6 ms·

Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

122 points by sph 3y ago

pacifika 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11277033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11277033
Lacerda69 3y ago
Working less seems like reasonable advice all around. To be honest I rarely have more than 3-4 productive hours in a day, where I actually get hard stuff done. Sure on special days I can be productive 8+ hours; but those are rare.
- abm53 3y ago
  For me the open question is if you decided up-front to only work 3–4 hours, would you be as productive as you are in those 3–4 hours out of an 8 hour day? Highly job and person dependent I suspect.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    I suspect that if you can habituate yourself to a sustainable number of daily hours (eg., 3-4) where you always work, barring illness etc. Then I believe you'd have a net positive output for most professions, and most software engineering domains. J. Blow has much to say against this, but i've never really heard him engage with this integral of productivity given habituation. I guess his reply to my argument above would be, "sure, but are you actually working these hours? if no, it's just rationalisation for lazyness" And i'd suppose, in most cases, it is.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
    Sometimes I can do weeks worth of work in just 30 minutes. Some people can cut a lot of labour time perhaps years worth for multiple people. Productivity can get hard to measure.
  - Lacerda69 3y ago
    I would have to try it but my feeling is I would be just as productive. Of course this is related to creative work, like coding, writing, design etc. Less creative work like kitchen work, or manual labour in general I can do until my body gives up (16h shifts used to be no problem but I'm getting older...)
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
I am going to try this. I found that boxing my self is far more productive than anything else, and it leaves me time to do whatever other thing I want.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sam_lowry_ 3y ago
  Ha! It's the opposite for me. I work productively only when the duration is open-ended. That is, at night, when I can stay up as long as I feel comfortable or over the weekend when none bothers me. A slightest deadline in sight or an upcoming meeting break the flow.
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    I think it depends on the kind of work you need to do. For creative stuff, I do the same, but I am also trying to reduce the number of hours at work. When being in the flow, I just let it continue without breaking.
    - sam_lowry_ 3y ago
      Software programming of the most mundane kind. I just take it more emotionally than most people, I guess.
sph 3y ago
Creativity thrives when constrained. I have been struggling with organising my time as well, and I found that fewer hours every day means I only focus on what's important, and I can achieve a state of flow, with a good routine, every day. I do 4 hours of 95% effort, no distraction deep work, and then I need to recharge the batteries. It all depends if you're doing creative programming work, or menial one. I'm building a business, and the software underneath it. It's not too dissimilar to sculpting or painting: bursts of intense work, with tons of space necessary to digest, plan the next step or just daydream and think out of the box around hard problems. Some people thrive in a brute force approach to creativity (work until the problem is solved), for others intuition is the driving force (think until the problem is solved) The issue is that as a society and the corporate machine is tuned for the brute force approach. We celebrate the 100 hours/wk Musks and Carmacks, and forget that their physiology, and more importantly, environment is much different than most of us. How many hours do you think Musk spends thinking about paying rent, cost of living, standups with a boring boss, endless Zoom calls that cut into his focus? How many hours does John Carmack spend, bored to tears, plugging yet another Slack library into their CRUD app for a boss than makes 500x his salary? How many hours of "brainstorming", daydreaming and reading up on exciting tech do they count as work? How many hours of daydreaming and "digesting" can you do sat in an open space cubicle? (Sorry, started talking about creative force, and went on a societal critique.)
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I work every day, but don’t have a strict time limit. Some days, it’s two hours; some days, 12. If I were to average, it probably comes to around four or five hours (out-of-the-arse guess). WFM. YMMV. Friday was a 12-hour, OCD day. I went the entire day without eating or drinking, as I was obsessing over finishing a dashboard app I wrote. At the end of the day, I had a combined blood sugar crash/dehydration event. FUN I don't recommend it. I usually drink a bit less than a gallon of water per day. I keep an insulated mug at my desk, and make sure it's always at least half-full of water.
ekianjo 3y ago
We'd have much less pieces from Mozart if he had followed such advice
- wesselbindt 3y ago
  Saying that OP's point doesn't/wouldn't/shouldn't apply to an extremely exceptional case is a tautology (and this is even assuming that Mozart didn't already follow OP's advice in the first place, which you haven't exactly established). Here's a more interesting example, which at least shows that it doesn't apply to a much larger category of jobs than genius composer: If Amazon warehouse workers'd follow such advice, much fewer packages would get shipped.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Amazon would just hire more workers... (They are paying them by the hour, aren't they?)
    - Paul-Craft 3y ago
      I doubt you could get enough people to want to show up to a 3 hour a day, 7 day a week job, and still be able to run a warehouse at the same cost.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    > If Amazon warehouse workers'd follow such advice, much fewer packages would get shipped. How so? Amazon is known for tracking performance very strictly. They will find the sweet spot for performance in case they see an opportunity.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ilyt 3y ago
[flagged]
cesaref 3y ago
The headline doesn't reflect the reality - I think what is really going on here is that 3 hours are spent doing what is considered 'work' by the outside world (sitting in front of the machine and writing the code that people believe is what the job is). However, creative stuff like programming doesn't tend to fix in such a neat box, and the preparation, or creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problems tends to benefit from spending time doing something else - your brain is still whirring on the problem whilst you are out walking, exercising, cooking etc. If you add on the time spent working through problems, you'll probably come to the same conclusion that I have that I spend 24 hours a day thinking about the problems i'm tackling. I often come up with great solutions whilst i'm asleep, and bad nights sleep is often correlated with a gnarly problem i've still not worked out. I personally don't get hung up on how much time I spend actually coding. Some days it's full on, other days I seem to achieve next to nothing, or if anything go backwards. I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right.
- tkiolp4 3y ago
  > I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right. And how many unproductive hours of work do you spend per day? I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day. When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours.
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    I'm communicating ideas to people most of the time.
  - naavis 3y ago
    > When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours. Honest question, do you unilaterally ignore any other parts of the contract?
majkinetor 3y ago
This completelly ignores the inner and outer world that are somewhat or completelly out of your control in given context. For example, you might be immonologically or psychologically compromised, there might be a lot of noise in environment for some period of month, you got a baby etc. If you are alone, it might be a lot easier, but with family, any schedule that is not dynamic is failure.
