During the summer after I graduated from college, a sinking feeling began to creep up on me. After readily saying “goodbye” to school for good, I now faced a seemingly endless expanse of time without intervals: no new semesters, long breaks, advancements, or graduations to look forward to—just work and whatever I made of it. I like work and making my own path through it, but something about this horizon of unstructured sameness unsettled me enough that I came very close to signing up for more school.

Over the next decade, I got used to the never-ending stretch of time, and we began building Pathwright as a never-ending series of projects. (Software is never “done.”) We’d start and finish projects, then pick up the next one. We hit (and missed) plenty of launch dates with no particular rhythm. We tried many project management tools and methods—from kanban boards and project management software to sticky notes—and saw marginal improvements.

In other words, we worked much like every other company. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t escape the feeling that we were running on a treadmill we couldn’t switch off or slow down. As the product and team grew and projects stacked up, we ran into frequent periods of intense work followed by burnout. After a particularly rough stretch leading up to the launch of Pathwright 2, we knew we had to get off the treadmill. That’s when we stumbled across this article about how Basecamp works in six-week cycles. We’ve learned a lot from Basecamp over the years, and we had nothing to lose by trying this method at the start of 2017.

Most new ideas we try on for size work to some degree, and we adapt them slightly for marginal overall improvement. But this idea was different: it worked immediately. It worked well. And it’s still working.

Five Benefits

Now it’s hard for us to imagine working without six-week cycles. In addition to recovering the more natural rhythm of work and rest that we humans are wired for, here are five benefits we can’t do without:

1. Timeboxing projects into six weeks helps us plan smaller and smarter.

It’s notoriously difficult to predict accurate timelines or costs for software projects (and that’s true of any multifaceted creative project). Humans are simply no good at predicting the future. Once we accepted our finite planning powers, we gained tremendous mental clarity and focus by limiting our time horizon to this question: “What can we realistically accomplish in just six weeks?”

As for how many projects we plan during one cycle, we follow Basecamp’s lead and commit to:

• Projects: A few bigger projects that will take six weeks max.

• "Sweep" tasks: A handful of smaller, stand-alone tasks that take anywhere from an afternoon to a few days, at most. (These make a nice grab bag to reach for when we're waiting on someone else before continuing a project, or to tackle in those smaller in-between time blocks.)

Mid-cycle, we review project progress, share feedback, and help each other shrink projects further for the remaining weeks.

2. We hit the reset button every six weeks.

While we try to keep projects within the six weeks, we don’t stress out if we don’t quite make it. Instead, we hit the “reset” button during the two weeks between Cycles.

Unfinished projects from the previous Cycle are reframed and reshaped as new projects for the next, or returned to The Labs.

3. There’s time to look back, think, and plan.

The two in-between Reset Weeks between Cycles are a welcome respite. We work at a slower pace on two kinds of work that don't fit naturally within a project-focused Cycle:

1. Sweep tasks: Odds and ends, loose ends, and smaller optimizations that can't all fit neatly into a Cycle Project.

2. Shaping: Reorient ourselves toward our longer-term goals and begin to shape the projects we'll kick off in the upcoming Cycle.

These break intervals help us zoom out from periods of detailed focus to reflect on our mission, strategy, and goals. This big-picture review every six weeks helps us avoid the common pitfall of prioritizing the urgent over long-term impact.

4. We have a rhyme and reason for saying “later.”

Before we worked in Cycles, it was harder to tell team members and customers with a great idea or pressing need that we’d get to it “later.”

Although “later” is necessary 93.8% of the time, it could come across as subjective and arbitrary when our only planning framework was whatever we decided was next in line. Additionally, we spent a lot of time and energy attempting to synthesize all of this new feedback into our current plans as it came in—which was all the time.

Now we can simply say we’ll consider the idea during an upcoming planning week and get back to them—then forget about it until then. While we still have to say “later” to most requests, at least there’s a clearer rhyme and reason behind it, and our team and customers have generally found that reassuring.

5. We get to share more of what we’ve accomplished.

Reset Weeks carve out just enough time to share what we accomplished in the previous Cycle with our team and customers—something we'd often skip because we're already moving on to build the next thing.

Why not give it a try?

If you feel like you’re running on a treadmill, experiencing bouts of “sprints” and burnout, it may be time to try a new working rhythm. We unequivocally recommend trying a work-and-rest interval rhythm. And if you try it, we'd love to hear how it works for you.