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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?

#31

Post by a-saleh »

Best thing in my opinion is to have something external that limits your schedule.

For me and few it of my coworkers it definitely were our children. I know I want to be at home by 18:00, so that I can have dinner with my family. One colleague was starting at 7:00 and and finished by 15:00, because he was pisking up his kid from preschool at 15:30 most days :)

I am not suggesting for you to get a kid :P but knowing that every day I want to end by $HOUR because I have a $THING does wonders :-)

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?

#32

Post by Terr_ »

cimmanom wrote: post #7

How 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…

From my own experience, burnout is primarily emotional. Time spent is a side-effect.

It's not how many hours you work, it's how much of your experience involves despair, frustration, and resentment. That might either be towards your employer ("stupid schedules, I'm not valued"), towards yourself ("this should be easy but I'm failing"), or towards the universe for simply not being the way it "should" be.

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?

#33

Post by Terr_ »

userbinator wrote: post #14

When 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…

Another trick is that when you're near the end of the day, deliberately stop partway through a problem and write down something about the next steps for yourself to read when you get back in.

This can help short-circuit some obsessive "just one more X" behaviors in night-owls, and makes it easier to get back into the groove the next day.

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?

#34

Post by Bahamut »

This is something I generally recommend to juniors, which goes against a lot of advice I’m seeing here - spend more time learning if your work is all good for the day. Early on, it is important to ramp up to get to senior as quickly as possible. If you don’t, you risk having trouble if you get laid off for whatever reason and need to ramp at a new job with a new codebase. I generally recommend doing around just under your max focus abilities - enough to push you hard, but not to the point where your mental health suffers.

Once you get to senior, your job prospects will reflect how quickly you got there - the quicker, the better opportunities you get, which has a cascading effect on your entire career.

I have seen junior devs fall into the trap of taking the job for granted, and run into trouble searching for new jobs - you don’t want to be that person.

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?

#35

Post by bbbobbb »

This of course depends on the flexibility of your working hour window. I see a lot of fairly complicated answers but for me, having a simple punch clock app so that I know exactly how long I have worked for the day, every day, works.

Some scenarios with my approach:

1) No flexibility, chair sitting required from 9 to 5.

With paid overtime, I would be there for 8 hours and never 10 minutes longer, unless the project was ending in two days and was not finished or the production was burning down.

Without paid overtime, I would be there for 8 hours and consider staying a little longer if production is burning down.

2) Flexible (meaning it does not matter if you work from 8 to 4 while skipping lunch, 10 to 6 or you don't show up at all - this is my situation now).

I will still track my time down to a minute. The overtime rules stay (unless I am really having fun with something and know I will get paid 150% of hourly for it). As for daily hours - usually I will work longer hours whenever required (within reason), at least at the beginning of the month.

Since my hours are flexible and I know exactly how long I have worked so far, I can easily stay there for 9-10 hours one week and leave after 6-7 hours the next, depending on the workload / situation.

I have noticed that some people, unless they are contractors with billable hours, look down on tracking your time or "punch clocks" as if it is beneath them. For me personally, it brings me the peace of mind. I don't have to ever debate myself whether I am working too much or too little since I have the exact numbers.

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?

#37

Post by peterkelly »

If I'm in the flow, I just keep going. My only hard-and-fast rule is that I'll stop if it gets to about 4am, because I find it very difficult to get to sleep if there's sunlight outside. I haven't always been this disciplined and sometimes used to go right through until I dropped from exhaustion, but discovered that was unhealthy.

Having said that, I almost never get started before midday, and often it's only in the early afternoon or sometimes even the evenings after a lot of online procrastination. I have some days when I'm extremely productive, and others where I really just can't get into the zone to do much of anything at all. In the latter case I'll just write the day off and try to make something of it in terms of relaxing. I make no distinction between weekdays and weekends, so I'll just work whenever I'm in a productive mood.

I'm also a remote worker; my client is on the other side of the world, and I bill by the day. So I have a high degree of freedom over which hours I work, and to a certain extent, the amount of days I work each month.

Butts in seats and meeting a quota of 8 hours a day is entirely pointless, and serves neither you nor your employer. The only things that matter are, in order: 1) your health & work/life balance, 2) the value you bring to your employer.

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?

#38

Post by emp_ »

peterkelly wrote: post #37

If I'm in the flow, I just keep going. My only hard-and-fast rule is that I'll stop if it gets to about 4am, because I find it very difficult to get to sleep if there's sunlight outside. I haven't always been this disciplined and sometimes used to go right through until I dropped from exhaustion, but discovered that was unhealthy. Having said that, I almost never get started before midday, and often it's only in the…

Amazing how I wrote this post without typing anything in it, I bill by estimate so if something is estimated 40 hours and I do it in 2, I can get more work or just chill, I usually book my time around 200 "hours" a week and some good weeks I work 18 real hours and the bad ones around 70, pays extremely well but has very little margin for error so the bad weeks have to be rare. I had 18 straight months of good weeks and now I'm in a 6 week streak of bad ones, great/awful clients make or break this system.
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