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Brain Time vs. Butt Time: Improve Developer Productivity
Many moons ago, I tweeted the following about how to improve developer productivity:
Tracking Time
There is a pretty big controversy in the software development community about logging time. Of course, if you are billable, you need to log your time, but what if you aren’t? Should you have to keep track of the time you spend writing code? Does tracking time do anything to improve developer productivity?
Now I know that no one really likes to track their time. It’s a pain. It’s challenging to be accurate. It’s hard to get time properly categorized. But it can be invaluable for making those important business decisions. I’m not going to solve that argument here.
But there is a bigger problem with measuring time. The only thing you can really measure is “Butt Time”. Butt Time is the actual amount of time someone has their butt in a chair while working on a project.
You need Butt Time to get any work done, of course. But managers should not be insisting on a lot of Butt Time. Butt Time isn’t really what you want to maximize. What you really want to foster is Brain Time.
