Pages per hour

[Richard Mateosian <srm -at- C2 -dot- ORG>]

>How many pages of a tech manual can you produce in one day (8 hours)?

Does anyone else find this a naive and silly question?

I don't mean to pick on the poster. Predicting how long a job is going to
take is crucial to bidding on it. Evaluating an employee's productivity is
an important management responsibility. It would be wonderful if there were
an easy rule of thumb for this. Unfortunately, it's not that simple.

Whenever a task gets so predictable that you can make this kind of estimate,
along comes a "productivity tool" to aid or automate that part of the
process. Everyone's output increases as a result, but the unpredictability
returns.

Twenty-five years ago, at the dawn of the word processing age, nobody would
have attempted half of the things that routinely appear on the pages of
technical manuals today. With today's technology it might take a year to
produce what will routinely appear on a "page"--whatever that comes to
mean--of a manual twenty-five years from now.

Whenever we look for productivity standards, we are looking at the routine
aspects of the job. These are probably not the main source of quality in
communication.  ...RM

Richard Mateosian                              VP, STC Berkeley Chapter
Freelance Technical Writer     srm -at- c2 -dot- org     Review Editor, IEEE Micro