Last week, I wrote about how I was feeling better and how I was kind of excited about being able to actually put in some effort at work without feeling awful for a week or more. I wound up setting a personal record for testing cycles performed entirely on accident. I’d forgotten that my previous record was counted using only half of what I’m now calling a cycle (since I was testing something else then), so I’d only done thirty cycles in a single day back when I was still feeling fairly hale despite all the pain I was in last summer and on Friday I wound up doing thirty-seven (specifically to smooth out the total count to a nice round number). I paid for it all weekend, of course, but I was feeling mostly better by Sunday and back to about ninety percent by the time I hauled myself into work yesterday morning (or, well, a week ago yesterday as you’re reading this). I felt well enough to log another thirty cycles, even, and woke up today feeling mostly alright. My hands are in the worst shape, between the blisters, the muscle tightness, and the lingering tenderness from my burns almost three weeks ago, but even so I’m able to keep up the work and wound up logging an impressive fifty cycles. The problem is, while I’m making great progress on this testing, it will take me weeks to get to the total number I need to call this test finished. After all, even if I can keep up doing fifty a day–or even get it up to my target of one hundred–that’s still ten to twenty days of work to get to one thousand (the number we’ve picked for this test). I need it to happen faster than that and I’d really prefer to not be exhausting myself every day given how much OTHER work I still need to do before this project is finished.

So, what’s a tester to do? This project is a high-enough priority that I can pull other testers to work on it and we’ve got a lab assistant that I could ask to do some of the work. It’s not terribly difficult to do, after all. It just takes practice and a decent amount of strength to do well. Which is what I set up throughout all of last week (two weeks ago as you’re reading this) so that I could call on people to get the work done in a more timely manner. However, as I leaned on these people yesterday, they proved to be somewhat lackluster in their enthusiasm. Most of them only did a few cycles before deciding that they’d done enough. Which is fair! It isn’t really their job to do this work and they haven’t spent the last year training themselves to do it over and over again. That said, it is sort of their job to help me and I’d rather find a fun way to motivate them than bludgeon them into working with comments about their job responsibilities, so I spent some time last night thinking about what to do to get them more involved.

Which is when it hit me: make a leaderboard! All of my coworkers are INCREDIBLY competitive (to the degree of competing over who could maintain a terrible haircut for the longest time), which tends to leave me out as the one who is more reliant on discipline and motivation via responsibility than sheer cussed competitiveness, but I realized I could make this usually annoying state of affairs work for me instead of against me through a simple two-step process. Step one: make a publicly visible leaderboard listing each person’s name and the number of test cycles they’ve done (updated at the end of every day), sorted in order of most cycles done to least. Step two: put myself on the leaderboard as a mountain they need to climb. After all, since I’m the person organizing this competition and offering the prizes (a prize to whoever has the highest number and a Grand Prize(!) to the winner if they manage to overtake me), I’m naturally not eligible. I can’t win a prize I’m offering myself since I’m the person who adjudicates whether or not a cycle counts. It would be categorically unfair. So now my coworkers have open-ended daily motivation to put in as many cycles as they can since they don’t know exactly how many each other has done until the day is over and I add up people’s tallies and, since they all know I don’t care about winning, they’ll try to chase the numbers I’m putting up (until I get to one hundred cycles a day, I’m sure. I doubt any of them will try for numbers like those). That, plus the offer of a prize to whoever does the most should be enough to keep them all invested AND get some of my other coworkers involved, if only because I’m publicly tracking the numbers.

After putting that system in at noon, my coworkers and I have more than doubled the number of test cycles we’ve done since the start of last week. I was worried for a little bit that the evident glee I felt as I saw this plan start to work would make them all dig in their heals and refuse to participate, but the offer of prizes seemed to mollify them and my willingness to be frank with them about what I was doing seemed to quickly allay any feelings they had of being manipulated. It isn’t a secret that they’re incredibly competitive, after all. This isn’t the first dumb little competition the team has cooked up to give everyone something to get riled up over (the aforementioned haircut competition is the one that sticks out most in my mind, but my eight years with this team are littered with more of these “games” than I could ever remember). If anything, I’m worried that it will work too well and one of my coworkers will get injured because they let their competitive spirit get the best of them. Right now, as I’m writing this during a quick break in my own testing, I’m watching a coworker who has been doing these cycle tests for almost fifty minutes straight now. I’m a little worried that he’s overexerting himself, but he’s also a grown-ass adult and I’ve warned him to take it easy, so there’s not much else I can do at this point. This is his first day doing these tests, so I’m a little concerned that he’s going to be feeling it for days after this. He’s certainly developed a unique way of running the tests, but it seems to be working for him…

Anyway, I feel clever for getting all my coworkers to buy into running these tests, the tests are getting run more quickly than I anticipated, and all I’ve got to do is maintain this leaderboard. So long as this enthusiasm continues (perhaps helped along by this coworker who is going to show up near the top of the leaderboard after not even being on it this morning), all this testing might be finished by the end of the week! It’s exciting to think about, even if it feels unlikely. Sometime next week [or this week, as you’re reading this, which is where things are probably going to wrap up] feels far more likely unless everyone else gets into doing as many cycles as they can every day. There’s an upper limit on it all, though. Each test takes about a minute to perform at the fastest, so everyone doing sixty cycles would eat up just about the entire day. We’d be done with all the tests in a day or two of that much work, but everyone else still has their own jobs to do. I hope I haven’t derailed anything important…