Busy to Death • Hacker News Board

Re: Busy to Death

#61

Post by curun1r » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 10:12 PM UTC

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #39

computator wrote: post #2

> Thinking is an activity too—don’t undervalue it. Make time and space for it in your daily work schedule. This is why I find it impossible to work effectively in open-plan offices. I'm often looking off in to space, thinking. But I feel compelled to make clickety-clack noises on a keyboard, continuously and unproductively, lest people think I'm not working.

By doing that you are only encouraging the "look busy" behavior in others. Please don't. The world does not need yet another million SLOC. We need to think a lot and type little.

This is why I encouraged my team to go on periodic walks throughout the day. I've always found that thinking can be easier when you move your body a little bit and getting out into the sunshine can improve your mood and cognitive abilities. If you can type at least 60wpm, as any professional dev should be able to do, the sitting at your desk part is just data entry and only needs to be done for a fraction of your day.

Getting organizational buy in, though, was a lot harder. At review time, when we were measuring employees against each other (don't get me started on the stupidity of stack ranking, but that was the system we had to follow), other managers would try to use it against my team saying that they're always away from they're desks and trying to compare them against their own team's long hours and heroic firefighting of production issues. It took me about 18 months of convincing before I got our directors to realize that my team was producing just as much functionality, with much more complexity, and doing it while seeing a fraction of the production issues that other teams saw. I had to get testimonials from our support team along the lines of, "we don't answer many questions about their stuff, it just works."

By the time I'd left, I'd just started to get through that busy isn't a virtue and hard work is only a good thing if it can't be avoided. Time spent reflecting is crucial to doing the least work necessary. Skipping that time will only create the appearance of productivity.

Re: Busy to Death

#62

Post by MaulingMonkey » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 11:01 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #55

TeMPOraL wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5) Consider journaling / take stream-of-concious notes / mind-mapping. Might slow your thinking down some, but might compensate for memory some too. I found myself unable to focus on thinking in the office, when there are other people present. I learned to compensate for that by doing my thinking in writing - I just start dumping my thoughts and talking to myself through my text editor. It feels a bit slower, but i…

Is a text editor more effective for you than pen and paper? I like a text editor because I can type faster than I can write, but something about writing on a paper works better for me.

I've also found text editors way easier to edit with - my thought process jumps all over the place, simple things like the ability to insert are a killer feature.

That said, I've recently started to go back to killing trees for things like daily checklists, as a physical reminder of stuff - and more "diagram" style doodling - all packaged into a three ring binder. At some point I plan to grab myself a document scanner so I can bulk archive my loose notes for convenience...

Re: Busy to Death

#63

Post by danek » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 2:11 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #19

Looking busy can sometimes be a defense mechanism for protecting your own space and peace of mind. When your cow-orkers, friends and family see you Very Busy, they'll be less likely to interrupt you all the time with irrelevant bullshit. In fact, this works extremely well, because people usually respect the fact that someone is working. On the other hand, when they see you not working, they think it gives them the ri…

In some companies you need to keep up appearances and look like you're busy all the time.

Re: Busy to Death

#64

Post by Radixex » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 2:13 AM UTC

rmah wrote: post #35

w0utert wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being lazy is a good personality trait to have if you are a developer, as long as you channel your laziness to be more efficient and get more done in less time. This frees up time you can spend thinking, relaxing, or reading/learning about stuff not directly related to the immediate task at hand. Over the long term you will learn more, stress less, produce fewer bugs, etc. The people I value the most as co-workers, w…

That's not being lazy. That's being proactive in improving your productivity. This is the opposite of lazy.

Thats what i call myself precrastiation, the act of doing now to laze later.

Re: Busy to Death

#65

Post by danek » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 2:14 AM UTC

coldcode wrote: post #45

I work at a big company where my manager is always 100% booked in meetings all day, and so are all the people he has to interact with. I never talk with him except for quick slack questions. Meanwhile we are finally pushing the biggest release ever of one of our apps to the app store this week after working for more than a year on our part, yet the next big release is supposed to be code complete next week already. I…

Some would say "perpetually busy management is bad management", and I'd agree.

Re: Busy to Death

#66

Post by danek » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 2:18 AM UTC

epx wrote: post #27

Once a guy chose not to go to office, instead he went to Starbucks -- so he could finish an important document (not some side project, but the kind of document he was paid to write). True story.

I've had to do this a lot. It's kind of fun to skip work to get work done, but it also annoys me because it makes it apparent that you can't get useful work done at work, and that makes me feel useless when I do go to work.

Re: Busy to Death

#67

Post by jamaicahest » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 5:29 AM UTC

computator wrote: post #2

> Thinking is an activity too—don’t undervalue it. Make time and space for it in your daily work schedule. This is why I find it impossible to work effectively in open-plan offices. I'm often looking off in to space, thinking. But I feel compelled to make clickety-clack noises on a keyboard, continuously and unproductively, lest people think I'm not working.

>> Thinking is an activity too—don’t undervalue it. Make time and space for it in your daily work schedule. >This is why I find it impossible to work effectively in open-plan offices.

That, and the fact that open-plan offices are, in my experience, a noise hell. There's always seperate 2-3 conversations happening in the room, some of them about actual work, but disturbing 20 people nonetheless.

Re: Busy to Death

#68

Post by Broken_Hippo » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 8:41 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #13

speedplane wrote: post #6

In professions where you get paid by the hour (e.g., contractors, lawyers, etc.) being busy is a proxy for making more money. So when people say, "I've been swamped," it's a polite way of them saying "I'm making bank."

> In professions where you get paid by the hour (e.g., contractors, lawyers, etc.) being busy is a proxy for making more money. On the other hand, in blue collar and McJobs, it's usually the opposite.

A lot of McJobs I've had nearly require busyness. If the boss sees you chatting with coworkers - it doesn't matter if the customer just left and it has been 2 minutes - You get told that there is plenty to do. If you can't find things, clean.

Of course, it has nothing to do with how much money is being made. Many don't do this because a lot of it feels like busywork, but it is what it is.

Re: Busy to Death

#69

Post by EGreg » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 2:23 PM UTC

shubhamjain wrote: post #11

I am often bemused how people actually end up being so busy. At times, I have felt insecure about my "free time" — sort of how I might be running behind people who are constantly occupied. But, taking a closer look, you can see how a lot of work that busy people do is something that can be reduced, optimised, and even completely done away with. Checking emails, and reports, taking calls that need not be taken, endles…

Yes they are busy. Busy creating free content for their friends on facebook to consume.

Today's generations do not know of the backbreaking work to develop the land and survive that our ancestors were faced with for nearly all of human history. Before animals were replaced with technology, owning them was considered quite a capital investment.

Today poeple sit in an air conditioned room and order in and consider that they "work hard". Maybe some do, intellectually, but most have it very easy.

Re: Busy to Death

#70

Post by valuearb » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 4:07 PM UTC

zubspace wrote: post #9

tunetine wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here I am trying not to look pissed off at everyone around me because they're sitting there doing little to no work, talking, and making noises.

I'm working in a small office with 4 to 5 developers. I actually enjoy the company and don't mind the occasional phone call or chat. Sometimes I can overhear another conversation and add my 5 cents to it, which I believe to be valuable. We also use slack and 'idle-ping' other team members first and keep conversations in slack if possible. This works quite well, too. Recently we had an intern, which had a very annoyin…

Open office plans are great till they aren't, and then fixing them is difficult to impossible. They are bulwarks of busywork, the enemies of deep thought, the land where every coworker gets to put their two cents in and believe it was helpful.