Have you ever wondered how a team of extremely creative people might join together and express themselves? Take one vacationing coworker like myself, combine it with a few boxes of tinfoil and you get the funniest prank I have ever been on the receiving end of.

How much work is too much?

In the May 2007 issue of Fast Company magazine there is an interesting article by Joe Robinson titled “The Red Zone”. The premise of the article is that every company has those employees that repeatedly work 60+ hours a week and a common misconception is that these “workaholics” are some form of a corporate “hero”. Contrary to what some employees believe, excessive hours is a red flag and should be considered an indication of possible productivity issues. Not only dedication and work ethic. The article talks about flagging these type of employee if the behavior become excessive and repetitive, and put in place a constructive plan to increase their productivity while reducing their hours.

I honestly could not agree more with this article. I think that many companies lose sight of the relationship between quality productivity and dedication. All of us cherish a dedicated employee, but are these type of employees really fulfilled. We all have at least one coworker that you know will do whatever it takes to get a project completed. I respect that passion, but after about 14 hours sitting in front of a computer the quality of code a developer produces diminishes. A career is not a sprint but a very long marathon. We as managers need to look at excessive hours as a sign of hidden efficiency issues such as unrealistic timelines, scope creep or even external personal issues.

Wikipedia defines a “hack-a-thon” as an event where programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming. An event where a group of people meet at a specific time to “hack” on what they want to, how they want to - with little to no restrictions on direction or goal of the programming. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon)

This begs the question, could the idea of a “hack-a-thon” be repurposed to crank out a professional web site in less than a day?

Last Thursday Terralever gave it a shot, and held the first Annual “Terralever.com Hack-a-thon”. The goal was to take a new Terralever.com creative design, and give it life between 4PM Thursday and 6AM Friday morning. All this after a full day of work. Equipped with some creative comps, 20 egger employees, and a ton of Redbull, we set out to test all of our skills, expertise and ultimately our focus.

I would love to say that we made our goal, but at about 5AM it became evident that as hard as we had worked, we just would never have the whole site complete by 6AM.

So did we fail…hardly! Success was not about getting to the finish, but about the journey to get there. I have been in development for quite some time and never embarked on such a challenge. It was exhausting, but a whole lot of fun. I was extremely impresses by how focused and driven the entire development team was throughout the whole night. There was a great balance between having fun and working hard. There is no question that by 5AM most if not everyone was mentally fried, but no one gave up, everyone was still focused on completing there tasks.

It is not fair to measure this experience solely on success or failure, but if a complete site was our goal, there are certainly things we can learn from this experience. I my opinion it all came down to better planning. Timeline, IA and design comps are essential but just not enough. The best chance we had at completing this task was to make a more formal script of who was going to complete what, and in what sequence. All design should have been formalized prior to the event.

When we attempt this challenge again (and I hope we do) we need to have designed the entire data model, object model and site architecture as part of preparation. On Thursday development spent the first 2 hours just thinking about how we would store and deliver data to the end user. This time investment was necessary to get started, but irreplaceable by early morning. Decisions we made the day of the event had a direct effect on the order we should have cut up the site, prepared copy and integrated interactive with development. In the future, every employee needed a clear understanding of what individual tasks they would be assigned, giving them an opportunity to better research solutions and look for existing code to leverage during the event.