Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Leave Work at Work

hbr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 60 posts

Re: How to Leave Work at Work

#41

Post by TrackerFF »

One way to avoid work from home, is to pick a profession where your work is simply unable to follow you home.

Sounds obvious as hell, but it's true - some professions, even in tech, come with the benefit that you're not allowed to bring your work home.

Some people will probably say "but that just makes you stay longer at work", well - yes and no. Completely depends on your work guidelines. Some workplaces have stringent rules, and will practically shoo you home/refuse you OT if you work too much OT.

Re: How to Leave Work at Work

#42

Post by CarbyAu »

Frost1x wrote: post #36
CarbyAu wrote: post #35

Coming close to burnout, I realised the work game is bigger than me. If I have so much work that I am drowning and people are looking for me to do more and more and more..... that means my manager failed their Real Time Strategy Game and they need another worker at my level. Maybe that's because the next manager up failed their game, etc etc. But it doesn't matter why. I do 9-5. And I go home. That is the employment…

Many however don't do this and it often reflects badly on those who do try to work normal hours. They essentially set the bar higher and unless you're more efficient, you fall behind in performance assessments or output. One environment I interact with are all hypercompetitive and I probably look like an idiot to some of leadership because I refuse to work 60 hour work weeks like some of them grind away. If they deci…

I have managed to find a niche where others are not grind-minded either. I won't pretend to tell you or anyone how to do this given the complexities of everyone's life. I'm sorry, I don't know.

I am obviously not Startup material! :-P I am not management material. I am not an entrepreneur par excellence. I won't die rich.

But I hope to leave the world a better place than it would've been without me, even if only a little bit.

And enjoy it in the meantime.

Re: How to Leave Work at Work

#43

Post by megameter »

justatdotin wrote: post #38

I'm a long-term remote worker. At first it was challenging. After a year of trying to create boundaries, I gave up. Twice I'd had a 'bad' friday, only to have solutions reveal themselves while I was gardening over the weekend. I realised it did me no harm that my mind strayed to work while gardening, and in fact I was glad of it. So I made a decision to abandon attempts at erecting artificial structure, and quickly r…

For me the most important thing has been recognizing that I respond better to some boundaries than others.

Time boundaries are notoriously difficult to use well without a coercive force dragging you forward. For folks with executive function difficulties that often turns into the procrastination/anxiety brew that makes them seek out pharmacutical help. But time is often sought after first because it has a seductive simplicity: First you do this for an hour, then you do that...except that you overrun one and have oodles of time leftover for the other.

Place boundaries, on the other hand, work relatively well for me. In that instance the work literally is wherever you left it, and going about your day means checking off a visit to different places. The places can be small: Absolute distance and volume aren't really the issue so much as the perception of travel, and organization emerges from this as a matter of ergonomics. Computers actually make place organization harder because they tend to cram everything together. It takes active resistance.

Social boundaries hold a kind of cross between time and place: Checking in with a person can be challenging if you have to actively enter their space, but easy if you agreed to show up at a common place and time.

Re: How to Leave Work at Work

#44

Post by violetgarden »

dvasdekis wrote: post #40

I'm a solo founder working from home, and even though I'm kicking goals with the startup, I'm really having struggles with separating work from the rest of my life within my headspace. For quite some time, I've been waking up at 3am with work thoughts perhaps twice a week, and will struggle to go back to sleep. Does anyone have any advice, beyond what this article mentions?

Sometimes I wake in a panic with something I need to remember to do. Keeping a notebook by the bed really helps me. I jot down whatever it was, which makes me feel like I’ve “dealt” with it, even though that only means it’s on my to do list or just out of my head so I won’t forget it.

I’ve also found making a list of things I want to do tomorrow and writing them down helps me not have those panic wake ups in the first place.

Re: How to Leave Work at Work

#45

Post by violetgarden »

leghifla wrote: post #13
_dwt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been able to solve a problem at work that nobody else could, or solve it faster, or cleaner, or more robustly, by virtue of having learned previously about some random topic which you had no idea would one day be applicable to your work? I think most programmers have, and I'd hope that a good boss at a good organization would understand that - as long as you're accomplishing everything that's required o…

I once "solved" a tricky issue with a random bug in an FPGA processing data from DDR. The issue was hardware "malfunction": DDR can flip some bits if accessed in some ways. No one on the team did know about that, no one believed my fix could work (a one line for a bug we investigated on and off for months). It did. I had read a computer security article about how row hammer can be used to gain privilege or something…

Wow that’s an incredible fix! What an awesome connection to make.

