Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Third Edition

Part II: The Office Environment

In order to make it possible for people to work, you have to come to grips with those factors that sometimes make it impossible. The causes of lost hours and days are numerous but not so different from one another. They are often—maybe even most often—failures, in one form or another, of the environment that the organization has provided to help you work. The phone rings off the hook, the printer service man stops by to chat, the copier breaks down, the chap from the blood drive calls to revise donation times, Personnel continues to scream for the updated skills survey forms, time sheets are due at 3 P.M., lots more phone calls come in, . . . and the day is gone. Some days you never spend a productive minute on ...