Could someone share a non-walled link please?
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I just don’t want to be busy anymore
231–240 of 463 posts
Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a weird fixation on productivity that gets drilled into our heads at a young age. It's beyond okay to not be running 100% all the time, regardless of what the paradigm espouses as value.
The biggest personal lesson from covid and lockdowns was that I dont need to be running at 100% for work all the time. Bertrand Russell wrote about this in In Praise of Idleness
For any who have not seen:
https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
"In Praise of Idleness." Harper's Magazine. By Bertrand Russell
Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is tough if you actually try to have a team-oriented mindset. I’ve worked in groups (hard to really call them a team) where everyone, everyone , stiff armed duties. The end result is that the hard stuff, or low status stuff, never got done. I get there’s a balance, but if you entered a career where you actually care about the mission, it’s hard to just see that mission suffer because people want to take the easy…
I don’t want overworked medical professionals. I want the hospitals to hire more people to work healthy 8 hour shifts. There is a viable different approach, but the employers do not like it. Let’s stop pretending.
Are 8 hour shifts healthy for patients? More handovers is strongly correlated with poorer patient outcomes. We need to strike a balance between the falloff in ability that comes with consecutive hours awake past a certain point, and minimizing handover.
Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore
#234One thing that helped me is not to care so much about my employer's goals. It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far. I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right. You're probably not going to get rich from working…
People don't know what to do with their time. For those who know, they don't know why they do, what they do.
Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore
#235All good advice. I distinctly remember they day I changed. I was talking to my wife and telling her how I thought Sun should give more vacation, she pointed out that I had come back from the office at lunch time and that is was Christmas Eve which was a company holiday. So many things went "Click!" all at the same time. From that point on I made it a priority to be home by 6PM so that we could have dinner with the fa…
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Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore
#236One thing that helped me is not to care so much about my employer's goals. It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far. I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right. You're probably not going to get rich from working…
This is tough if you actually try to have a team-oriented mindset. I’ve worked in groups (hard to really call them a team) where everyone, everyone , stiff armed duties. The end result is that the hard stuff, or low status stuff, never got done. I get there’s a balance, but if you entered a career where you actually care about the mission, it’s hard to just see that mission suffer because people want to take the easy…
Hospitals and contractors are great examples of professional fields where job roles are well-defined and the hours worked are carefully tracked. When contractors get too busy, they tell clients their project is delayed. When ER or ICU resources are maxed out, they stop accepting patients and send them to other nearby hospitals. When clinics are fully booked, they stop making appointments.
I understand what you’re saying about a problem solving mindset, but that is not the issue in burnout. The issue is unrealistic volumes and deadlines that encroach too far into the rest of your life.
Personal boundaries exist in medicine, in fact they are essential to surviving a career in medicine. There will always be more sick, injured, and dying people. The hospital has the mission to save them all if it can. An individual doctor or nurse has to understand that they personally cannot. Or they will burn out very fast.
Overworked tech companies could benefit from some perspective from the medical field. Is someone going to die if your feature misses its ship date? Probably not. People die in ERs every day, but guess what: ER staff still work a fixed set of hours, take vacations, etc.
Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore
#237As a 54 year old Software Engineer, who has had a nice IT career for over 26 years, I'm spent. This is coming from someone who has always had a growth mindset and had a really hard time sitting still. I used to loathe naps and felt like I was missing out if I took one. Now, I take a one hour nap almost daily and I'm finding that after 1pm I'm basically fried (I start working around 7AM). I'm not sure what to do about…
Are you exercising? Lack of physical exercise is literally a killer.
Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the premise here is that the only purpose for a career is to "get rich". I think a lot of people genuinely enjoy the work they do, and the relationships they have with their co-workers. Or, on the darker side of things, over-work themselves because they can't find anything engaging _outside of work_. For both of those groups of people, they might not actually enjoy getting…
>the only purpose for a career is to "get rich". What other reason is there for a career? If there was no financial incentive for most, I highly doubt anybody would waste the time learning how to be a lawyer, programmer, or doctor. People don't just go into a career hoping to make a menial wage and work 40-60 hours a week.
Much of what I do, I would have done even without the money. The money is just a means to allow me to do what it for the duration of my life.
Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enough to retire early.
I think this is around $2M in the US, using what the FIrE community says. Does that seem reasonable, Or are you thinking about $20M+ payouts? (That’s what I would need to retire now.)
"retire early" does not necessarily have to mean "retire tomorrow", I guess it depends how old you are.
If you're in your 20s or 30s, 2M is probably not "retire tomorrow" money, but it would probably let you retire very early if you managed it and made smart investments with it. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think many ICs are getting even 50k from startup equity, nevermind 2M.
20M is "retire tomorrow" money for sure. And definitely workers do not get that kind of money from startup equity.
Most of what I hear now is companies giving fake "shares" that are ostensibly tied to the value of the company but are not actually shares and do not represent any ownership. If they do give shares it's not enough to pay out big, and they get diluted repeatedly over time.