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Curious - if you are a knowledge worker and getting through your tasks in say 4 days, does your boss/company really care how you are spending remaining 1 day?
by iamsb 7y ago
Curious - if you are a knowledge worker and getting through your tasks in say 4 days, does your boss/company really care how you are spending remaining 1 day?
I often use company time to learn about new things that are related to my work, but not necessarily immediate tasks. For example - While working on a Java app, I will spend some time learning AWS or Kotlin. Not one person in the companies I have worked for ever told me off for doing that, most in fact encouraged it. My personal diary/notes suggests I spend between 25-30 hours/week doing actual tasks or attending meetings and remaining I spend socializing at work to build relationships which will help get things done for me or learning. This of course is average over a year, some weeks are more work heavy (even stretching to more than 40 hours) and some less so.
I have come to prefer it instead of shorter work week, which means same amount of work needs to be done in less number of sleep/break cycles, reducing the quality I produce. When I worked for myself, I used to work only 3-4 days a week and observed that in theory it sounds good, but my personal experience was, I was spending far less time subconsciously and output was not inline with my usual quality.
- jsinai 7y agoBut on the other hand, you could be spending that extra time reading and learning about things for your own interest or socializing with your friends for your personal benefit and social health. Ultimately there is a trade-off between spending time at work and for yourself/friends/family. What the OP and other recent posts are increasingly showing is that the amount of time we really need to spend at work (perhaps especially if you are a knowledge worker) is not as much as our normal hours dictate. Culture is a strong force.
- mantoto 7y agoThen you should have time to optimize your environment. Making documentation better. Or cleaning out technical Dept, making things more performant or more reliable.
- HammockWarrior 7y agoIf you got time to lean, you got time to clean!
- dv_dt 7y agoSome companies care, if you have one day free that means they can add tasks to your list.
- iamsb 7y agoSorry, I was not completely clear in my comment. What I meant is having a 5 day work week, but having some gaps of time to focus on learning. I usually spend an hour after lunch to learn something, as that is anyways my least productive time. I also try to find 30-60 mins throughout the day as well.
- danielbarla 7y ago>... getting through your tasks in say 4 days... In my experience, there is no such thing as "getting through your tasks", as you are expected to pick up more tasks from a never ending bucket of tasks [1]. Of course this varies from place to place, but is in general true. Your peers and managers are more likely to notice you leaving early, or "not working" on the Friday, than they are to notice you working your butt off on the previous 4 days, to be honest. [1] Edit: this is because of the nature of knowledge work, and the difficulty in estimating duration of work, difficulty, and quality. If you finish early, the powers that be are more likely to attribute it to bad powers of augury as opposed to extra hard work. This might sound overly negative, but I have seen this consistently throughout a few decades of experience (yet, I still work hard... go figure).
- iamsb 7y agoInteresting. Where I work, we have a well defined scope for a sprint. That will get divided into tasks and then are assigned to team members. So I usually know what is my pipeline for next 2 weeks and it is fairly finite. Unless of course I am working on a more exploratory project where scope is not well defined. Of course people falling sick, or getting stuck in their task and needing help, and few other attributes can change that to some extent, but not a lot. So in summary, even though there is an endless supply for tasks that can be done, for the sprint, it is fairly finite. Also I dont spend less time at work, I just use post lunch hour, and 30-60 mins throughout the day to do learning.
- Teknoman117 7y agoWhere I work it's generally assumed that when you run out of stuff from the sprint you start working on the backlog or looking at stuff on the list of things we know we'll have to deal with in the future.
- CaptainMarvel 7y agoWhy are they happy for you to stop working before the working week is over?
- samvher 7y agoThis is exactly what I do as well both in my current and previous jobs. I've never advertised exactly how much time I spend on courses but did ask (and get) permission to spend some of my time on personal development. Sometimes I would take Coursera/EdX courses and sometimes just read through books and do some exercises, generally around analytics/computer architecture/numerical methods. I've generally always been able to apply some of the things I learned somewhere in my job, leading to happy colleagues because I injected new solutions and insights. I feel like as long as you prioritize your work well and you make sure to finish enough high-value tasks employers tend to not care too much about whether you actually fill up 40 hours with these tasks. Being able to use any left over time for myself also incentivizes me to stay productive so I'm pretty happy with this system.