Building in time to fail (and fix it)

My generation is looking for that job that respects their work life balance, and I think the answer is a simple as building in more time to accomplish the tasks that you have set out for yourself as a company, as a team, and as a human being.  In my life, almost all of my stress has been time related.  It all boils down to how am I possibly going to X before Y?  Be it "rent/the first," "get to class/it starts," or "get to the bank/it closes."  

In class we talked about building in time to fail and make changes.  This obviously needs to be a balance to keep things moving quickly, but allow your people (yourself included) time to relax and recharge.  We talked about building in 5-10% extra "scratch" time.  I think that shooting that low has a real risk of cutting into the work life balance.  At Canvas & Hide we are designing products that transition seamlessly between home, work, and a weekend adventure.  If we don't give ourselves to be home and to go on adventures then we will be distancing our experiences from the experiences of our users.

I've built this based on   insights laid out in "let my people go surfing "by Yvon Chouinard and my personal experience with keeping sundays as a day of rest.  Yvon recognized early on the value of having employees that lived the company culture.  To do that he had to enable a workplace that encouraged spending time outdoors pursing interests and hobbies.  Through this process he has found that some of his best product testers are his employees.  On my end, I've been living the experience of keeping Sundays as a day of rest.  My pastor sold me on the idea by framing it like this.  We are at our worst when we are tired, stressed, and strung out.  Taking a day out of the week makes helps us fight those three things and enables us to be better people who are capable of being patient, encouraging, and helpful to others.  Keeping the Sabbath isn't for God, its for us.  It makes us better people to be around. 

Seeing as how we will be an office full of people who are around each other and working together I see a great value in encouraging those people to be patient, encouraging, and helpful.  For this reason we won't ever work on sundays, and we will keep the last three weeks out of every year as time off to spend at home or on adventures.  The yellow blocks are flex time.  We will schedule each week for 5, 7 hour days (35 hours) and each 7 week period for 6 weeks (210 hours) of work.  When things go wrong we will have time each week to fix it, and push back deadlines into the 7th week if needed.  If we make our 6 week goals we will be able to spend the last week testing product in the real world.  This may look slower than most of the fast paced companies these days, but In practice it should keep employees happy, motivated, and productive.  I believe that we will get more done in each year than most of our contemporary competitors.