Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work

>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. This tends to have a cascade effect on most kinds of work, locking up all your people resources.

Working in a retail store/break-fix repair/MSP environment, for a small business in a small city, this is absolutely the case. There is nothing more frustrating than having three customer projects on your plate, all of which are important (think "the email server is down"), and then the doorbell or phone rings and you end up spending half an hour walking an old lady through resetting her facebook password. It's an absolutely massive productivity killer, as well as making the day feel longer.

More employees would be the normal solution, but that's not possible here (we've had more in the past, it wasn't financially viable, apparently). Unless of course they started paying commission based on what people actually got done instead of a regular wage, which I'm not a fan of. (Though to be fair, if we did switch to that, the one employee who barely does anything would either get his ass in gear, or leave, so win/win maybe?)

If you're my boss watching me that closely, I'm going to be reading up on the OSS workforce sabotage manual.

Which is the best argument for WFH, really. At 3h a day + 1h commuting, it's 6h a day wasted for being in an office, crazy.

Yeah having the same device, software, and websites I use for work also able to connect to things I use for not work does not help my ADHD.

This is exactly why I've concluded trying to go my own way is the best long-term plan for me. Before learning about YC and HN and such, the thought never really occurred to me.

When I'm working on a personal project I'm really passionate about, my productivity is literally orders of magnitude higher than at any day job I've had. Months or years are compressed into days.

For any ambitious personal project that I'm intrinsically motivated by, I'm working on it and designing it pretty much every free moment I have. It's actually crazy to me how much I can get done if there's absolutely zero "ugh field" [1] inhibiting me. It doesn't feel like work at all. I'd happily take 20% of my current salary if it meant I could do that all day instead.

Even if it's stressful and even if I might fail miserably, I think life should be lived. If there's even the tiniest sliver of a chance that I could support myself just doing something like that, I know I'd be much happier. And if turning such a thing into a job or organization sucks the fun out of it, then I'll just keep trying again and again until I can find a project with a sufficiently viable enjoyment:financial stability ratio.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EFQ3F6kmt4WHXRqik/ugh-fields (Regarding the author's username: yes, it's that one.)