Try to know how many hours of "deep work" you can do before losing steam. Usually it's ~4 hours, once you get past that point, do some tickets that are not too demanding, and preparation for the next day. That should be around 6 hours of work and that's more than enough, almost no dev does 8 hours of solid work a day, a part of it ends up being browsing the internet and reading articles.
Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#12This is the question of the next few decades. How much do we keep the "x amount of hours a each day" thing built into our culture.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#13How strict is your employer about butt-in-seat schedule? If you have full flexibility, I’d suggest aiming to hit 40 hours on a weekly basis rather than 8 on a daily basis. That gives you the flexibility to work, say, 10 hours one day because you’re really on a roll, and to stop at 6 hours the next afternoon when you’re tired and distracted without feeling guilty. Don’t go over 40 hours on a regular basis. That’s a re…
Experience alone doesn't help you get better at estimating. You also need to have reasonable stopping points. That's why I try to aim for rigid 8 hour days, rather than being flexible. It allows me to see how much work I accomplished in a given day, and what kinds of tasks generally take less time or more time. Days are very intuitive chunks of time to reason about, and I find this helps my estimations be a lot more accurate.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#14When the end of the day approaches, start finishing up whatever you were working on, and mentally prepare for what you'll be doing the next day. Then forget everything until tomorrow morning.
There's a huge amount of variability between developers, so don't think that the "workaholics" doing 50+ hour weeks are necessarily being more productive than you; unless you actually compare, they could really be struggling and just trying their hardest to keep up with everyone else. In the past, I've solved problems in minutes that someone else on the team had spent many long-houred weeks and eventually given up on.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#15As a remote developer, setting a schedule for yourself is really important -- at least when you are getting started. Once you have an established work pattern that you are happy with you can experiment to see how things work.
I recommend doing what you are doing until you feel like, "OK. I'm in a rhythm and things are going well." Perhaps you are already at that point.
Next, when you have one of those days where you are feeling good and want to continue, work an extra hour. Then play with how you are going to use that hour the next day. Will you start late, or leave early or have a long lunch, or whatever? Tell your coworkers that you're going to do it. "I worked late today, so I'm going to X tomorrow". This keeps them informed so that they don't panic if they are looking for your help the next day.
Evaluate the progress. Did it feel good to you? For example, starting late does not work for me. I'm a morning person and taking an hour or two off in the morning means that I will get started on my side projects... and never stop. Then I end up working my "day job" until midnight --- no good!
Also, evaluate the reaction on your team. Were they OK with your behaviour? Every team is different. It's important to try to work with the team and not just stubbornly go your own way. I've worked with people who have the attitude, "It's my right to do whatever I want. I'll come in at 2pm and leave at 4pm and make up the time when it suits me". I hate working with people like that because programming is a team sport and I have to accommodate your weird schedule.
I work time shifted by 9 hours from the rest of my team. I know it impacts them and I do whatever I can to help them -- including working late nights sometimes (even though I'm a morning person). But you do what you can. Some of my colleagues can't get up early in the morning, so I'm happy to accommodate them, just like they are happy to accommodate my choice to live on the other side of the world. There is a give and take there, and as long as you are aware of it (and not always taking), then I think it's fine.
Deciding whether or not to work late is always a judgement call. My advice is to consider 2 things.
1: Is it truly and emergency? The server is on fire and you are losing customers. Somebody needs to work on it. You should stay if at all possible. Even staying around to provide moral support for your colleagues can make a big difference. Sometimes there is nothing you can do, but if you hang around and read slack (or however you communicate) and make occasional comments, it can really help the team. Nothing is more lonely than sitting in front of a melting down server, not having a clue what to do and everybody has buggered off for beer.
Sometimes people say it's an emergency and it really isn't. In those cases, consider the cost of saying no. There will be a cost if someone asks (or hints strongly) for you to stay and you say no. It sucks. It's not what it should be. But it's very common. If you can afford to pay the price, then feel free to draw the boundary. If you can not, then do what you have to -- and then try to get yourself into a situation where you can afford to say no the next time.
2: If you just feel like working, then go for it. Keep in mind that this comes after you have established a "normal" working day for yourself and when you know how to take back the time later. But stopping yourself from having fun (even if it's making other people money) is just silly.
Always keep in mind your own health, though. When I was younger, I seemed to be able to work a lot of hours and still stay very energised. As I've gotten older, I can not longer do that. I have to pay attention to my energy level, because a 12 hour stint can wreck me for the next 2 days. That's no good for anyone.
Finally, I occasionally work a short day when I'm really not on the ball. Again, I confer with my colleagues before I make any decisions. People know I'm usually around between 9am and noon their time. Sometimes I need that time off and around 9am I say, "I'm not getting anything done today, so I'm thinking about packing it in for the day. Is there anything that somebody needs me to do before I go?" Sometimes there are lots of things, and I stay and do what I can -- which is good because that often makes me productive, when I wasn't before. But if there isn't anything pressing, I'll rest and be able to do a very productive day the next day. That kind of thing really depends on the team and the amount of trust everybody has in everybody else. It won't fly on some teams, but I work with a good team.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#16To me, it's more about making sure that you accomplish while pushing your learning curve up. This is easier when you work for an employer, but hard when you work for yourself as you always want to push more in less time. Another thing in a virtual work model is to make sure that you are engaged with your other coworkers throughout a regular basis especially if there are some others that are not working remotely. I think it's more about making sure that the team has a good feeling of the virtual model. I wouldn't be too worried about keep tracking of the exact clock in/out.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#17Using TDD (Test Driven Development) I tend to stop working when fatigue sets in and I'm tempted to skip unit tests for the sake of immediate gratification.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#18I use rescuetime to track my computer usage and aim for a certain number of “productive” hours a day. This way I don’t feel guilty for procrastinating or falling into a hacker news hole, that time is not counted toward the productive time goal.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#19>> I'm a relatively junior software engineer, a little over a year out from university, with a cushy remote job working for big-co. And I never know how much work to do on a given day.
Protip: Optimize for consistent performance. It's better to close 3 tickets every day, than close 30 tickets on Monday and one or two every other day, even though the latter scenario adds up to more tickets.
(Obviously, replace "tickets" with your own measure of productivity.)
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#20I'm always objective focused with my team...
1. we breakdown issues/bugs into 2 - 4 hour increments where we write test(s) to replicate. Then share with team. Hopefully there can be a fix in that time, else create a new issue.
2. we breakdown new tasks into 2 - 4 hour increments with a new function(ality) + necessary tests
Then we spend ~1 hour a day doing code reviews. Some days I can get through multiple issues, some days it's just 1. In either case, we can assume 5 - 8 tasks / issues a week are completed. How everyone does it is up to them; so that's how you decide how much work you need to do.
Unfortunately, estimating can be poor for these tasks, but that's why we time box it and require a team notification for any issues (plus tests). It works relatively well, and everyone checks for open PRs or code reviews between each task -- so blockers don't occur.
I recommend trying something like that.