Live data from Hacker News

How I got to 200 productive hours a month

qotoqot.com

281–290 of 296 posts

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#281
post #45

Who works 200 hours a month? That's either five 10 hour days a week or roughly seven 7 hour days a week. My time off work is far, far too important to me to be working either of those options. It seems I value working less than other people. I'm fine with that.

Umm, more than half of full-time US salaried workers? link" rel="nofollow">http://news.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-lo... My perspective is that working 40 hours a week is the rare unicorn of a job you'll only find in Europe or enterprise software. Every line operator in my plastics factory job got mandatory overtime for that much, too.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#282
post #45

Who works 200 hours a month? That's either five 10 hour days a week or roughly seven 7 hour days a week. My time off work is far, far too important to me to be working either of those options. It seems I value working less than other people. I'm fine with that.

Umm, more than half of full-time US salaried workers? link " rel="nofollow">http://news.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-lo... My perspective is that working 40 hours a week is the rare unicorn of a job you'll only find in Europe or enterprise software. Every line operator in my plastics factory job got mandatory overtime for that much, too.

Of the 4 jobs I've had (in US), none have in any way encouraged people to work more than 40.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#283

Besides the larger issues of whether or not this is something you should be doing, this seems a decent overview. Except for one part, the amount of exercise is terribly low. A swim a couple times a week and 30 minute walks every day is not good enough for your health or if you are chasing peak performance. First of all, this isn't even enough to offset the damage this much inactivity will cause. If you want peak ment…

I thought the latest was that it's diminishing returns (of life expectancy gains) after 30min of cardio (Assuming swimming is that) every day is not required.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#284
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you feel a sense of ownership around the work you do. That is great but I hope you understand that you do not own the code. You are a contractor and have no stake in the future success of the project. All of the extra free hours you are spending could be used to build your own product that you would have a stake in.

I've built my own product, now building someone else's product at a scale that was inaccessible to me in my previous adventures. I've had lots of back and forth with myself on that as it's the first time I hold a corporate position in 10 years and I found the idea of working for someone else very unlike myself. Eventually I understood I just like building stuff, the monetary compensation is just a bonus. If you let m…

The scale thing is one way of seeing you've found a place where you can be much more than you could be by yourself. I've put my exact same work ethic into other jobs and projects and gotten nowhere; in the current case where what I can provide is actually just what they need, I want to work as many hours as I can while the opportunity lasts. It's just wasteful not to.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#285
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought it partly because I like the offline tracker idea, other stuff seems to have some cloud backend. Also wanted to support development, it was on the front page a couple months ago. Decent product, if you are looking for something like this.

I was using RescueTime for long time but then discover Timing[1] (which also works offline). Never tried Qbserve but I highly recommend Timing. [1] https://timingapp.com/?lang=en

I downloaded this and Qbserve both over the weekend. So far is seems like Timing is better (but time will tell). However I am irked that I can't see the whole day for adding 'tasks'. For example yesterday I went out around 5PM for a movie. However the day kinda stops around that time as well.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#286

Are there any MyFitnessPal alternatives that don't force you to log in so that they can monetise my eating habits?

What functionality are you looking for exactly?

The ability to easily log all contents of meals, with a large searchable database so that I can just scan a barcode for most things or type the name. Then have the app tally up daily caloric intake, maybe macros, and graph it.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I started out, I thought you would be assigned work with the expectation that you could complete it. I basically murdered myself for a half a year and developed minor health problems, since I was broke and worried about losing my income. As my energy and stuff deteriorated I lost the ability to concentrate or do much work, and I started getting warnings for not working fast enough etc. At that point I felt manip…

> Eventually she seemed to start avoiding me, and then went psycho and left the organization. I often think that people say that someone is "psycho" when the person is actually just someone stupid who ended up with some power, perhaps through physical attractiveness, or through simple dishonesty, or maybe even both. Was that woman less intelligent than you? Was she not very intelligent to begin with? I think it's act…

No, she was pretty smart and sort of obese. She got in shape during the time period and was normal weight by the time she quit.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#289
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be completely honest I work 2 - 100 hour weeks per month. It is tough, but I work much better in bursts. I then basically take a 2 week vacation, but nobody knows about it except me. I schedule good chunks of Git Commits to push during my off weeks. In the off time, I still respond to email, and occasionally take meetings. Which might take an hour per day. But I don't do anything productive. I play a lot of Ninten…

I've always joked about doing this, but I'm surprised to hear this actually works for you. How long have you been doing this? How far do you go for your vacations? What kind of team do you work on?

I work at company with about 50 people. Most of my projects are mostly independent, which helps a lot. Launching a new micro-site, automating notification systems, stuff like that.

I don't travel on my vacations, because there is still the chance I have to go into the office for a meeting. I just focus on relaxing and recharging. Working on my own projects, learning new stuff, and being easy on myself.

Post reply on HN