more convenient in her schedule. In contrast, selfless givers are more inclined to sprinkle their giving
throughout their days, helping whenever people need them. This can become highly distracting and
exhausting, robbing selfless givers of the attention and energy necessary to complete their own work.
One September, seventeen software engineers at a Fortune 500 company were charged with
developing code for a major new product. It was a color laser printer that would sell for 10 percent
of the cost of other products on the market. If it succeeded, the company would be a dominant player
in the market and could release an entire family of products to follow the printer. The division was
losing money rapidly, and if the printer wasn’t ready on time, the division would fold. To finish the
project, the engineers were working nights and weekends, but they were still behind schedule. The
odds were against them: only once in the division’s history had a product been launched on time.
They were “stressed” and “exhausted,” writes Harvard professor Leslie Perlow, with “insufficient
time to meet all the demands on them.”
The engineers had fallen into a pattern of selfless giving: they were constantly helping their
colleagues solve problems. One engineer reported that “The biggest frustration of my job is always
having to help others and not getting my own work done”; another lamented that “The problem with
my work style is that responsiveness breeds more need for responsiveness, and I am so busy
responding, I cannot get my own work done.” On a typical day, an engineer named Andy worked from
8:00 A.M. until 8:15 P.M. It wasn’t until after 5:00 P.M. that Andy found a block of time longer than
twenty minutes to work on his core task. In the hopes of carving out time to get their own work done,
engineers like Andy began arriving at work early in the morning and staying late at night. This was a
short-lived solution: as more engineers burned the midnight oil, the interruptions occurred around the
clock. The engineers were giving more time without making more progress, and it was exhausting.
Perlow had an idea for turning these selfless givers into otherish givers. She proposed that instead
of sprinkling their giving, they could chunk it. She worked with the engineers to create dedicated
windows for quiet time and interaction time. After experimenting with several different schedules,
Perlow settled on holding quiet time three days a week, starting in the morning and lasting until noon.
During quiet time, the engineers worked alone, and their colleagues knew to avoid interrupting them.
The rest of the time, colleagues were free to seek help and advice.
When Perlow polled the engineers about quiet time, two thirds reported above-average
productivity. When Perlow stepped back and left it to the engineers to manage their own quiet time
for a full month, 47 percent maintained above-average productivity. By chunking their helping time,
the engineers were able to conserve time and energy to complete their own work, making a transition
from selfless to otherish giving. In the words of one engineer, quiet time enabled “me to do some of
the activities during the day which I would have normally deferred to late evening.” After three
months, the engineers launched the laser printer on time, for only the second time in division history.
The vice president of the division chalked the success up to the giving boundaries created by quiet
time: “I do not think we could have made the deadline without this project.”
Since the engineers were facing an urgent need to finish their product on time, they had a strong
justification for making their giving more otherish. But in many situations, the appropriate boundaries
for giving time are much murkier. Sean Hagerty is a principal in investment management at Vanguard,
a financial services company that specializes in mutual funds. Sean is a dedicated mentor with a long-
standing passion for education, and he has made a habit of volunteering his time at least a week each
year to teach employees at Vanguard’s corporate university. When Vanguard’s chief learning officer
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