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A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

census.dev

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

#71

Post by yuuuuyu »

catiopatio wrote: post #58
irrational wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 typic…

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 have a typical coder job.) Thinking about what to work on today, remembering the problem I left off yesterday (having parked downhill), etc. It's a great distraction-free environment. Some of the best ideas come there. No slack, no email. No CI pipeline that screams at me. Sometimes I keep thinking after the shower before turning on the laptop. Just sitting on the sofa. By the time I log in, I may have already worked for an hour. Or perhaps two, if I started thinking about work right after waking up. On office days, I typically think work during the commute. There mostly, but often even on my way home. I think that all counts as work hours.

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

#72

Post by agentofoblivion »

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.

Similarly, I find it effective to simply writing down what the next step is, and what’s interesting/challenging about it in a couple sentences. It seems to directly solve the problem that this “trick” is indirectly solving, which is reducing the load of knowing how to get started next time.

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

#73

Post by augment001 »

yuuuuyu wrote: post #67
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…

That could backfire. Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's difficult to pick up from. To use the metaphor, perhaps you would be forcing them to park uphill.

> Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's difficult to pick up from.

Certainly some of them said that, and I had to push for them to leave anyway. I also feel like that when I’m coding myself sometimes.

But I think the of times when it’s actually true are vastly outnumbered by the times when it’s just an illusion, and it was obvious from the velocity and energy level that the policy worked.

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

#74

Post by gavmor »

"Go Home Red" is a slogan I've heard tossed around the length of my career, meaning "leave a unit test failing overnight." It's trivial if you're practicing TDD, since most of your time is spent coding against a failing test. A failing test really expands your short-term memory, ameliorating interruptions like meetings, Slack messages, and having a life.

Regarding open loops "living rent-free in my head," preoccupation with work outside work can certainly be a health hazard, but I have never found `git push` to reduce those ruminations. If engaging hobbies and loving community don't do it for you, maybe some mindfulness meditation might help "let it pass."

That being said, I am not super disturbed if even my dreams are infiltrated by the dayjob on occasion; I don't bill hourly.

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

#75

Post by augment001 »

yuuuuyu wrote: post #69
prometheus76 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or it could be that you had a brilliant idea for the rest of the sentence, but the strict rule prevents you from writing it down, and next day you can't remember it and chase it all day and still be unsatisfied in the end. Either because of lost time or because you couldn't remember/recreate it, or even both. I suppose it just goes both ways. Try not to finish sth so that you don't have the somewhat hard task to star…

> 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.

Although I disagree with you when it comes to corporate policy, I basically agree with you at a deeper level.

I think that being able to be completely asynchronous about how and when you work, while also being unafraid and deeply reflective about your process would be more of an ideal.

However this isn’t realistic in a corporate situation, and in such a setting most people are more likely to be suffering from meaningless workaholism induced by relentless corporate pressure than they are to be operating at the highest levels of self-actualization.

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

#76

Post by sublinear »

yonaguska wrote: post #41
sublinear wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I've been 60 minutes of focused work away from wrapping up this current ticket for the past two days. Too exhausted to get going in the morning before meetings and interruptions kill my productivity for the day. Usually I start work two hours before the workday actually starts because context switching and meetings drain me, and deep work won't get done otherwise. The curse of ADHD.

I already know I don't have ADHD, so I can tell you it might not be your ADHD. It's not that you're ruminating about what they asked, but that they all keep asking you because they use you as their syncing mechanism and must repeat yourself to several people. Effectively just as bad for productivity.

Morning meetings are a deliberate tactic. Middle management needs answers for their next meeting which is also right after yours in the morning.

The people who get to have meetings at the very end of the day are at the top of the hierarchy, and guess what? They got their work done!

If there was ever a real example of inequality that should be fixed (fuck all that DEI shit) this would be it. Work from home actually massively reduced this meeting train crap at my workplace, but they just found other ways to annoy people. It's still an improvement though.

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

#77

Post by gffrd »

yuuuuyu wrote: post #67
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…

That could backfire. Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's difficult to pick up from. To use the metaphor, perhaps you would be forcing them to park uphill.

Could, but likely won't: if the things you have to do regularly spill beyond the boundary of time set to do them, you're not deciding how to approach the things you have to do correctly.

Enforcing a constraint for the 90% scenario makes more sense than designing around the 10%.

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

#78

Post by augment001 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #39
gweinberg wrote: post #34

Earlier 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…

It’s true that the team was made up of mostly young, unmarried men. I think only one senior person had children. I don’t recall what his needs were, but I wasn’t a hard-ass about not leaving early if people were productive.

And certainly if the team in general hadn’t liked the hours, I’d have negotiated. We moved from 9am to 10am for that reason.

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

#79

Post by kitsunesoba »

generic92034 wrote: post #16
Cardinal7167 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way. I stop working with tests passing but write a context comment on whats to be done next. It’s like flushing my working memory.

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.

It’s crazy the degree to which the subconscious mind chews on problems it’s been given. I never even dream about the problem in question but pretty consistently sleeping on friction points like that will clear them in short order the next morning. It’s almost kind of spooky, like there’s a second person in my head burning the midnight oil.

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

#80

Post by rmilk »

yuuuuyu wrote: post #71
catiopatio wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 typic…

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 have a typical coder job.) Thinking about what to work on today, remembering the problem I left off yesterday (having parked downhill), etc. It's a great distraction-free environment. Some of the best ideas come there. No s…

Seconded. My daily walk to Starbucks is my time to meditate on my coding issue of the day, free from distractions of emails, office visitors, and meetings. Many coders I’ve met say a change of scenery can help you solve a problem you were stuck on. Also a chance to say hi to the local crows who appear to recognize me nowadays and don’t fly away when I walk by :)
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