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Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

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Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#31

Post by naavis »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #30
naavis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours. Honest question, do you unilaterally ignore any other parts of the contract?

Arguably these contracts are a legacy of factory shifts in industrial revolution times. What (most) managers want is your output, irrespective of how long it will take, may be 12h or 3h. One could argue, that while working 3h or 4h one should still be available to support, help, communicate, meet with, your team and stakeholders for the remaining hours of that contract. I would not have an issue with less hours provi…

This I agree with. But I would say being available to help and support and whatever is part of the job. If you say you work for 4 hours, but still have to be available for all of the above for 8 hours, you are working for 8 hours, not 4.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#32

Post by distances »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #28
naavis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours. Honest question, do you unilaterally ignore any other parts of the contract?

Nobody works exactly to the contract. Except perhaps in the most monitored and hellish workplaces (e.g. Amazon warehouses).

What do you mean? As far as I know, I've always worked according to the contract.

Some of my employers had flexible timekeeping, and then I would often work a bit over 40h/week so that I could take extra days off for extended weekend trips when I felt like it.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#33

Post by mjburgess »

abm53 wrote: post #5
Lacerda69 wrote: post #3

Working less seems like reasonable advice all around. To be honest I rarely have more than 3-4 productive hours in a day, where I actually get hard stuff done. Sure on special days I can be productive 8+ hours; but those are rare.

For me the open question is if you decided up-front to only work 3–4 hours, would you be as productive as you are in those 3–4 hours out of an 8 hour day? Highly job and person dependent I suspect.

I suspect that if you can habituate yourself to a sustainable number of daily hours (eg., 3-4) where you always work, barring illness etc. Then I believe you'd have a net positive output for most professions, and most software engineering domains.

J. Blow has much to say against this, but i've never really heard him engage with this integral of productivity given habituation. I guess his reply to my argument above would be, "sure, but are you actually working these hours? if no, it's just rationalisation for lazyness"

And i'd suppose, in most cases, it is.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#34

Post by rvba »

Congratulations to the author for building a successful product from which they can make a living! Even bigger congratulations that the product can be maintained / extended by working few hours per day.

For example 4 hours x 31 days = 124 hours per month.

Now compare this to a corporate job where it feels like you are setup to fail. Every day 3-6 hours of meetings / conference calls. Constant flood of emails that are often irrelevant or unclear, but you need to stay focused reading them because something can be relevant to what you are doing (often the part important to you is written in an ambigious way, since they dont know what to do with your case - so you have to ask for clarifications - more meetings). Constant context switching due to having to drop what you are doing to do something else. Trying to do you your actual work.. often after hours, when they still call you. Or you cant even do your job, because someone who is supposed to provide something for you didnt do it on time, so you are waiting. (They update that it will be there the next day, on next day -> they again say next day and so on).

10 hours per day x 21 days = 210 hours

Of course corporate work is safer. Somehow the corporation exists and moves forward.

That's why it is so impressive that the author can be their own boss. Could even make some contracting work from time to time.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#35

Post by [deleted] »

abm53 wrote: post #5
Lacerda69 wrote: post #3

Working less seems like reasonable advice all around. To be honest I rarely have more than 3-4 productive hours in a day, where I actually get hard stuff done. Sure on special days I can be productive 8+ hours; but those are rare.

For me the open question is if you decided up-front to only work 3–4 hours, would you be as productive as you are in those 3–4 hours out of an 8 hour day? Highly job and person dependent I suspect.

[deleted]

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#37

Post by JonChesterfield »

Work is a mixture of thinking through problems, writing down the answer, debugging systems, talking to stakeholders, writing prose for engineers or management.

An idea from the creative artist world is to consciously divide the tasks into creative and other. Game plan goes:

Wake up. Do not read email. Or slack. Breakfast then walk, thinking about things.

Write down the ideas you want to come back to. Then lunch.

Then take a look at email, slack. Do the traditional fire fighting while trying to write code simultaneously game until the evening.

Spend the evening socialising, reading, generally taking in new information, probably in the hope that it gets sorted while you sleep and takes your mind off the fires of the afternoon.

That's not a path to three hours a day of work. But it probably is a way to make progress on hard problems despite a software dev day job that applies pressure against that, via cultural firefighting.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#38

Post by andirk »

naavis wrote: post #31
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably these contracts are a legacy of factory shifts in industrial revolution times. What (most) managers want is your output, irrespective of how long it will take, may be 12h or 3h. One could argue, that while working 3h or 4h one should still be available to support, help, communicate, meet with, your team and stakeholders for the remaining hours of that contract. I would not have an issue with less hours provi…

This I agree with. But I would say being available to help and support and whatever is part of the job. If you say you work for 4 hours, but still have to be available for all of the above for 8 hours, you are working for 8 hours, not 4.

In "agile" or "scrum" or whatever story pointing is, the "level of effort" is often touted and rightfully so. The mind can quickly become exhausted after grueling mental labor. Personally, I often get some 5 hours of solid work in one day and consider that enough. Other times, I'll work 10+ hours in a day on less mentally grueling work but I rarely bill over 8 hours in one day even if it's more. I always want my employer to see the cost of me as well worth it.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#39

Post by brigadier132 »

cesaref wrote: post #14

The headline doesn't reflect the reality - I think what is really going on here is that 3 hours are spent doing what is considered 'work' by the outside world (sitting in front of the machine and writing the code that people believe is what the job is). However, creative stuff like programming doesn't tend to fix in such a neat box, and the preparation, or creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problem…

I find I need at least 2 hours of continuous focus to get any real work done and 3 hours to be really productive. If I start at 9:00 am and have no meetings in the morning that means I can get a meaningful piece of work done by the time I eat lunch. Then if I have no meetings in the afternoon I can get another meaningful chunk of work done. Oftentimes though, days are wasted because of meetings thrown in haphazardly.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#40

Post by tap-snap-or-nap »

abm53 wrote: post #5
Lacerda69 wrote: post #3

Working less seems like reasonable advice all around. To be honest I rarely have more than 3-4 productive hours in a day, where I actually get hard stuff done. Sure on special days I can be productive 8+ hours; but those are rare.

For me the open question is if you decided up-front to only work 3–4 hours, would you be as productive as you are in those 3–4 hours out of an 8 hour day? Highly job and person dependent I suspect.

Sometimes I can do weeks worth of work in just 30 minutes. Some people can cut a lot of labour time perhaps years worth for multiple people. Productivity can get hard to measure.
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