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Busy to Death
41–50 of 72 posts
Re: Busy to Death
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being lazy is a good personality trait to have if you are a developer, as long as you channel your laziness to be more efficient and get more done in less time. This frees up time you can spend thinking, relaxing, or reading/learning about stuff not directly related to the immediate task at hand. Over the long term you will learn more, stress less, produce fewer bugs, etc. The people I value the most as co-workers, w…
That's not being lazy. That's being proactive in improving your productivity. This is the opposite of lazy.
man perl | grep -iA 1 laziness
:)
Re: Busy to Death
#43Looking busy can sometimes be a defense mechanism for protecting your own space and peace of mind. When your cow-orkers, friends and family see you Very Busy, they'll be less likely to interrupt you all the time with irrelevant bullshit. In fact, this works extremely well, because people usually respect the fact that someone is working. On the other hand, when they see you not working, they think it gives them the ri…
Get out pen and paper instead of looking idly into space. It helps organize your thoughts and also makes you look occupied.
Re: Busy to Death
#44Another aspect to this is that many people (hand sheepishly up) allow other people to determine their priorities both in work and life. It's much easier to react to external pressure by giving way than it is to pursue internally set goals while resisting external pressure.
Yeah, but long term, living that way is hard as hell. I've made that mistake quite a few times, and digging myself out is painful, every time.
Re: Busy to Death
#45I work at a big company where my manager is always 100% booked in meetings all day, and so are all the people he has to interact with. I never talk with him except for quick slack questions. Meanwhile we are finally pushing the biggest release ever of one of our apps to the app store this week after working for more than a year on our part, yet the next big release is supposed to be code complete next week already. I took one day off Friday and paid for it by having work on my day off today due to yet another problem at the last minute. Yet executives expect arbitrary dates for things without regard for how much pain it costs. Every release is filled with last minute problems fixed in a hurry to meet iron clad schedules. This isn't sustainable.
Re: Busy to Death
#46> Thinking is an activity too—don’t undervalue it. Make time and space for it in your daily work schedule. This is why I find it impossible to work effectively in open-plan offices. I'm often looking off in to space, thinking. But I feel compelled to make clickety-clack noises on a keyboard, continuously and unproductively, lest people think I'm not working.
> But I feel compelled to make clickety-clack noises on a keyboard, continuously and unproductively, lest people think I'm not working. Easier said than done, but some unsolicited suggestions: 1) Acquire the self confidence that your results will speak for themselves, appearances be damned. 2) Realize your coworkers also value thinking, and recognize it properly. 3) Realize your coworkers are probably too busy worryi…
This is great advice for so many things in life. In particular 1-4 is the advice I always give to people who start lifting weights at a gym but it applies to basically every task in life.
Re: Busy to Death
#47This went a long way to make a Vanilla Ice joke.
I don't see how you can go from 'Busy to death' and segue into a 'Vanilla Ice the Rapper' joke. Care to enlighten us? Alright stop, collaborate and listen...
Re: Busy to Death
#48I work at a big company where my manager is always 100% booked in meetings all day, and so are all the people he has to interact with. I never talk with him except for quick slack questions. Meanwhile we are finally pushing the biggest release ever of one of our apps to the app store this week after working for more than a year on our part, yet the next big release is supposed to be code complete next week already. I…
I relate to your comment a lot. My boss is completely unavailable except for a brief 1:1 meeting every other week. We are constantly given arbitrary, yet impossible deadlines to meet. Then the objectives change mid-stream and have to start over... It seems totally toxic and I'm already looking for another job. I'm totally burnt out of working like this.
Re: Busy to Death
#49Once a guy chose not to go to office, instead he went to Starbucks -- so he could finish an important document (not some side project, but the kind of document he was paid to write). True story.
That reminds me of my second job in the industry. My boss was very chatty and would keep me on the phone for hours every day if I let him, so I kept making up things so I could work without interruption. Funny thing, he was extremely lonely, had no life and loved to talk about mine, so I could tell him "my girlfriend is angry at me, it's really bad, I need to take care of it right now." I'd hang up, code for a few hours, and then call him back and make up a story about the fight I had with my girlfriend. That worked much better than telling him I needed some time to, you know, do all the stuff we talked about on the phone all day.
Re: Busy to Death
#507 Habits of Highly Effective People goes into this in depth with its quandrant system of time management:
q1: important and urgent q2: important and not urgent - the focus of the article q3: unimportant and urgent q4: unimportant and not urgent i.e. video games