Trying it out: Library Hours
After reading Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson’s “ It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work”, we were inspired to try out some of the methods used at Basecamp to increase productivity. At the top of my list was Library Hours, not only because I love libraries (and being a librarian was my dream job when I was a kid), but because I thought it would help our team be more productive in our open environment. I proposed the idea to my team and they agreed to give it a try (because they are awesome and always willing to try new stuff).
The description of Library Hours in the book was limited, so we used the following guidelines:
No talking above a whisper. If you need to take a call or speak in a louder voice, do it somewhere else.
Assume everyone is doing focus work, don’t interrupt people.
If you send someone a slack or email, expect that they will not answer immediately
We decided on a Monday as our test day and here’s how it went:
Almost everyone loved it: For many of us, this was the most productive work time in ages. One participant with small kids at home said he felt like this kind of focus was what he used to get at home before he had kids and loved that he could find this zone at work. For introverts who can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the noise in an open office, this was also a great opportunity to focus and get a lot of work done in a relatively short time. It wasn’t great for everyone, however. An extroverted person on the team did not love this experiment because it wasn’t conducive to her way of working, which is often engaging others verbally to talk out ideas.
Monday was not a great day for this: Although I was firmly in the camp of loving this experiment, doing it on a Monday wasn’t the best choice. As people came into the office, I wanted to ask them about their weekends and reconnect after being away from each other for 2 days, but that was counter to library hours. A different day would have been better, but we mitigated it by all going to lunch together.
Library Hours are great, Library Days are not: For a team who needs to collaborate a lot, we decided that having a portion of the day dedicated to focus work was great, but that it wasn’t realistic to have entire days spent in this mode. Some of our best work comes from impromptu conversations.
Overall, it was a great opportunity to get some focus work done and might be a good thing to try with your team. If you try it out, we’d love to hear how it goes for you!