. If someone decides on using his innovation time, he is tracking the time on this ticket. It is his task to make sure that he does not exceed the "Geschätzter Aufwand". This can easily be automated, but let's keep it simple and flexible for the beginning and see what works and what does not.
FAQ:
"Why should I track more time than the treshold? I could as well just stop at the treshold and spend the rest of the time on Project X!"
You totally can. The math behind it stays the same. Only, if you used that innovation time account, you could save up on time for a whole week of Project X or you could even transfer time to Jose, so that he will have more time to hack up his baking-start-up.
"Is that correct that we track the time on Project X as well? Doesn't that lead to a feedback loop, where we end up working only on Project X?"
Well, I really hope it does lead to that feedback loop eventually! But not mathematically. As I am more the mathematical example type than the mathematical proof type, let me give two more examples:
- I have 6 hours on my innovation time account to start with and my treshold is 14 hours. Every week I track 14 hours on brand eins and 6 hours on Project X. The innovation time account stays on 6 hours every week but the sustainability treshold is always reached with money work.
- In week 1 I work 21 hours on brand eins only (7 hours to the account). Second week again 21 hours only on brand eins (7 more hours to the account). The third week i spend my 14 hours to work on Project X only and do nothing else (account is back to zero). When I add up the money work I can see that I did what I had to do for the three weeks to keep the company sustainable. (14 * 3 = 42)
"But I don't track when I'm working on the bitspire page. Isn't that unfair?"
Sales and marketing activities should be tracked as well so Björn can exceed his treshold. Also if Moritz and Robin want to use this way of accounting as well, they might want to track the general management stuff they're doing.
"What if I get into negative innovation time?"
IMHO, we should not allow negative innovation time. If one's account falls to zero it should not drop below. And if someone is consecutively not reaching the treshold, we should figure out what's wrong and how we can help that person and not punish him.
"What about vacation?"
Yeah, I would say, let's cross that bridge when we come to it. It's just mathematics so I guess we will figure out how to do this correctly.
"How should we set this sustainability treshold? If we track sales and management activities, there will be lot of work tracked that is no money work!"
We should just start with some buffer and check every month how income, expenses and savings are balanced to see if we can lower the treshold or if we have to raise it.