Backstory: my partner and I left a career of full time software engineering jobs to become indie developers out here in Portugal. As a manager at Tinder I had a strong suspicion that the 5 day, 8 hour workweek was a holdover from the low skill labor of the industrial era and is not the optimal setup for creative work like game design and development. We've been experimenting with work schedules and have found a lot of success with a hackathon model. We work 32 hours Tuesday-Thursday and take Friday-Monday off completely -- surfing, playing chess, exploring Baleal etc. The time away really helps us focus on what is important during the high stakes time of the hackathon. Is anyone else experimenting with their work hours? Anyone seen success with any interesting new models?
I like what you're going for on this thread. I began to think how I would respond with my own daily/weekly work flow (which is fairly irregular) and then I thought that most indie's work hours are probably fairly irregular across the board. The very concept of being an indie means an extremely non-traditional work style because indies wear so many different hats at once. If we were solely designers, solely programmers, solely artists, solely marketers it'd be easy to nail down but I think just the nature of the beast would make it difficult to spell out a specific schedule that any indie could, or want to adhere to. This is just my opinion. Being a solo dev I find myself constantly straddling several tasks at once and either time, inspiration, necessity dictate which hat to wear at any given moment. Then again, I'm probably on the newer end of the scale having only shipped 1 title thus far and more experienced devs will more than likely be shaking their heads at me. But for the solo route I think it'd be difficult to set out a schedule that I'd be able to stick to hour to hour.
