How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time • Hacker News Board

Re: How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time

#41

Post by jdleesmiller » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 6:44 AM UTC

beliu wrote: post #9

Thanks for sharing this. Is the metime code publicly available? I'm the CTO of another small tech company ( https://sourcegraph.com ) and I'm also a bit obsessive about time tracking. I wrote a small open-source CLI that gives you a CPU-profile-like view of time spent on your computer: https://github.com/sourcegraph/thyme . Thought I'd share since OP and others here might find it useful, and I'd love to hear any feed…

(Author here.) I have now made the source available: https://github.com/jdleesmiller/metime

Re: How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time

#42

Post by vidarh » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 6:56 AM UTC

cup wrote: post #6

The notion that a 130h work week is admirable, desirable, sustainable or useful is ridiculous and should be criticised every time it's raised. Unless you're working for yourself or working in a job where your contract compensates you by the hour then investing such huge swathes of time I think is destructive. There is a reason workers united, fought and were martyred for the 8 hour work week and the creeping clawback…

I also for a second don't believe it is productive time.

I'v worked similar hours, and believed I was productive, until I had a team and saw what happened to their productivity when they worked long hours.

Not just did it damage their productivity, but it killed overall team productivity, because it caused a rise in conflicts, rise in "downtime" where people were physically present and in theory working but didn't get anywhere.

This might "work" for some notions of work for simple repetitive tasks where you can have someone overseeing the work and "whipping" people to keep tempo up.

I have never seen it work with more than very moderate, very temporary, increases in working time, across a large number of teams over the last 20 years.

In fact, I'd argue that a 40 hour week is pushing it for developers. I have my most productive weeks when I work less, and I know many who are the same.

Re: How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time

#43

Post by jdleesmiller » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 6:58 AM UTC

lloydde wrote: post #10

> My app had some simple charting built in but no real analysis. It’s only now, six months later, that I’ve had a chance to really get into the dataset I'm interested to find out if the data influenced the OP from week to week (month-to-month) during the collection phase? Did it influence his keeping up his development by shifting it to weekends? Or was there other catalysts to that? What were they? Were there planne…

(Author here.) The shift to developing on the weekends wasn't really evident in the simple charts that I had --- I only found out about that after doing the detailed analysis, and it required doing some statistics to really pick out the trend from the noise.

I have now open sourced the app, if you'd like to dig deeper into what I was looking at during the (latter part of the) experiment: https://github.com/jdleesmiller/metime

We did have some large projects to complete on tight timescales that spilled into the weekend. We didn't really have a good system for sizing / pointing tasks (and we still don't) --- probably an area where we could improve.

Re: How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time

#44

Post by jdleesmiller » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 7:04 AM UTC

(Author here.) It's great to see my write-up on HN, and I'm glad to see it generating good discussion here.

Since several people have asked, I have now made my 'metime' tracking app open source: https://github.com/jdleesmiller/metime

Being in London, I have just woken up, so I will now be more able to answer any questions!

Re: How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time

#45

Post by taurath » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 7:15 AM UTC

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #38

spullara wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to take the shuttle to Twitter for an hour each way. I think I wrote most of the code I wrote there on the bus because of the reliable time in front of the computer.

Yep. Mirrors my experience with shuttles. I, too, have banged out some real work on a shuttle with headphones on. I unexpectedly regretted moving closer to the office because I lost this time, despite that making not a lick of sense.

Offices are for managers to feel that people are productive, not for people to be productive. Look around most offices and there is absolutely no space laid out for concentration time, except social concentration time.

Re: How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time

#46

Post by cel1ne » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 8:10 AM UTC

bluetwo wrote: post #16

The biggest thing I learned when analyzing my time, which I wish I had recognized earlier, was that I can have two types of productive days: I can have days where I do a million small things and hop quickly from task to task. Or, I can have days where I work on big issues and should not be interrupted by small issues. But, if I think I'm going to have a day where I work on a big thing and it turns out I get interrupt…

That is an old distinction that applies to writing as well:

* Creative day: work on big things, write a new chapter.

* Non-creative day: fix little bugs and papercuts, do spell-checking, generally improve or finish previous work.

Re: How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time

#47

Post by shubhamjain » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 9:21 AM UTC

jdleesmiller wrote: post #44

(Author here.) It's great to see my write-up on HN, and I'm glad to see it generating good discussion here. Since several people have asked, I have now made my 'metime' tracking app open source: https://github.com/jdleesmiller/metime Being in London, I have just woken up, so I will now be more able to answer any questions!

I am assuming that you didn't spent actively recording it but what does the time spent on sites like HN, Reddit et. al look like?

Re: How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time

#48

Post by jdleesmiller » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 9:55 AM UTC

shubhamjain wrote: post #47

jdleesmiller wrote: post #44

(Author here.) It's great to see my write-up on HN, and I'm glad to see it generating good discussion here. Since several people have asked, I have now made my 'metime' tracking app open source: https://github.com/jdleesmiller/metime Being in London, I have just woken up, so I will now be more able to answer any questions!

I am assuming that you didn't spent actively recording it but what does the time spent on sites like HN, Reddit et. al look like?

Sadly, I didn't specifically track HN / reddit --- it would have been 'clock stopped' :)

My feeling is that I read HN less than I used to, but I don't have any data to back that up.

Re: How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time

#49

Post by lusen » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 10:37 AM UTC

jdleesmiller wrote: post #44

(Author here.) It's great to see my write-up on HN, and I'm glad to see it generating good discussion here. Since several people have asked, I have now made my 'metime' tracking app open source: https://github.com/jdleesmiller/metime Being in London, I have just woken up, so I will now be more able to answer any questions!

Hi author. Small nit: consider changing your title to "their" time rather than "he" since you talk about "a technical co-founder". There's no need to use gendered language in the general case, and gendered language needlessly encourages gendered based identification. Imagine if you included your race and ethnicity and sexuality in the title - that'd feel silly, right? It would limit the audience who found the piece relevant, and it could be read as though those aspects were somehow relevant to being a technical co-founder. No doubt gender and race and ethnicity do effect one's experience and interactions, and that's a great piece to write, but that's not what you're trying to talk about in this piece so why put it in the title?

Re: How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time

#50

Post by AznHisoka » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 11:22 AM UTC

syntex wrote: post #30

karmelapple wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10-15 hours per week is your max? Do your clients understand that playing / trying out new things leads directly to you building the finished product? Or is your playing truly separate from any of your client work?

My max was 48 hours/week ( but this is an exception ) For living I build e-commerce solutions and backend stuff. And in free time I play more with a frontend. Recently with react/redux and in the long run with every possible new technology on the horizon. I guess I waste a lot of time doing this as most of these things isn't immediately related to client work. ( but over time It helps me to sell to them a few ideas f…

But do you bill considerably more than the 10-15 hours you actually work? If so I would find that unethical