This describes my situation pretty well. Working remotely makes "getting away with it" all too easy. Unfortunately the effect it's having on me is a great deal of anxiety. Though the anxiety is probably a combination of many factors: lack of social life/friends post-graduation, feeling stuck at a job I don't enjoy, wanting to move out of my parents' house but not knowing where to go.
Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
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Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
#52Ask HN: these are shit posts from throwaway accounts?
Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
#53My company gets utility from me when I'm sleeping, showering, or sitting on the throne. I'm thinking about my work tasks and how to solve them in those situations. When I'm at my desk in my open plan office (pre-COVID), the constant interruptions meant not getting any work done.
Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
#54I was in a similar rut. Not just professionally but academically as well for most of my life. Motivation had to be forced to do more than just enough to blend into the crowd. It took me saying enough is enough in my 40's to go get tested. Turns out I have ADHD. Getting therapy to deal with anxiety and depression stuff as well as getting on Adderall has done wonders.
I'm not suddenly working 40+ hours always in the zone. What has happened is that I've been better able to enjoy/engage with coworkers around helping them. Instead of feeling stuck and anxious, it's been easier to feel at ease at work and less fixated on metrics or usefulness. That engagement with my coworkers coupled with lowering how much effort was needed to do work that was previously seen as "busy" work has done wonders for my outlook about work.
In my case the benefit/problem of hyperfixation due to ADHD meant that when I had an interesting bit of work in front of me I could knock it out the park and it didn't feel like any effort. Those infrequent home runs were enough to make up for the times where I just couldn't be bothered to do other less interesting things. Didn't want to do them and because no one was asking me to do them it was ok that I didn't. Deep down I knew I was overcompensating in my strong areas to avoid the uninteresting items. This may not be you but if it is you may want to think on it. It's helped me outside of work as well. Parenting and dating.
Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
#55This sounds like it might be good thing for the company. Having employees who have extra capacity is incredibly important for an organization that wants to get things done; if you're constantly hard at work on something important, when something else comes up (someone has a question, there's a bug or an outage, whatever), you either have to delay the thing you're already working on, or delay the thing that came up. T…
They can pick up low priority tasks and if something of high priority comes in, it takes the precedence. An employee can also learn new tasks, rotate to different teams, cross train, fix old code / refactor, take a sabbatical-on-call, write documentation, etc which do not get in the way of taking on high-burst high-priority tasks. This is far better in terms of company's productivity than pretend-work that the OP is…
I don't really have enough information on the specific's of OP's job and what they're doing with their spare time. Reading tech books sounds like learning to me, but otherwise I don't know.
I think that it's really difficult for a lot of people to see the value they're providing outside of the proper business tasks they're assigned, and once there are tasks assigned to fill up all the time, everything breaks down. It doesn't matter if your task is something as irrelevant as "provide documentation regarding this vendor relationship," once it's on the board it can't be dropped and so you're no longer available to try the new tool people are looking for feedback on, or whatever.
The other thing doesn't even have to be high-priority, but if you're at a large enough organization, there are lots of things you'll realize can't be done well because too many people need to be involved, even if it's just a little bit of time. My org can't make any movement on, for example, API clients or API documentation because there are lots of different needs, but by the time you've gotten through the initial conversations it's a six months later, because people weren't available. There are many efforts we can't get done because that effort isn't priority for the team's involved, but requires time from people on those teams.
Ideally, of course, we try to minimize those things. But I've yet to hear of a sizeable org that has none of those kinds of things.
Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
#56Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
#57They pay you the bare minimum needed to keep you, so why would you do anything but the bare minimum amount of work? Passion is things you are actually invested in, like hobbies, or your family, or a business you own, or a particularly interesting question, or career development, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
#58While I don't seem to have all the information here, what I do have is enough to make a really good suggestion. I have some of the same issues with goofing off and such like that. So with this, a couple of questions. 1. Do you find yourself avoiding work you don't want to do outside of the job? 2. Was this a problem in school? 3. Have you talked to a doctor about this? Number three is the most important. I have ADHD,…
ADHD and WFH have basically been a death sentence for me in regards to my output and velocity. Some days are good, some days are horrible. As someone who received their ADHD diagnosis at 22 (well after I fumbled through a CS degree wondering if I was a moron, while also working part time at startups) it changed my life. Ignorant people will say "nobody needs stimmies" but 5mg Adderall has legitimately changed my life…
I've been extremely lucky with WFH actually significantly improving my productivity. My ADHD in an office environment was significantly worse. Coworkers coming to talk to me, overhearing conversations from the break room, unlimited free snacks, etc. I'm also fortunate to be able to have a dedicated space at my home to use for work so I can still have that "disconnect" at the end of the day.
Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
#59by the end of my employment at Google, I was working about 2 hours a day (and getting Meets Expectations at L6, which is OK but not great). While I'd be online and available to respond to chat for 8 hours, I only exerted about 2 hours and most of that was just explaining to executives just how bad our fleet was. Before that I had worked at least 6 hours a day. And I assumed that to be "right" i should be working at l…
> From the feedback I got, I wasn't much more productive working more hours I've had this feedback too and I feel like it is likely not true. Really what it is is that your managers aren't paying much attention to your output and have sort of written you off for promotions, raises, etc. This was feedback I got a couple of months after I had been working my ass off trying to impress management and then a couple of wee…
I've actually noticed a completely inverse relationship between how hard & how many hours I'm (actually) working and how well I'm perceived by my peers and by management. This is unrelated to acute problems caused by errors on my part, or anything like that.
I don't get it, but if I feel like I'm working hard I now take it as a very serious alarm bell. Some of my best feedback has come when I was starting to get nervous because I felt like I was hardly doing anything.
Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
#60I was in a similar rut. Not just professionally but academically as well for most of my life. Motivation had to be forced to do more than just enough to blend into the crowd. It took me saying enough is enough in my 40's to go get tested. Turns out I have ADHD. Getting therapy to deal with anxiety and depression stuff as well as getting on Adderall has done wonders. I'm not suddenly working 40+ hours always in the zo…
“Not working enough? Just take meth!”