61–70 of 196 posts
This makes sense. But does anyone else have problems with disconnecting when I know what needs to be done.
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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…
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.
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…
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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.
Yeah, you have to give it a solid effort for this to work. On day two if it's not solved yet, you have to give another solid effort before resting. I'm not sure if in this scenario it's an option to solve the problem on the first go. Usually when I hit this scenario, I am simply unable to do it in the first place, but the next day is easy.
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.
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…
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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.
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…
William Carlos Williams would do the same thing with his writing. He wrote for exactly one hour every morning, and he would leave mid-sentence many times. He said it made it much easier to get started immediately the next day.
I suppose it just goes both ways. Try not to finish sth so that you don't have the somewhat hard task to start with sth new next day. But at the same time don't stop in the middle of sth that's difficult to pick up from. A strict timing rule does only help if you are statistically more often at a point where it's easy to pick up again. I doubt that you are though, so I'd try a more concious approach than a clock.
I really like the parking downhill analogy.
Leaving a failing test clearly pointing at what to do next has been very effective for me.
I definitely read it somewhere.