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A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

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Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#31

Post by sublinear »

yuuuuyu wrote: post #23
generic92034 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand it can be helpful, in my experience, to stop right in the middle of a very hard problem, where you are still searching for a good solution. Come the next morning I often know at least a possible solution, without having worked on it consciously.

The risk with this is that you keep procrastinating away before getting going again. It's the anticipated pain of frustration that prevents you from starting. Not so much if your idle time generated a solution to the problem. But if it didn't, then you are in trouble.

This is an underrated comment. Not only this, but there are some micromanaged environments that make this impossible and you're immediately hit in the face with a meeting first thing in the morning that destroys any energy you might have had to continue after being asked several ways if it's "done yet".

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#32

Post by prashp »

This is good general advice, but there are situations where it doesn't always work. Sometimes I've come back the next day, finished the thing I was working on within 1 hour and then I get stuck for the rest of the day trying but failing to be productive. Maybe it would have been better to finish the day before and taken the next day off?

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#34

Post by gweinberg »

irrational wrote: post #29
augment001 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineering director years ago I had the rule that engineers hours were 10am-6pm, and I'd walk around the office at 6pm and send people home. I'd get complaints that I was making people stop when they were in the middle of something, and I'd just say, you can carry on with it in the morning. It worked extremely well. Engineers just wanted to get on with their work as soon as they arrived in the morning. We'd ha…

6pm? Man, I’m so glad I didn’t work for you. That is late.

Not if you don't get there until 10 is isn't. But enforcing a late start is a lot harder than enforcing an early finish. What are you going to do, refuse to let people in if they show up early? Besides, sometimes you can't help it. When I was taking BART to work, I had to get to the station before the parking filled up.

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#35

Post by [deleted] »

irrational wrote: post #29
augment001 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineering director years ago I had the rule that engineers hours were 10am-6pm, and I'd walk around the office at 6pm and send people home. I'd get complaints that I was making people stop when they were in the middle of something, and I'd just say, you can carry on with it in the morning. It worked extremely well. Engineers just wanted to get on with their work as soon as they arrived in the morning. We'd ha…

6pm? Man, I’m so glad I didn’t work for you. That is late.

[deleted]

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#36

Post by throwaway1777 »

irrational wrote: post #29
augment001 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineering director years ago I had the rule that engineers hours were 10am-6pm, and I'd walk around the office at 6pm and send people home. I'd get complaints that I was making people stop when they were in the middle of something, and I'd just say, you can carry on with it in the morning. It worked extremely well. Engineers just wanted to get on with their work as soon as they arrived in the morning. We'd ha…

6pm? Man, I’m so glad I didn’t work for you. That is late.

Are you younger than 25? Because working 100 hour weeks used to be common in startups. Look up stories from the early days of google and Facebook. People lived in the office. It was by choice. No one forces you to do it and plenty of other companies to work for if you wanted balance.

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#37

Post by DelightOne »

I usually add a line with a plain "todo" to break the build and afterwards a three-line comment describing what is supposed to change. At the end of the change I remove the todo-line and move the three-line comment to the now-better location as documentation for why that code there is the way it is.

When I don't have such comments, its usually back to the collection of design documents thinking through the next feature.

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#39

Post by nonethewiser »

gweinberg wrote: post #34
irrational wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6pm? Man, I’m so glad I didn’t work for you. That is late.

Not if you don't get there until 10 is isn't. But enforcing a late start is a lot harder than enforcing an early finish. What are you going to do, refuse to let people in if they show up early? Besides, sometimes you can't help it. When I was taking BART to work, I had to get to the station before the parking filled up.

It’s still late in absolute terms. Not everything can just shift around to an abnormally late work schedule.

This sort of schedule gives you virtually no free time with kids. Get home, eat, put kids to bed, wake up early because school doesn’t start at 10am, send them to school, wait a bit, leave for work.

We are lucky that things are more flexible now. I don’t blame the manager. It was a different time. But it’s a schedule that doesn’t work well for a lot of people.

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#40

Post by [deleted] »

bradleybuda wrote: post #10
JohnFen wrote: post #6

I've been using this "trick" for many years. An old mentor taught it to me, but he called it "park facing downhill". The idea is to leave the workday with the work in a state where there's an obvious and easy task to start the next day with, like parking your car facing downhill so that gravity will get you rolling before the engine is up to speed.

(author here) "park facing downhill" is an excellent TL;DR - I'm definitely stealing this!

[deleted]
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