Book Review: Rework
Back in the day, the only available vacuum cleaners used bags to hold the dust. A man called James Dyson was vacuuming his home, when he observed that his vacuum cleaner would constantly be running out of suction power. The reason this happened was because the dust was clogging up the pores in the bag. So the airflow was being obstructed.
And this was happening regularly. He was getting frustrated with the inefficient solution. And so, he decided to solve this problem. Since he was experiencing it first-hand, it gave him much more impetus to build a better contraption.
In a few years, the world was introduced to the first ever cyclonic bagless vacuum cleaner, from the company, named Dyson.
This piece will be a review of the book, Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson.
The premise of the book lies in the fact that conventional work methods are almost obsolete, and in some cases quite inefficient to get real work done. For example, y’all know that in general, employees at an office are supposed to work for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
But Jason and David, decided to cut down the number of workdays in a week from 5, to 4, for their own company.
When the world came to know of this approach, people scoffed. Forbes published a lengthy and detailed article on why this was a very bad idea — stating that pushing in a 40-hour week into only 4 days per week, will necessitate that the employees will work for about 10 hours per day. And this was almost impossible to be sustained.
You might think now, that of course this was logical. To work for 10 hours a day, 4 days a week, does not sound like a pleasant experience.
But, the main point that everyone missed out on, was that David and Jason did not intend to add the remaining 8 hours from the 5th workday into the 4 workdays. No, Jason claimed in a blog post that Forbes had missed the entire point of this novel exercise. The idea was to work 8 hours a day, 4 days a week.
But contrary to what you might think that less work would get done this way — in reality, the productivity actually soared.
This is because of two main reasons. The first, is that in a typical work day, employees do productive work for only around 4 hours out of the 8 hours that they have to stay in the office. The remaining hours are actually wasted. The second reason, is that once the total number of work-hours per week, decreased for everyone by one whole day, employees began to realise the importance and value of time spent at work — and this resulted in much shorter meetings, negligible work-time spent not working, and much more productivity seen in the 4-day workweeks, than what used to be during the 5-day workweeks.
This is what Jason and David, refer to as, “Scratch your own Itch”. They saw that the current work model was not very efficient, and hence they decided to better it. Exactly the same, happened with James Dyson. He saw a problem first-hand, and he decided to solve it.
You need to scratch your own itch. When you craft something that you would actually use, because you need it, you are also able to assess the quality and performance of your work directly, and iterate and refine your product.
And this, is just one of the numerous lessons that this book has to offer. Lessons on progress, on shipping your product, on productivity, on leveraging competition, on culture, on evolution of your self, and much more. This book is a gem.
Rework — by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson.
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