kleiba 3y ago
Not convincing to me. I do agree with the general notion that working 8 productive hours everyday does not work long-term. But assuming that you could work three hours completely productively every day, that does not imply that the remaining five hours would be completely worthless. In a normal work week, I am sure you could get more out of the remaining 5x5 = 25 hours than the six hours at the weekend. Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day. I think the appeal of "3 hours a day" is that the number is so extremely low compared to the number 8. But I don't think that it will work. Flexible time models also give you a pretty good work-life balance, and they're more realistic. I mean, for one, you won't find an employer who will follow this 3-hour model, so we're only talking about self-employed workers. But even then, it has to be a pure coding or other desk job - if it involved e.g. any meetings at all, how are you going to fit that into your small time budget of three hours only per day? Yeah, like I said, I don't think that this model is going to work in most situations and for most people.
- ilyt 3y ago
  Pretty much. Near-everything aside from "one man project hacking" will have some amount of "office hours" just used to coordinate with co-workers, plan, code review, or frankly just doing stuff like reading the docs or specs. Even assuming "you can only do 3 productive hours a day" (which is a lie with appeal to authority mixed in. "Look that guy that made shitty web framework did it, it must be good!"), that does apply only to coding, there is more to being developer than just programming > Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day. I'd even call that advice outright idiotic. You wasted time to get in the zone only to throw it away I feel like any recommendation of "do X hours of this" is a delusion. We're not robots, we have better or worse days and more or less engaging tasks. If task is "here are API docs, make a bunch of code and tests for it" I can do it whole day without much slowdown.
grammers 3y ago
Sounds like a plan. How does one get such a job?
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  > I am an indie iPhone developer
  - hereonout2 3y ago
    Indeed! As a more senior programmer at a large corporate, I'm lucky if I only have three hours of meetings per day.
    - Paul-Craft 3y ago
      But are those meetings "work" in the sense he's talking about? I would guess that for most people, most meetings are not "work."
      - raydev 3y ago
        Meetings require some base level of focus on the meeting, so it is still work. Some people might get away with playing games or reading Twitter or whatever during meetings, but it isn't actually a restful break.
      - hereonout2 3y ago
        Most meetings are not coding but they are all work. No chance I would be attending without getting paid and by the same token I'd likely get sacked if I failed to attend. I can't imagine a solo indie dev has those meetings though. So their definition of work is somewhat different. Also I guess the three hours is a consequence of them having a successful product, which is somewhat akin to winning the lottery. I can't imagine if they were struggling to make rent they'd down tools at 11am for an afternoon of reading and walking.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
> First, the most productive time for me is after I wake up, so I need to sleep well, and start working right after I wake up. I don’t read any news or SNS because even if I only read them a little bit, it could affect my productivity because it distracts my mind. > I even disable all notifications on my iPhone before I go to bed, so I don’t see them before I start working next day.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rvba 3y ago
Congratulations to the author for building a successful product from which they can make a living! Even bigger congratulations that the product can be maintained / extended by working few hours per day. For example 4 hours x 31 days = 124 hours per month. Now compare this to a corporate job where it feels like you are setup to fail. Every day 3-6 hours of meetings / conference calls. Constant flood of emails that are often irrelevant or unclear, but you need to stay focused reading them because something can be relevant to what you are doing (often the part important to you is written in an ambigious way, since they dont know what to do with your case - so you have to ask for clarifications - more meetings). Constant context switching due to having to drop what you are doing to do something else. Trying to do you your actual work.. often after hours, when they still call you. Or you cant even do your job, because someone who is supposed to provide something for you didnt do it on time, so you are waiting. (They update that it will be there the next day, on next day -> they again say next day and so on). 10 hours per day x 21 days = 210 hours Of course corporate work is safer. Somehow the corporation exists and moves forward. That's why it is so impressive that the author can be their own boss. Could even make some contracting work from time to time.
JonChesterfield 3y ago
Work is a mixture of thinking through problems, writing down the answer, debugging systems, talking to stakeholders, writing prose for engineers or management. An idea from the creative artist world is to consciously divide the tasks into creative and other. Game plan goes: Wake up. Do not read email. Or slack. Breakfast then walk, thinking about things. Write down the ideas you want to come back to. Then lunch. Then take a look at email, slack. Do the traditional fire fighting while trying to write code simultaneously game until the evening. Spend the evening socialising, reading, generally taking in new information, probably in the hope that it gets sorted while you sleep and takes your mind off the fires of the afternoon. That's not a path to three hours a day of work. But it probably is a way to make progress on hard problems despite a software dev day job that applies pressure against that, via cultural firefighting.
herodoturtle 3y ago
The merits of the idea aside, I find it quite interesting that this was written 7 years ago (2016), and that the author had been doing it for 2 years already. At present the idea of working 3 focused hours per day doesn't seem outrageous, but back in 2014 this would have been quite progressive.
lhoff 3y ago
I recently read the book deep work by Cal Newport. He introduces the concept of deep and shallow work. Deep work is the part the needs focus, concentration and complex thoughts. He argues that there is a limit of about 3-4 hours that one can spend in the state of deep work. That doesn’t mean in can’t do more shallow work in addition to the deep work. But the brain also needs rest, therefore working long hours consistently diminishes the ability to work deep. Also some problems are better solved unconsciously while the brain is resting. I can really recommend that book, I haven’t adopted to many of the practices that he recommends but I am working on it and it already had a profound impact on the quality of my work but also my general mental health.
- amelius 3y ago
  Ok, but the shallow work can perhaps at some point be done by LLMs. If we have to compete with AI, then we might get more pressure to spend more time doing deep work.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
Whatever works for the author, he is self employed. For most companies I have worked for I would get to the office very early in order to have at least 90 minutes of total concentration before other people came to work. I would usually leave work around 3PM, a few hours before other people left work. That always worked really well for me. During the day, I would routinely shut my door for a while and relax. re: author of article: I wonder if he does technology learning activities outside his 3 hour work window?
mnw21cam 3y ago
"Everyday" doesn't mean the same thing as "Every day", just like "Everybody" doesn't mean the same thing as "Every body". Pet hate of mine.
wly_cdgr 3y ago
Sounds about right. Maybe you could do 4 hours if you really wanted to push it. I do think you could then have another 2-3 hour block of something completely unrelated every day and be very productive doing that as well.
karlclaude80 3y ago
[dead]
maryfisherr6 3y ago
[dead]

