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A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

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Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#61

Post by steve1977 »

memling wrote: post #36
renegade-otter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working smart vs working hard. Also - optics. Notice how even if you are an early bird and in the office by 9, you are a lazy slacker when you leave at 5? Then someone rolls in at 11 and leaves at 7 - same number of hours. HARD WORKER. People are shallow, visual, and have no attention spans (especially now). You need to be aware of the optics and play them. No, you are not gaming the system - you are getting to the e…

> Notice how even if you are an early bird and in the office by 9, you are a lazy slacker when you leave at 5? Then someone rolls in at 11 and leaves at 7 - same number of hours. HARD WORKER. So I generally agree with your post, but is this what constitutes early riser these days? I get having kids and missing the key 7-9am time slot, but is an 11am start time a Usual Thing?

Was thinking the same, early bird here (Western Europe) would be someone who’s in the office by 6 or 7 AM

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#62

Post by saalweachter »

memling wrote: post #36
renegade-otter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working smart vs working hard. Also - optics. Notice how even if you are an early bird and in the office by 9, you are a lazy slacker when you leave at 5? Then someone rolls in at 11 and leaves at 7 - same number of hours. HARD WORKER. People are shallow, visual, and have no attention spans (especially now). You need to be aware of the optics and play them. No, you are not gaming the system - you are getting to the e…

> Notice how even if you are an early bird and in the office by 9, you are a lazy slacker when you leave at 5? Then someone rolls in at 11 and leaves at 7 - same number of hours. HARD WORKER. So I generally agree with your post, but is this what constitutes early riser these days? I get having kids and missing the key 7-9am time slot, but is an 11am start time a Usual Thing?

Incidentally, I was wondering what having our 0-hour at 6am (equinox sunrise) instead of midnight would do to our average wake-up schedule.

Waking at 6, 7, 8, 10, seems pretty arbitrary, but waking up at 0-hour feels more significant to me.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#63

Post by david-gpu »

jader201 wrote: post #32
david-gpu wrote: post #17

The years when I was at my most productive, in terms of outputting the most value for my employer (products, patents, etc), I was doing about three hours of "focus work" a day on average. I simply didn't have the energy to do more than that. The rest of my working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc. My performance reviews were consistently top-notch and I was getting promoted a…

> The rest of my [5] working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc. That would feel very unproductive, to me. 3 hours of productive work is certainly better than 0, but I think I’d have a hard time ending the day with that much of my day consumed with unproductive meetings and email. Granted, a lot of my day is spent on our internal chat tool (Slack equivalent), so I suppose that’…

> That would feel very unproductive, to me. 3 hours of productive work is certainly better than 0, but I think I’d have a hard time ending the day with that much of my day consumed with unproductive meetings and email.

I hated every minute outside of the three hours of actual work I did every day, but I did it because I felt I had to maintain the appearance of being productive.

The simple reality is that after those three hours of intensive work I didn't have any mental juice left to do useful stuff. At that point in my career I would have given more if I had it, but I just didn't have the mental stamina for that level of focused work.

What I wondered during those years is: if I'm "slacking" most of the day, how can I be a top contributor? But I was, and not because I was particularly smart or good at selling myself. I suspect the answer is simply that most people don't actually work all that many hours a day either, either intentionally or because in order to go through the whole 8-hour workday they pace themselves accordingly.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#64

Post by cxr »

ishtanbul wrote: post #43
zero-sharp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will python help him with meetings and emails? This doesn't sound like a technology problem. Not only that, but he's already working crazy hours. And you're suggesting that he spend more time on work? He's asking for ideas on how to make a career transition with the understanding that his salary will most likely get reduced by 90%.

Im looking forward to the msft copilot integration in office that can answer my emails and write transcripts of calls with to-dos. It will save time, but i think it will just up the ante since the culture is what got us here. And the risk of deals failing means you have to work on many at a time and accept as much as 100% swings in comp year to year. I would love to learn python, i figure with chatgpt i can learn it…

At $500k+ annually, you can hire a secretary.

(It sounds like you're in a position where you feel like you're compensated well enough that you'd be open to taking half the pay if it meant you could maintain the same return on investment: i.e. put in only half the work.)

