I'm a business owner and I start my day early (5ish). I am usually done around 1 for a few hours then do another hour before bed. As I've grown older I've learned to recognize when my brain is mush and I've replaced actual work with the appearance of work. Even when things are going great there is a limit to what I am capable of each day.
Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
91–100 of 123 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#92How I handle juniors and beginners: It is ok to stay longer It is ok to stay longer especially as a beginner. You are in a learning phase. But still need to do your stuff. It is also ok to screw up or ask questions. Never ever go every week over 50 hours. I have a junior right now which works longer because he sees us working long hours. I will tell him soon to suck it up and go home on time.
To be honest (not always fair), if someone is working too many extra hours "to learn how it works", then that says something about the capacity and capability of the person.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#93When the clock hits 4pm, I have a daily standup meeting. About half the time, this meeting occurs, and I go home afterwards immediately. If it doesn't happen, a quorum of people had something better to do. If I don't have anything actually urgent or interesting, I tend to bail with the others. Otherwise, I work away until maybe 5:15, then I go home. I'm basically paid to be on-hand 9-5, so that's what I do. I don't c…
Not that you asked, but this sounds like a totally dumb time for this meeting. It creates a reliable interruption, such that if it happens you're likely to be distracted enough that it isn't even worth trying to get back into serious work for 45 minutes before you need to go home. It's also late in the day, so any tasks that come up must pass a high bar to be actually remembered and resolved. A task must either be so…
I haven't found an actually good time to have these kinds of standup meetings.
First thing in the morning is not good, because it requires people get in in time, and so it becomes a gate on starting work if you are on time until the latest person arrives. Also kind of useless to do until the morning email triage is completed.
Midday doesn't work, I've found, because it is impossible to carve out a consistent time to meet. External sources always try to clutter up 10-2 with calls and meetings that involve herding cats and aligning schedules over which there is little control. Also tends to blow into lunch time and people get hangry and cranky.
End of the day at least serves as a terminus to the day, and since standups are mostly useless, skipping it to sneak out and play golf or whatever tends to be a common outcome.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#94> This might work if we had actual sprints. Our reality is an endless stream bugs and features for us to work on before we launch our product, and we just grab tickets as they come.
> Hopefully this improves after launch.
It won't. It will improve after you or more likely someone more senior stands up and does something about it. Which requires buy-in. Which is much harder to get in a highly remote team IMO.
Or it will change when you find another job that already matches your criteria.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#95You're a junior SE and working remote? Yikes. I'd want others around that can help me out. So simply fixing bugs and adding features is a junior dev kind of task. Prioritization, understanding the business need - that's how you differentiate yourself at this point. It's not about hours worked but about identifying what is and what isn't as important.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#96Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#97These days I just do one big idea. If I finish early I might do other smaller tasks which I don't care about too much. When I was a junior dev I tried to do a lot of things everyday to prove how fast I am. That worked for the short term but looking back there are actually very few things which are genuinely useful. Creating new revenue streams for the company for example.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#98I generally try to get as much work done (in life) as I can. Some projects I can work for 12 hours a day on, others I'm tapped out at 6, so I just maximize output. If output is below the debugging cost of that code or something, I stop. Could be 2pm or 10pm.
Do you think this approach applies if you’re trying to save energy to work on side projects? I feel like if I work as hard as I possibly can at my day job, at the end of the day I’m not left with much juice left to work on the things I actually care about.
This is a place where having an awareness of what is important at your job can help. You described a process of adding features and fixing bugs. If you ever want to achieve balance, understanding the value of a feature so that you can determine what actually needs your time is important. Then, it's not about quantity of your time and effort that matters, but how much value you are adding.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#99Start the day with a plan.
I use the Franklin covey method of listing out tasks ranked by importance first. Most important have “A”s next to them, then “B”s and so on. Then rank the list by order, 1,2,3,etc.
List should look like this:
1A - most important fire drill task I need to get done today
2A - def have to do this too
3B - let’s do this after that
4B - blah blah blah
...
This will focus your efforts on being effective rather than efficient.
Then I intentionally detach myself from accomplishing everything on the list. There will be days when you can’t even get through task 1A so you really have to be able to cut yourself off and sleep on it. If you get too emotionally attached to completing the list you’ll experience dissatisfaction. Instead, choose to value other aspects of your life like the fact that you have flexibility, family time, good health, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?
#100Read Deep Work and find a schedule that works best for you. If it doesn’t work for your employer find a company that it will. You’ll be happier and more productive.
I have clients for whom I averaged 5-6 hours a day. They saw me come and go and were happy to pay me 40 hours. I have other clients who act like they cannot survive without me there 8+ hours a day. For them I get there at 7am and work till 5. Many days I leave still feeling like I didn’t get to accomplish everything I’d hoped.
There’s quite a bit of variety in expectations out there. You have to cross this river by feeling the stones.