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Every Weekend Should Be a 3-Day Weekend (2015)

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Re: Every Weekend Should Be a 3-Day Weekend (2015)

#151

Post by ghaff »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #148
ghaff wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not much for time management systems in general but one of David Allen's GTD tips I always liked was the advice that, if something will just take you five minutes, just do it. Sometimes easier said than done I know and I always dread whatever yak-shaving is going to result from easy task. But it's good advice in general.

Yes - I, like many, never actually finished GTD. But I still use the general approach. The sticky things tend to be the non critical more than 7 minutes but less than 20 minute tasks. But I will credit GTD with helping me get over the, "this thing is going to take so long" mindset and more often than not the, "this will only take a minute or two" mindset.

His ideas around doing reviews of your todos, etc. are also useful. Even if you don't do a formal review every Friday afternoon or whenever, the general concept fits well with his overall ideas around breaking tasks into manageable chunks and generally not being overwhelmed with an undifferentiated 75 item todo list.

Re: Every Weekend Should Be a 3-Day Weekend (2015)

#152

Post by adrianN »

jrockway wrote: post #141
prolikewh0a wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't doubt this idea has come up at least once in some shareholder meeting.

It does. I think apenwarr has a good outlook on this: "maybe we can just have the engineers work weekends or something? Well, I think most of us know that's a losing battle. First of all, even if we could get engineers to work, say, on Saturdays without any other losses (eg. burnout), that would only be a 20% improvement. 20%? Give me a break. If I said I was going to do a talk about how to improve your team's effici…

If only hiring 20% more people would mean 20% more efficiency we would have a lot fewer problems.

Re: Every Weekend Should Be a 3-Day Weekend (2015)

#153

Post by nickjj »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #128
nickjj wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think life becomes less stressful when you just bang those things out on demand. How long is it really going to take to glance through those 15 unread tabs? Chances are you'll do a legit sweep of them in 45 seconds and then maybe 1 or 2 things will be worth reading. Before you know it, you just knocked it off your list in 5-10 minutes. The same can be said for painting that spot on the wall, 10 real minutes end to…

I agree with you. However life gets in the way sometimes and those little quick things get delayed until later. Enough of those build up and that's when I run into those. The tabs are all things I've sent to my phone/home computer via pushbullet because they were articles I was interested in actually digging into and maybe doing more research on the topic later so they do takes some actual time or at least mental ene…

> I am the most happy or at least the most focused when I finish all of these things thus the clean up day

But what happens for the week or weeks in between that? Are you also equally as happy because those tasks are out of mind?

For me, I just constantly think about "I should have done...", "damn it, I really should do...", and before you know it, you get overrun by those thoughts and nothing gets done. The only way I've learned how to bypass that is to just do things as soon as possible. Sometimes I'll delay things from the morning to do at night, but I really try my best to do them now.

Then you're just constantly crushing out tasks and getting things done and it builds up a lot of positive momentum.

Re: Every Weekend Should Be a 3-Day Weekend (2015)

#154

Post by logfromblammo »

danny8000 wrote: post #127

I think we should switch to a six-day week (just drop Wednesday). Two day weekend, four day week: http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/60-Week_Calendar

We could go partial French Revolutionary, and have 36 10-day weeks at +3-1+3-3, plus an intercalary partial week at -5 or -6. Since we're not [all] French, the days of the week would be renamed as follows: Workday, Bluesday, Grindsday, Humpday, Schmerkday, Slogsday, Highday, Lazyday, Gamesday, and Chillsday. This would be referred to as the "Bactrian week", and the previous +5-2 week a "Dromedary week". The partial week shall be "Festivus Week".

For essential personnel, they cover all days of the week by working a rotating schedule of 9-day cycles (+3-1+3-2) plus one vacation week of 9 days off in a row, which adds to the previous 2-day weekend for a total of 11 consecutive days off. Festivus has staggered 3 on, 2 off, at double pay. Employees draw straws at 60% probability for working a leap day.

There's no need to rename the months. Years start on January 1st and follow Gregorian leap day rules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

~

Re: Every Weekend Should Be a 3-Day Weekend (2015)

#155

Post by xutopia »

EZ-E wrote: post #45
biggio wrote: post #17

There shouldn't be weekends. People should be allowed to take any 3 days off during the week. This will reduce unemployment and increase productivity.

France tried to reduce working hours to 35 hours, hoping to create jobs : it didn't go well

It didn't create more jobs but what about the other effects? Reduced stress on employees and increased productivity during working hours?

