7 ms·
TL;DR: Basically getting up early and doing 4 hours of deep work has changed my life from really stressful and bad to really productive and nice. One thing rea
by mbrock 9y ago
TL;DR: Basically getting up early and doing 4 hours of deep work has changed my life from really stressful and bad to really productive and nice.
One thing really fundamentally helped me, as someone who works from home on a large project in an asynchronous 100% remote organization.
I work on a fairly involved project that demands a lot of hard work. At the same time there are other things I want to get done: some administrative duties, some nonprofit work, etc etc.
That makes me stressed and anxious, and my natural response to that is to buckle down and try to "finish" the big projects, by overworking...
Except overworking doesn't actually tend to mean getting a lot of work done, because I spend more mental energy being stressed about how much I have to do than I spend on actually doing it.
It's a pretty vicious cycle and I guess it is a proximate cause of burnout.
It all changed when I realized I cannot sustainably do more than a few hours of hard work every day, and took that to heart.
Now I don't try to get more done in a day than is sustainably possible.
I wake up pretty early, around 6, sometimes 7, sometimes 5. Then I make a cup of coffee, some small breakfast, and sit down in my comfortable coding environment, and do a sprint of serious working.
About 4 hours of that is usually enough to land a decent series of commits that definitely advance the project.
Then I do the mental magic that previous me never did. I think: "Wow, that's great work for one day! I'm definitely on track!"
And at this point it's like 11 AM. So I can happily go have lunch, another cup of coffee, listen to a podcast or something, and know that I have plenty of time in the afternoon for paying bills and whatnot.
I also like to take some time in the afternoon to improve my work life in some rewarding way. This includes Emacs tweaking, build server and CI setup, etc. Lately I've managed to get my business email into a form that I enjoy.
(Details: my maildir gets mined for all the important recurring PDFs which end up in monthly folders, and since yesterday I even have a shell script that uses "pdftotext -layout" to parse out due amounts and OCR/reference numbers from the few recurring bills we need to pay manually. This eliminates a type of drudgery that I really loathe, so it's a huge win in terms of mental energy.)
- tshanmu 9y agoThis is so much relatable to my situation. Thanks for the tips!
- lazyjones 9y agoSounds to me like you had some issues with distractions during the day, amplified by working at home. Other people (like me) prefer to work late at night for the same reason, it also allows for a more social lifestyle (i.e. going out occasionally) than having to be in bed early.
- mbrock 9y agoIt's less about distractions and more about never having the feeling of having done enough. Being done with work by lunchtime is a way for me to be more social, but that's a matter of situation. I do "go out" sometimes; shifting my sleep time by a couple of hours isn't a big problem for me.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tigershark 9y agoI'm sorry but I'm missing how can you have a more social lifestyle if you are working while the others are going out..
- specializeded 9y agoNot having to ”be in bed early” makes ”going out occasionally” easier!
- nurettin 9y agoI miss the times developers would optimize their lives without all the online rants and the sensitive encouraging, nodding and enabling of said behavior. That said, don't you have banks which automatically pay your bills (electricity/gas/water)? Which country are you from?
- michaelmior 9y agoI prefer not to pay my bills automatically because it doesn't take much time and lets me make sure they are correct.
- amigoingtodie 9y agoPlus, you can more easily switch banks. Provision and migrate accounts with Ansible?
- Johnathanb 9y agoIn the UK the banks take care of switching over your direct debits and standing orders when you switch bank accounts.
- OJFord 9y agoManually pay bills every month, or whatever period, so that it's easier to switch account? Even if you're switching every year that doesn't sound like a good deal.
- apexalpha 9y agoYou can still check if they're correct if you do it automatically though. You can just cancel the tranfer.
- michaelmior 9y agoMy bank doesn't make that easy for me. Besides, it only takes me a few minutes each month to review and pay bills.
- 9y ago
- samzhao 9y agoHow did you get your employer to agree to 4-hour work days? The first half and one of your comment replies spoke to me deeply - especifically the part about having the feeling of never having done enough, haunts me everyday, but also pushes me. So thanks so much for writing this! Just wish you could speak more about how you were able to negotiate your current work schedule.
- dboreham 9y agoI'm guessing that his employer is agreeing to take the 4 hours of productive work he achieves, which is likely much more than the average "sit in front of the keyboard for 8 hours" worker.
- samzhao 9y agoYeah, that must be the case: a smart employer and demonstrably productive employee.
- mbrock 9y agoI don't have an employer that cares about my schedule. It's literally never come up. My daily productivity has increased noticably since this regimen, and if my employer didn't understand that as a benefit, they'd be silly. By the way I'm active for more than 4 hours a day, and after the morning sprint I'll spend some time chatting about business, reading and learning, triaging issues, etc. It's just that I don't spend more than 4 hours intensively coding or debugging.
- samzhao 9y agoGreat response, thanks!
- flachsechs 9y agoi agree with this. as i've gotten older i've become a morning person, usually starting around 6, but sometimes earlier. you can easily belt out 4-5 hours of real work before lunch time, and then take a leisurely lunch/walk/coffee, and do administrative / non-intense tasks in the early afternoon, leaving a relaxed afternoon and evening to do real life things. and, when a true emergency pops up, it's rare, and it doesn't trigger your stress/frustration response.