5 ms·

I'm a PM and I work from home - far and away the biggest advantage IMHO isn't the lack of commute (though that's great), but rather the flexibility in schedule.

I'm a PM and I work from home - far and away the biggest advantage IMHO isn't the lack of commute (though that's great), but rather the flexibility in schedule. My most productive hours are 6-9am - I can crank through what would take me most of 9am-5pm in that time period. That's wasted when I have to get ready and commute during that time period. When optimizing for most efficient working times, 40 hours a week is really 20-30 depending on meetings.

JohnFen 4y ago
My most productive time is similar to yours, from about 7 to 11am.
- andromeduck 4y ago
  11 pm - 3 AM
  - code_biologist 4y ago
    +1. I really find that I hit my stride around 1am. Lovely for personal projects. Unfortunate for professional work.
  - berniedurfee 4y ago
    Same. I was built for the graveyard shift in a day shift world.
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
The one thing I would go to the office for are sprint ceremonies. On my best functioning teams, we would plan and make sure everyone knew what was needed and solutions brainstormed until we had an agreed approach. Then you stay at home and just execute. And you can used your best hours to smash stuff out and then enjoy the rest of the day.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Hot take: Sprint ceremonies are what I hate the most about our profession. In-office sprint ceremonies make it even worse. Please end this madness. One guy from customer success I had lunch with once told me: "wait, so you guys have team meetings every morning, every single day? but why? that sounds terrible. I would hate that" And yeah! I agree! but this has been the norm in the entire industry for the last ~10 years and you have no say in it. I once went a month by actively not paying attention to the daily meetings just to prove they're worthless and I didn't miss anything important. Weekly meetings are much better at keeping employees engaged without feeling like a burden/waste of everyone's time. This whole daily stand-ups and sprint ceremonies are useless bullshit. Quality software got shipped way before those were concocted and shoved into our worklives by agile "consultants" who have nothing better to do in their lives than selling employee micromanagement and control schemes to clueless managers making them feel more empowered over their workers, and creating more bullshit jobs like scrum masters or agile coaches just to give credibility to these management frameworks.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    Stand-ups aren't really for devs, but for the team leads and PMs trying to track work. If they take more than ~5 min or so, people aren't prepared and that should be a red flag for team leads. That said, every day is often overkill, and most of the value can be gotten by keeping tickets up to date. But "ceremony" is often a tool to get people to keep things up to date by formalizing the expectation that it'll get picked up if they're not. The more disciplined a team is, the less you need that ceremony.
    - komali2 4y ago
      I challenge PMs and leads to do a project, maybe just a small one, where you don't hold a group meeting even once over the course of the project. I've led a 9 month project building an entire SaaS project this way. It was definitely hard work making sure my tickets were in good order, that i had a good design feedback loop with the designer (really just the CEO plopping components into figma), and that I had another feedback loop with the engineers (of which I was also one in this case) so we could accurately predict what would get done when. The tools were relatively simple: figma for designs, linear for tickets, slack for messaging. This is across several time zones with differences up to 12 hours. I found that by using our tools well we were able to get a good product delivered in good time at good cost, with good quality of life for all involved. I used to hate standups and think "well, I guess it's probably making someone else's job easier?" Sure, it was making the product manager's job of reporting what was happening to their boss easier. But turns out, maybe that can be supplanted by using your tools well. When will the xyz feature be done? Looks like middle of sprint based on estimates. It seems so simple I don't really know if we just got lucky this one time or what, but this was across nearly a whole year and such a big project I kinda feel like we hit upon something with our method.
hnews_account_1 4y ago
What are you accomplishing daily at 6-9 am when most people aren't logged in? I know there's like a lot of individual work but when do you work with other people? Do you just work less efficiently during the day you mean?

JohnFen 4y ago

My most productive time is similar to yours, from about 7 to 11am.

andromeduck 4y ago
11 pm - 3 AM
- code_biologist 4y ago
  +1. I really find that I hit my stride around 1am. Lovely for personal projects. Unfortunate for professional work.
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  Same. I was built for the graveyard shift in a day shift world.

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago

The one thing I would go to the office for are sprint ceremonies. On my best functioning teams, we would plan and make sure everyone knew what was needed and solutions brainstormed until we had an agreed approach. Then you stay at home and just execute. And you can used your best hours to smash stuff out and then enjoy the rest of the day.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Hot take: Sprint ceremonies are what I hate the most about our profession. In-office sprint ceremonies make it even worse. Please end this madness. One guy from customer success I had lunch with once told me: "wait, so you guys have team meetings every morning, every single day? but why? that sounds terrible. I would hate that" And yeah! I agree! but this has been the norm in the entire industry for the last ~10 years and you have no say in it. I once went a month by actively not paying attention to the daily meetings just to prove they're worthless and I didn't miss anything important. Weekly meetings are much better at keeping employees engaged without feeling like a burden/waste of everyone's time. This whole daily stand-ups and sprint ceremonies are useless bullshit. Quality software got shipped way before those were concocted and shoved into our worklives by agile "consultants" who have nothing better to do in their lives than selling employee micromanagement and control schemes to clueless managers making them feel more empowered over their workers, and creating more bullshit jobs like scrum masters or agile coaches just to give credibility to these management frameworks.
- vidarh 4y ago
  Stand-ups aren't really for devs, but for the team leads and PMs trying to track work. If they take more than ~5 min or so, people aren't prepared and that should be a red flag for team leads. That said, every day is often overkill, and most of the value can be gotten by keeping tickets up to date. But "ceremony" is often a tool to get people to keep things up to date by formalizing the expectation that it'll get picked up if they're not. The more disciplined a team is, the less you need that ceremony.
  - komali2 4y ago
    I challenge PMs and leads to do a project, maybe just a small one, where you don't hold a group meeting even once over the course of the project. I've led a 9 month project building an entire SaaS project this way. It was definitely hard work making sure my tickets were in good order, that i had a good design feedback loop with the designer (really just the CEO plopping components into figma), and that I had another feedback loop with the engineers (of which I was also one in this case) so we could accurately predict what would get done when. The tools were relatively simple: figma for designs, linear for tickets, slack for messaging. This is across several time zones with differences up to 12 hours. I found that by using our tools well we were able to get a good product delivered in good time at good cost, with good quality of life for all involved. I used to hate standups and think "well, I guess it's probably making someone else's job easier?" Sure, it was making the product manager's job of reporting what was happening to their boss easier. But turns out, maybe that can be supplanted by using your tools well. When will the xyz feature be done? Looks like middle of sprint based on estimates. It seems so simple I don't really know if we just got lucky this one time or what, but this was across nearly a whole year and such a big project I kinda feel like we hit upon something with our method.

hnews_account_1 4y ago

What are you accomplishing daily at 6-9 am when most people aren't logged in? I know there's like a lot of individual work but when do you work with other people? Do you just work less efficiently during the day you mean?