Re: Every Weekend Should Be a 3-Day Weekend (2015)

#156

Post by windexh8er »

cheez wrote: post #120
windexh8er wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. While I will often block off two or three hour chunks early in the week for deep dive I often relent on releasing that time to yet another meeting. Having switched employers a few times in the last 5 years I find myself taking more and more time off between. It's amazing how much you can clean off your plate of learning, catching up and self improvement in that amount of time. Ultimately I feel as though it's p…

Because most employers can get 9/10x5

Understood. But does it net anything positive beyond said "extra" hours? It's like the new quarterly earnings game on Wall Street: let's all report non-GAAP and make it look like we're not losing money.

Re: Every Weekend Should Be a 3-Day Weekend (2015)

#157

Post by jrockway »

adrianN wrote: post #152
jrockway wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. I think apenwarr has a good outlook on this: "maybe we can just have the engineers work weekends or something? Well, I think most of us know that's a losing battle. First of all, even if we could get engineers to work, say, on Saturdays without any other losses (eg. burnout), that would only be a 20% improvement. 20%? Give me a break. If I said I was going to do a talk about how to improve your team's effici…

If only hiring 20% more people would mean 20% more efficiency we would have a lot fewer problems.

Sure, but there are a lot of efficiency killers to look for before you need to worry about individual hours worked.

Adding 20% more people doesn't make the software come out 20% faster because:

1) Multiple people need to work on the same critical section of the code, and then there are merge conflicts. (Or people disagree on the design, or refactoring becomes a higher priority than doing what users want, etc.)

2) People work sloppily and omit relevant tests, only for someone else to have to re-discover the bug, fix it, and write the tests (trading productivity from one person to another).

3) People work on the wrong tasks, adding 20% more technical debt but not fixing 20% of the highest-priority bugs.

4) People take 20% less responsibility so you end up with "someone else will handle that (where "that" is usually documentation, monitoring, deployment, or anything else not explicitly captured in your list of bugs/priorities).

It is very interesting to me how internal software development often fails (I'm sure I've been the point of failure before), but software development CAN scale. I use AWS, for example, and I'm sure their software engineering teams are messing with products/features that my team uses. But they don't make me 20% slower. Ultimately, overly-tight coupling gets you every time. But on the other hand, too much isolation can also be a problem (time spent overengineering). If you find that balance, you can scale your team infinitely ;)

Re: Every Weekend Should Be a 3-Day Weekend (2015)

#158

Post by refoundglory »

knodi123 wrote: post #136
AlwaysRock wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did/have you asked? I know a handful of people who have asked and successfully accomplished this. I know a lot more people who wish they could but don't want to ask for fear of being seen as a low performer or something.

Um, actually no I didn't think to ask. That's a good point. I'm traveling to meet my distributed team next month, maybe I'll delicately broach the subject.

You might find it easier to get agreement on "taking unpaid leave" rather than "reducing work hours and salary". It seems to fit into people's mental frameworks more easily.

Re: Every Weekend Should Be a 3-Day Weekend (2015)

#159

Post by a-saleh »

metabagel wrote: post #113
schrodinger wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s plus 25%, not 20, since you’d make 5/4 the pay.

They are correctly using the upper salary and hours as a reference point in both cases. Perhaps the language could be clearer, but it doesn’t make sense to use different reference points for comparison.

These are rough estimates :) while comparing offers of my previous and current employment, there was the thing of having less vacation when working part-time (only 16 days, no sick-days, compared to 25+5) but the 20% pay-rise vs 20% less work seemed like the simplest comparison to get across :)

Re: Every Weekend Should Be a 3-Day Weekend (2015)

#160

Post by redwheelbarrow »

xfitm3 wrote: post #58
redwheelbarrow wrote: post #53

While I support this in theory, the news source looks less than credible. On another article they suggest that medical professionals as well as IT professionals were becoming "dead career fields" which is very odd.If you look at hiring statistics in the latter at the very least, you will see that this is somewhat alarmist.

Both “IT professionals” and “medical professionals” are incredibly vague terms. If the author is referring to corporate IT I do agree this niche is dying. Business support isn’t a great place to be. Operational roles in product typically pay better and give you a greater opportunity to make an impact.

That's a very valid point. I was more confused by the point he was trying to make when he suggested that front-line medical workers are being less in demand however. In that respect, I was being vague, not the author. They directly mentioned that primary care workers are dying, which is demonstrably false.

Front-line/primary care providers in Canada at least are among one of the most in demand members of the work force. Look at the nurse shortage for example. If you get yourself a degree in nursing, you are almost guaranteed a job. If I look at members of my generation that I know who are employed VS not, I struggle to find any who majored in a professional health program (excluding premedical programs which are non-professional programs) who were not working in their field almost immediately after graduation.

In comparison, I know of a handful of people who graduated from highly in demand engineering programs and are entirely unemployed. As in, no job what so ever. Many also are not employed in their area.

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