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I read the comments before clicking the link, and found myself agreeing with commenters who complained about this line: > In addition, if people are working le
by skrebbel 8y ago
I read the comments before clicking the link, and found myself agreeing with commenters who complained about this line:
> In addition, if people are working less than 8-10 productive hours per day, then they are clearly not being as productive as they could be.
I almost dismissed the book as a "yet another VC-driven, work-your-people-to-burnout story" but really, there's more to that. I've found it an excellent read so far and it's very concise, it wastes zero space on nonsense. I realized that I don't have to agree with everything an author writes to be able to get value out of a book. Warmly recommend you check it out.
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoI track my productivity very assiduously. For some tasks, such as writing, it is next to impossible to be productive for more than 5-6 hours/day. Your brain gives up after a while.
- baby 8y agoAs a founder you would probably spend more time on calls and other administrative tasks that don’t require much brain energy. That’s how you end up doing long hours.
- rizzin 8y agoHowever constantly switching contexts between different tasks is also very taxing...
- DenisM 8y agoThe idea is two spend first half of the day braining and second half doing busy work. Also championed by pg: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoI've taken to waking up at 6 to get a couple of hours of solid "brain work" before I start the day
- cwingrav 8y agoI think this is an important comment. I used to be a late night worker but family and other commitments has made that impossible. I wake at 5AM to get a few solid hours of brain work in before the family stirs. This has been the best approach to retaining the 'late night work hours' and balancing family.
- grvdrm 8y agoSecond this. Morning is the best for clear thinking. Late night work is less productive.
- yulaow 8y agoIt depends. I am a night owl and if I wake up too soon I am really useless for almost the whole day. Instead waking up later than usual (like 11-12am) makes me hyper-productive until late night. I guess each person has a different time of best performance, the problem is when you get a job in a office without flexible hours.
- Mtinie 8y agoI find my creativity peaks after 1 A.M.if I’ve been able to get into a state of flow. I’m certainly not at my most productive, but for work which isn’t time critical it’s a useful tool. Edit: grammar
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoI tried to delude myself for years, telling myself that I'm not a "morning person". It was just an excuse to stay up late and watch garbage on the TV or scroll endlessly through Reddit. Since I've forced myself to go to sleep no later than 11, I've realized that hey, I actually am a morning person.
- 8y ago
- austenallred 8y agoThe problem here is assuming only hours in deep mode are “productive hours.” If you’re an engineer not all of your productive hours are writing code.
- GrumpyNl 8y agoThat's why i also charge clients for my "thinking" hours.
- douglaswlance 8y agoRight before that happens, eat a good meal then meditate or take a nap. You'd be surprised how much more you can squeeze out your day.
- privacypoller 8y agoExcept my days are not oranges where I'm trying to squeeze every last drop of juice out of them, leaving nothing but pulp, peel and seeds before I throw them in the green bin. Life is most certainly a marathon where pace of play is far more important than local maxima.
- manigandham 8y ago...or you can just do more everyday and live a better life.
- kirubakaran 8y agoHow do you track it?
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoA combination of Toggl, Spreadsheets, and good old paper and pen. I keep a calendar that I mark every day as either green or red depending on whether I've met my threshold for a productive day (>6 hours of actual productive time - tracked using Toggl)
- kirubakaran 8y agoGreat! I'd love to hear your thoughts on https://crushentropy.com/ https://crushentropy.com/ (something I made for myself for this purpose) If you'd like to chat more, please email me. My email is in my profile.
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoMan I love this. Very neat! Kind of like markdown for calendaring. If you wrap this up in a more 'fashionable' ux, you'd have a big hit I'd love to just upload a text file with my entire plans for the week.
- kirubakaran 8y agoThanks! :-) Please email me if you can. I'd love to discuss more.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cncrnd 8y agoWhy is everyone disliking this statement about 8-10 hours a day? Excluding weekends, this is 40-50 hours a week, nothing outrageous. You're not that special folks, you have to work to get paid like everyone else.
- icebraining 8y agoIt's almost impossible to be productive 100% of the time. Even with just 2h for lunch and all other crap, to get 9h of productive time you're taking about entering at 9AM and leaving at 8PM. No, thanks.
- austenallred 8y agoBeing a founder isn’t about writing code all day - you don’t have to be operating at full mental capacity to be getting stuff done. You spend a ton of time talking to people, recruiting, writing emails, etc. IMO the notion that you can be more effective as a founder in < 8 hrs/day as if you work 8 hrs/day is a pleasant sounding falsehood. I’m sure there are diminishing returns at some point, but I don’t think it’s before 8 hrs/day.
- icebraining 8y agoBeing a founder is irrelevant, he's talking about pushing his workers to work those hours, not about his personal schedule.
- austenallred 8y agoOk fair, but are you aware of any position that is devoid of administrative tasks or meetings? The hardest part of being in a company is almost always coordination and communication.
- icebraining 8y agoThat's exactly my point; he shouldn't expect 8-9h of productive time from his workers, because there are always administrative tasks and meetings (not to mention more lowly vital necessities), and so that implies they're basically living in the company.
- deepGem 8y agoI think we have to stop looking at productivity as a universal metric. Each person defines his own way of being productive. Some people subscribing to deep work only consider deep work as productive work. If I can just write code in my comfort zone for 2 hours should I consider that productivity ? I'm not sure. From my experience, a lot of a founder's time is spent in non deep work. Taking calls, traveling, talking to users, understanding user feedback, writing product features and coding up some or most of the features. So the actual deep work is perhaps very limited - in desiging features and coding them up. How do you measure founder producivity when the tasks are so varied. IMHO such a measurement exercise is futile.
- koonsolo 8y agoSteve Blank has an awesome anecdote on this: https://steveblank.com/2016/09/07/working-hard-is-not-the-same-as-working-smart/ https://steveblank.com/2016/09/07/working-hard-is-not-the-sa... "Our team knows this isn’t a 9-5 company. We stay as long as it takes to get the job done." “Let’s just wait across the street from your company’s parking lot and watch the front door." "a first trickle of employees left. I asked, “Are these your VPs and senior managers?” He nodded looking surprised and kept watching. Then after another 10-minute pause, a stream of employees poured out of the building like ants emptying the nest. Rahul’s jaw dropped and then tightened. Within a half-hour the parking lot was empty."
- shanghaiaway 8y agoAmerican work culture, always trying to please the boss.
- Mtinie 8y agoAs I’ve heard very similar anecdotes from friends and coworkers all around the world, I’m going to offer an alternative phrasing: > Modern work culture, always trying to please the boss.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y agoCompletely agree based on my experience as a CTO. I didn't agree with all of it, but there is a lot of solid advice in here without a bunch of filler.