By bringing up Copilot, it shows that you're already dabbling with adjacent ideas. Would love to know if/why you haven't considered this already and more about your work, including what parts, if any, make it a non-starter.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#65

Post by pavel_lishin »

2devnull wrote: post #42
lijok wrote: post #29

Working continuous overtime is one of the worst diseases you can inflict upon your company. 1. By making changes outside of work hours (comitting code as a software dev), you're upsetting your teammates understanding of the state of the project. Ever had on-call push a 200+ LOC change after hours to hot-fix a bug, then had to have a two hour meeting next morning to figure out what changed and how to re-do the fix pro…

I disagree with some of this. I think if you work with international teams, half of the time of day stuff is in play no matter what. But in general I sort of agree that we should all try to work slower/work fewer hours, for the good of society. But we shouldn’t harass those who have more time and interest in the work they’re doing and want to work more, or those who might need more breaks or work most optimally at a…

> But we shouldn’t harass those who have more time and interest in the work they’re doing and want to work more

I mean, sure, we shouldn't harass anyone.

But if they're working 12 hour days, and pinging me on Slack at 7pm, they're the ones harassing me. If they're producing 5 times the lines of code that I am because they're workaholics, thus causing me to spend half my day playing catch-up to their unreasonable schedule, that's also not great.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#66

Post by Game_Ender »

dchftcs wrote: post #33

There are ways where an employee that works 40 hours has less than half the impact than someone who works 60 hours. But plainly high quality code is not one of them. It works when you get a block of intense focus time and then go off to spend a lot of low-energy time in a breadth of business matters, including casually learning how to do your job better. In the first year or so it often doesn't make an obvious differ…

Part of the way I explain this is the amount of overhead in a company or position. Say you have 20 hours of coordination, planning and meetings/week, and 20 hours of direct work. If you work 50 hours you know increase how much development you are doing by 50% by only working 25% more hours. Now it the organization can do the same by cutting overhead and meetings but that is usually not up to one high performance contributor.

Like you said the impact of a top contributor doing 50% more work can be really large, entire new systems can be built, key features launched. It can get you promoted, but you definitely won’t get a 50% raise.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#67

Post by dgellow »

ishtanbul wrote: post #35

Investment banker here. The culture of software/tech better valuing work life balance is alluring. Whats described in the article is pretty alien to me. I typically have 4-6 hours of meetings a day (client calls) and am also expected to do 6+ hours of document/email work a day on top of that. I have to do somewhere between 2-10 hrs of work every weekend. It is impossible to keep up, so i am always disappointing someb…

Making that much money I would expect that you can take almost any career risk you could imagine. I understand that you're basically millionaire at 35 years old, you're basically set for life and can focus on doing things you find more interesting, such as learning about robotics without any monetary pressure. That's a pretty luxurious and safe situation! Maybe take some time off can help you realize how insanely far ahead you are from any other worker trying to save money.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#68

Post by pavel_lishin »

mjirv wrote: post #27

> Three out of every four desk workers report working in the 3 to 6pm timeframe, but of those, only one in four consider these hours highly productive. It’s nice to see some data on this. A lot of people talk about a 4-day workweek, but personally I think a 6-hour work day would be better. At least in white-collar jobs, I think most people could fit the same amount of productivity into fewer (focused) hours. Plus a d…

> make things easier for working parents.

During the (now semi-aborted) back-to-office push at my employer, several of us pointed out that a 9-5 in the office is impossible for those of us with children and a commute.

- 8:00am - earliest free drop-off time at school.

- 8:12 or 8:20 - next bus or train to the city. I can probably make that from the school, if I fully sprint for at least half that journey. (Taking a car is riskier; traffic around the school or the station, or bad parking, means that driving is wildly more variable.)

- 9:45 - earliest possible time I can roll into the office.

- 5:00 - I slam my laptop shut, having already put on my coat, and sprint to the subway and/or bike share to head to the train station.

- 5:16 - the earliest possible train I can make, assuming that all of Midtown stops for me.

- 6:31 - the earliest possible arrival back home, 31 minutes past aftercare's closing time.

The only way this would be doable is by hiring childcare for both mornings and afternoons, every day of the week, to the tune of ~$50 extra per day, minimum. That's on top of the cost of the commute.

Re: A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

#69

Post by kevinmershon »

ishtanbul wrote: post #35

Investment banker here. The culture of software/tech better valuing work life balance is alluring. Whats described in the article is pretty alien to me. I typically have 4-6 hours of meetings a day (client calls) and am also expected to do 6+ hours of document/email work a day on top of that. I have to do somewhere between 2-10 hrs of work every weekend. It is impossible to keep up, so i am always disappointing someb…

With all that salary, keep the job and hire a team of outsourced workers to build the business of your dreams on the side.
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