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> Two years ago I could spend a week not working because I was avoiding some task. This is a great article and there’s plenty to talk about in organizational systems, even if this seems to be subtly pitching his own products in places. But if anyone reading this identifies with this sort of chronic procrastination, consider seeking psychiatric help. This is a giant red flag for adult ADHD, which is a serious and ofte…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well actually I think people should first try getting off social media - and not just that - getting off Internet.
This is anti-advice. This is like telling depressed people to be happy or victims of violence with PTSD to 'grow a pair' and 'snap out of it'. This is the kind of simplistic, unhelpful, shaming advice that keeps mental illness taboo.
I was expecting the answer to be "hired a employee", not "worked 50h work weeks".
I get what you're saying, but "productive hours a month" as a metric has to really be per-person, because hiring a new person should cause "reversion to the mean" in the productivity calculus, instead of magically increasing the total. Mythical Man Month logic dictates that a boss that is ~90% efficient at using their own time, that hires and delegates work to someone who is only 50% efficient, will end up getting le…
I found that people start to lose productivity after about 36 hours per week. Just four more hours, a full 40 hours, saw a drop in production. Over 40 hours and it was very noticeable.
This mostly applied to mentally taxing jobs.
My solution was, as best as I could, to hire people to do certain jobs, not hire them to fill seats for certain hours. Employees had a job to do and I was happy so long as they got it done well and on time. If they got it done early, they still got paid the same.
I'd not much care if they just went home after their job was done. So long as they met the time constraints, it was all good. Now, they usually stuck around and worked on other stuff, helped out, or refined their work. We also had, at one office, a pool table and small bar in the back - so they could opt to just hang around.
Still, once knowledge workers go past about 36 hours, they start to really slow down - by my observations. It really wasn't worth it, most of the time, to have someone working overtime. They get sloppy, slow, and unhappy. It can be done for a crunch time, but that I found that should be a rare thing.
The Seattle Hundreds that I hear about? Yeah, if I caught an employee trying to do something like that, I'd probably have reprimanded them. If they kept it up, I'd have probably terminated their employment with us. I don't want worn out employees and I don't want others feeling pressured to work long hours.
Heh... Sometimes I kinda miss the office. Threads like these bring back fond memories.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well actually I think people should first try getting off social media - and not just that - getting off Internet.
If you have ADHD it’s not so simple. When I’m off my pills — which is to say every day of my life before I was diagnosed — I don’t really make conscious decisions about such things. I open my computer to work and find myself on Twitter or Facebook or HN or whatever 20min later without thinking about it. I mean that literally with no hyperbole. ADHD manifests from an under developed or under stimulated prefrontal cort…
thanks for sharing your experience
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well actually I think people should first try getting off social media - and not just that - getting off Internet.
If you have ADHD it’s not so simple. When I’m off my pills — which is to say every day of my life before I was diagnosed — I don’t really make conscious decisions about such things. I open my computer to work and find myself on Twitter or Facebook or HN or whatever 20min later without thinking about it. I mean that literally with no hyperbole. ADHD manifests from an under developed or under stimulated prefrontal cort…
I am not saying you don't have a problem, because I also feel like someone who has ADHD and feel a lot like the author of the article.
But I also think that, just like the author, you can change your 'ADHD' by changing your behaviour.
Again: I dont want to put anyone down that is labelled with ADHD, but I think this culture is on it's way to create an ADHDer of everyone.
One thing really fundamentally helped me, as someone who works from home on a large project in an asynchronous 100% remote organization.
I work on a fairly involved project that demands a lot of hard work. At the same time there are other things I want to get done: some administrative duties, some nonprofit work, etc etc.
That makes me stressed and anxious, and my natural response to that is to buckle down and try to "finish" the big projects, by overworking...
Except overworking doesn't actually tend to mean getting a lot of work done, because I spend more mental energy being stressed about how much I have to do than I spend on actually doing it.
It's a pretty vicious cycle and I guess it is a proximate cause of burnout.
It all changed when I realized I cannot sustainably do more than a few hours of hard work every day, and took that to heart.
Now I don't try to get more done in a day than is sustainably possible.
I wake up pretty early, around 6, sometimes 7, sometimes 5. Then I make a cup of coffee, some small breakfast, and sit down in my comfortable coding environment, and do a sprint of serious working.
About 4 hours of that is usually enough to land a decent series of commits that definitely advance the project.
Then I do the mental magic that previous me never did. I think: "Wow, that's great work for one day! I'm definitely on track!"
And at this point it's like 11 AM. So I can happily go have lunch, another cup of coffee, listen to a podcast or something, and know that I have plenty of time in the afternoon for paying bills and whatnot.
I also like to take some time in the afternoon to improve my work life in some rewarding way. This includes Emacs tweaking, build server and CI setup, etc. Lately I've managed to get my business email into a form that I enjoy.
(Details: my maildir gets mined for all the important recurring PDFs which end up in monthly folders, and since yesterday I even have a shell script that uses "pdftotext -layout" to parse out due amounts and OCR/reference numbers from the few recurring bills we need to pay manually. This eliminates a type of drudgery that I really loathe, so it's a huge win in terms of mental energy.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is anti-advice. This is like telling depressed people to be happy or victims of violence with PTSD to 'grow a pair' and 'snap out of it'. This is the kind of simplistic, unhelpful, shaming advice that keeps mental illness taboo.
I think you misrepresent the parent post. Suppose you had insomnia. Wouldn't it be a fair suggestion to cut back on coffee and other stimulants first, before trying sleeping pills?
> Two years ago I could spend a week not working because I was avoiding some task. This is a great article and there’s plenty to talk about in organizational systems, even if this seems to be subtly pitching his own products in places. But if anyone reading this identifies with this sort of chronic procrastination, consider seeking psychiatric help. This is a giant red flag for adult ADHD, which is a serious and ofte…
Not even a just diagnosis as specific as ADHD. I was a chronic procrastinator due to anxiety and high expectations of perfectionism. Working with a psychologist using CBT has transformed my productivity by allowing me to learn that it's possible to let things not be 'perfect', whatever that meant anyway.
> Two years ago I could spend a week not working because I was avoiding some task. This is a great article and there’s plenty to talk about in organizational systems, even if this seems to be subtly pitching his own products in places. But if anyone reading this identifies with this sort of chronic procrastination, consider seeking psychiatric help. This is a giant red flag for adult ADHD, which is a serious and ofte…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get what you're saying, but "productive hours a month" as a metric has to really be per-person, because hiring a new person should cause "reversion to the mean" in the productivity calculus, instead of magically increasing the total. Mythical Man Month logic dictates that a boss that is ~90% efficient at using their own time, that hires and delegates work to someone who is only 50% efficient, will end up getting le…
Over the years, I've employed a lot of people. Unless there is a crisis, I don't want anyone working that many hours. If there is a crisis, then I still don't want anyone working that many hours, so we need to figure out how to avoid that crisis in the future. I found that people start to lose productivity after about 36 hours per week. Just four more hours, a full 40 hours, saw a drop in production. Over 40 hours an…