Re: How to Leave Work at Work

#46

Post by vvanders »

Frost1x wrote: post #36
CarbyAu wrote: post #35

Coming close to burnout, I realised the work game is bigger than me. If I have so much work that I am drowning and people are looking for me to do more and more and more..... that means my manager failed their Real Time Strategy Game and they need another worker at my level. Maybe that's because the next manager up failed their game, etc etc. But it doesn't matter why. I do 9-5. And I go home. That is the employment…

Many however don't do this and it often reflects badly on those who do try to work normal hours. They essentially set the bar higher and unless you're more efficient, you fall behind in performance assessments or output. One environment I interact with are all hypercompetitive and I probably look like an idiot to some of leadership because I refuse to work 60 hour work weeks like some of them grind away. If they deci…

That only works if you either don't care about retention or long-term gains(which is an extension of retention).

You can argue the humanist point of view to not burn people out or the business point of view that happy, well rested people produce better work over the long term. There's tons of data to back it up if you want to go that route as well.

I've found you can frame the productive discussion beyond hours in the office by emphasising that we work hard and use the time outside work to be refreshed enough to do it consistently month over month, year over year.

Re: How to Leave Work at Work

#47

Post by cthonicthulu »

adamjb wrote: post #34
klenwell wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to suggest a variation of this idea that I learned about here on Hacker News and have applied successfully since: Try to stop on a bug or error. Same reasoning you cited with a bonus: when you come back in the morning, you'll have an error message to help you quickly pick up where you left off.

Reminds me of the "meanwhile back at the ranch" school of screenwriting: switch to your B story when your A story is at its peak of interest, and switch to your A story when your B story is at its peak. That way when you do switch back you won't have to work (too hard) to keep the audience's interest.

Love this whole thread. I thought I'd add a bit more for those who ended up in the same position I ended up in a little while back: if you're ever stuck in a position where you're forced to use an environment where you iterate so slowly that it takes days to a week to get from one error to the next error: take notes along the way as you go. Take notes about things which could be done differently if they weren't stuck a certain way. Not only does it neatly manage deadline anxieties, but it helps you build a map of friction points that are keeping things slower than you'd like, and it gives you the detail you need to slowly build cohesive and persuasive plans for improving the situation.

Of course, the optimal plan at that point could easily be for you (as it was for me) to leave the situation, but even so -- at least it makes that clearer!

Re: How to Leave Work at Work

#48

Post by m463 »

justatdotin wrote: post #38

I'm a long-term remote worker. At first it was challenging. After a year of trying to create boundaries, I gave up. Twice I'd had a 'bad' friday, only to have solutions reveal themselves while I was gardening over the weekend. I realised it did me no harm that my mind strayed to work while gardening, and in fact I was glad of it. So I made a decision to abandon attempts at erecting artificial structure, and quickly r…

I find the world consuming problem from yesterday usually solves itself as I wake up and lounge in bed and let my mind drift a bit.

These didn't come to me as easily when I was "on the clock" to get out of bed and be somewhere at a specific time. (sometimes, in the shower)

It does mean I have to have my phone near the bed to rapidly record these small insights that come to me.

Re: How to Leave Work at Work

#49

Post by disparate_dan »

justatdotin wrote: post #38

I'm a long-term remote worker. At first it was challenging. After a year of trying to create boundaries, I gave up. Twice I'd had a 'bad' friday, only to have solutions reveal themselves while I was gardening over the weekend. I realised it did me no harm that my mind strayed to work while gardening, and in fact I was glad of it. So I made a decision to abandon attempts at erecting artificial structure, and quickly r…

I came to similar conclusions for similar reasons. For one thing I often spend some ‘work’ time dealing with personal stuff so it’s a fair turnaround to think about work (or even work) over the weekend.

Before covid, I was reaching my office around 7am and most of my team would drift in around 10am - and I’d be leaving around 4pm... Now that I’ve been working from home I still start at 7am but it’s much easier to take a multi-hour break (usually spent on some hobbies or chores, or just chilling) and then go back to work later on for a couple more hours. So I’m getting more sleep and putting more work hours in, but getting a lot more personal projects done. And yes, it feels liberating, so I guess I’m lucky. (And very lucky to have a great manager at work!).

Re: How to Leave Work at Work

#50

Post by moltar »

justatdotin wrote: post #38

I'm a long-term remote worker. At first it was challenging. After a year of trying to create boundaries, I gave up. Twice I'd had a 'bad' friday, only to have solutions reveal themselves while I was gardening over the weekend. I realised it did me no harm that my mind strayed to work while gardening, and in fact I was glad of it. So I made a decision to abandon attempts at erecting artificial structure, and quickly r…

I fully agree with and arrived at the same conclusions.
Post reply on HN