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I never thought I'd handle WFH well. When job-hunting, I'd always ignore fully remote jobs. It sounded totally depressing and demotivating to sit at home and in
by tdeck 5y ago
I never thought I'd handle WFH well. When job-hunting, I'd always ignore fully remote jobs. It sounded totally depressing and demotivating to sit at home and interact with my coworkers virtually. I also always valued the office perks.
During the first few months, it felt like WFH stripped out all the non-work aspects of my job. At Google those perks were substantial, and it put the work itself in full focus.
But you know what? I like it now. I'm able to put in more focused work between 9 and 6 because I can take real breaks. There's less BS intruding on my life. In the office, your breaks feel more limited to 1) walking to grab a snack in the kitchen, 2) scrolling through something at your desk, or 3) going all the way outside to take a walk. 2/3 of these make you look like a slacker when you do them too much, so I always ended up doing a lot of "pretending to work" breaks to refresh my mind. That said, nobody ever had a problem with my performance.
Now I can pop out and walk around the block in 10 minutes, or wander into my back yard. I can do manual chores and intersperse them with knowledge work to give myself a break. I also don't have to commute for 2 hours each day. This means I have more time and willpower and actually get more done. I actually measure every minute of focused work, which is how I know.
- hawthornio 5y agohow do you measure your minutes of focused work?
- tdeck 5y agoI use a set of shell scripts that record when I start and stop work in a text file. The hard part is developing the habit. When I get up, switch to something non-work, or even start to daydream I stop it. Sometimes I still forget to start or stop it, so then I have to try to figure out when I started or stopped working from browser, command line, or undo history. Lately I have been using the pomodoro method on top of this, which is probably easier to get started with since it's fewer large blocks of time. The scripts are here FWIW, but they're written for an audience of one: https://github.com/tdeck/timing https://github.com/tdeck/timing There's also some stuff in there for various other schemes like daily goals, some notion of "debt" etc... that I used at various times to manage my motivation and pacing. I've found it works best to just plan a number of pomodoros for each task, map out my day in half hour slots, and decide when I will do them.
- danuker 5y agoFor when you forget to record, check out ActivityWatch: https://activitywatch.net/ https://activitywatch.net/
- danuker 5y agoI use LibreOffice Calc. Ctrl+Shift+; (or Ctrl+:) inputs a time (or Ctrl+; just a date). On each row, I have a start and end time of a work "session" or "pomodoro". Do a subtraction: end - start = duration (in days). I aim each day to be 4 hours, but sometimes I over or under-work, so I also have a running sum across days, subtracting 4h for each workday (so I should keep it near zero). I also use ActivityWatch - https://activitywatch.net/ https://activitywatch.net/ -, but more as a backup in case I forget to record. I don't trust it too much, because, say, time in the Slack window could be work or just chat. I am brutally honest and only bill what I consider "real" work. That is out of appreciation for my boss, who is trusting as well as receptive, and contributes back to open-source projects we use.