The Hallway

— Photo by ML

The proposal is finally done. Answers for some 220 questions have been researched, written, and reviewed. Add to that references to a dozen or so white papers and other documents, and, of course, the tedious tasks of converting, renaming, and indexing those documents. A final review of everything (for the umpteenth time!), and a few last-minute edits — all seemingly endless busy-work. But then the end is as sudden as the beginning: a hard deadline when the proposal must be submitted.

I've gone through these exercises many times and I know the drill. We all know the drill. We get a Request for Proposal (RFP) and the clock starts ticking. The deadline is usually something like 5pm EST Thursday, or Friday 2pm PST, or some other arbitrary (but very specific) point in time. Now the machine must be started and proposal writing must commence. Team members in different time zones, countries, even continents, are assigned to tasks and we all start to work like an army of ants towards the common goal of delivering a complete proposal no later than the specified deadline.

When you stop to think about it, it's really silly. It appears to be a game: a customer lays down a gauntlet of questions and tasks that we — the vendor — have to pass through to get to the next level of the corporate mating ritual. This is a very serious game. It's the lifeblood of our business. So whatever the deadline and whatever the amount of questions or tasks, the proposal will be written and delivered on time. During the RFP process normal work rules no longer apply. The only thing that matters is that we deliver a complete document by said deadline. In fact, meeting this deadline is now our sole purpose in life.

Last fall I spent several weeks working on another huge proposal. The RFP had well over 500 questions, and two of us from the U.S. team even went to work with our colleagues in Germany. During the last week of that project we all spent endless days at our corporate headquarters. The deadline was Friday 9pm CET! Each day was the same: go to the office early and leave late for a few hours of sleep. It rained every day, but since most hours were spent in windowless offices and meeting rooms, one couldn't really tell.

It was surreal. There were clocks showing time zones from around the world, and working with colleagues across time zones just made the days seem even longer. I could only feel time go by when I counted down the hours towards the deadline. But I had no real sense of time: mornings, afternoons, and evenings all looked and felt the same. The days were punctuated by meals, meetings, and conference calls. Without much daylight, however, it often felt as if time stood still: everything always looked the same.

Late evenings were different. While the buildings would be teeming with several thousand employees during, in late evenings one could walk through hallway after hallway without meeting a single person. It would be absolutely empty and eerily quiet.

I've been working in the technology industry for over 20 years, and, to some extent, I've gotten used to crazy schedules. There have been incredibly complex projects, long projects, fast-paced projects, and slow-burning tedious projects. Some projects started with a bang, while others ended in one. In hindsight, however, I'm not sure that all those all-nighters, 80-hour-work-weeks, early-morning and late-night conference calls with team members around the globe, and all the other just-have-to-finish-this-or-the-world-will-end emergencies were really worth it.

It's so strange that we allow ourselves to get sucked into working like this. How can arbitrary deadlines become so powerful? Will the world really end if we don't do what we think we have to do? Of course not! And intellectually we all know this. But while we're in the middle of it, we often feel that we can't take any chances.

I used to think — no, I was (and still am) convinced! — that I can "move mountains," and boy did I ever move them. The question, though, is whether every single one of those mountains really needed moving. What would my life have been like, had I instead just walked around some of them.

One aspect of "growing up" is to learn when it's important and/or worthwhile to work like mad, and when it's not. After all, there is life outside work, and that life is actually much more important (another thing I learned the hard way). Besides, and I'm sure this has been said before, I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who on their deathbed would say that they wish they had spent more time in the office.

-martin.

P.S. I have to confess that I work best under pressure. In fact, without looming deadlines and threat of imminent death, I tend to procrastinate. But as I'm getting older and, if not wiser, then at least less unwise, I'm learning to motivate myself through these periods (fodder for another blogpost perhaps?)