Rediscovering the state of things and being in flow are very different things.
The author is entirely right about a trick to recover context.
But I'm not sure he's ever experienced flow.
A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
51–60 of 196 posts
Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm over 50. I work from home now, but when I did have to go into the office, I'd typically show up just before 10:30 standup and head out by 4. And I'd take an hour or two to workout in the one of the fitness facilities on campus in between. My bosses have always been happy with my work and output.
Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
#53Earlier 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.
Everywhere I've worked has been 9-6, at least this is 10-6 (the 8 hour day has been a lie my whole life)
Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
#54You’ll never be able to exist outside of work if you follow this advice. There is a mental burden to leaving things broken; if you really care, you’ll spend your cycles thinking about what is next and how to solve it. From experience, I don’t recommend it.
Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
#55My old colleague Mike Rowe said it this way: "Always leave it compiling" meaning, make a change and don't test it, just start the build and walk away. So when you returned you had something to dig into (didn't build, or did and needs trying). Also, you had a good feeling that maybe what you just tried will fix the problem or whatever. So you don't go home frustrated and depressed.
> good feeling
Hah, for me, these moments are some of the most stressful moments of coding! I am about to find out a very important piece of information: whether I'm done or not.
It's an intense feeling of anticipation like how you feel while hearing, "We, the jury, find the defendant...". I would like to avoid stringing that out over a longer period than necessary.
Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
I seriously think that the specific range of hours was not at all the point of the example. Would you disagree?
If you're going to nit-pick, my kid starts school at 9am, so I can't start work before 9am. What about remote workers and the example of walking around the office?
I'm pretty sure the example was specifically to note that cutting off their work hours was a successful tactic with respect to leaving them with something to start in the morning, vs letting them finish what they're working on and then have to figure out what/how to get started on in the morning.
Literally the point of the article there, leaving your work unfinished or broken, as it were, so you can just jump in knowing the next thing you were already going to do last night, but forced yourself not to or were forced to not finish.
Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
6pm? Man, I’m so glad I didn’t work for you. That is late.
Everywhere I've worked has been 9-6, at least this is 10-6 (the 8 hour day has been a lie my whole life)
I guess I'm lucky! The most restrictive places I've worked set the hours at 8-5, so at least it didn't cut into precious evening time.
Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm over 50. I work from home now, but when I did have to go into the office, I'd typically show up just before 10:30 standup and head out by 4. And I'd take an hour or two to workout in the one of the fitness facilities on campus in between. My bosses have always been happy with my work and output.
With an hour for lunch, that’s only 2.5-3.5 hours of work a day. Even less factoring in the stand-up.
What role were you able to be successful at while only putting in 2.5hrs of work a day?
Posted as an edit, since YC is doing its inexplicable rate-limiting on replies to this thread:
> Work != presence. In a role in which you don't have to sit in front of a computer, 3h presence could mean 8+ hours of work. … I typically start working when I step into the shower in the morning. … I think that all counts as work hours.
I work from home, but I do not count my showers as working hours. That’s patently ludicrous, and frankly, 2.5-3.5 hours of “presence” a day is unbelievable. Someone putting in so few hours is shirking their work, period.
My work is in software verification, so it’s not as if I don’t need time to think, but I also put in the actual hours required every day to appreciably kick the can forward.
I’d be livid to be stuck working with (and waiting on) someone who considered their shower and commute as working hours.
Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
#59You’ll never be able to exist outside of work if you follow this advice. There is a mental burden to leaving things broken; if you really care, you’ll spend your cycles thinking about what is next and how to solve it. From experience, I don’t recommend it.
I really think this is a "to each, his own" concept.
May work great for some people. May be terrible for others.
The internet is a wonderful place for the open exchange of ideas, if you just treat them as such.
Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Much older than 25 here. I still do insane hours when I'm starting my own business. But I have never, and would never, work that sort of schedule for someone else's startup (nor would I expect employees of my own startups to do so). If I'm going to kill myself like that, it's going to be to build my dreams, not someone else's.