It's amazing what you can pull off when you find yourself enjoying something that your good at. In spite of a full night of deploying code and generally rectifying sick servers I managed to get another server ready for installation and to troubleshoot various system issues today. At one point the boss asked me if I "ever sleep" Why yes, but it's highly overrated. Actually I do sleep, quite well in fact. So where do I make up the extra time? Pace.

I found out long ago, before my obsession with endurance racing, that pace is everything. There is a delicate balance to be struck between outright speed and survivability. The key is in known how hard you can work while maintaining both quality of work and skirting total exhaustion. It may seem counter intuitive but by adopting a slower pace you can actually produce more than by pressing hard for a period and then taking time to recover. Obviously you have to maintain a minimum pace for this theory to work and therein lies the challenge: How slow can you work yet still achieve the same amount of work.

Workaholics will counter that by throttling back you are being lazy and "just trying to get by". It may seem this way but take it from someone who has worked with those who do things in fits and starts, mistakes happen when you overextend yourself. Mistakes often lead to rework or correction which compromises the overall productivity of any activity. The net sum may not always equal greater productivity when pacing projects but on balance you'll find mistakes have greater consequence than simple rework.

Besides less fatigue leads to happier workers, something that is important in creative centric operations. On any level sustainability is as much about achieving objectives is as it is about keeping key elements happy. Endless drives toward moving targets and relentless scheduling can reduce even the brightest minds to mere robots of "getting things done". It isn't healthy and it isn't sustainable.