122 points by sph 3y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11277033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11277033

Working less seems like reasonable advice all around. To be honest I rarely have more than 3-4 productive hours in a day, where I actually get hard stuff done. Sure on special days I can be productive 8+ hours; but those are rare.

abm53 3y ago
For me the open question is if you decided up-front to only work 3–4 hours, would you be as productive as you are in those 3–4 hours out of an 8 hour day? Highly job and person dependent I suspect.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  I suspect that if you can habituate yourself to a sustainable number of daily hours (eg., 3-4) where you always work, barring illness etc. Then I believe you'd have a net positive output for most professions, and most software engineering domains. J. Blow has much to say against this, but i've never really heard him engage with this integral of productivity given habituation. I guess his reply to my argument above would be, "sure, but are you actually working these hours? if no, it's just rationalisation for lazyness" And i'd suppose, in most cases, it is.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
  Sometimes I can do weeks worth of work in just 30 minutes. Some people can cut a lot of labour time perhaps years worth for multiple people. Productivity can get hard to measure.
- Lacerda69 3y ago
  I would have to try it but my feeling is I would be just as productive. Of course this is related to creative work, like coding, writing, design etc. Less creative work like kitchen work, or manual labour in general I can do until my body gives up (16h shifts used to be no problem but I'm getting older...)

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

I am going to try this. I found that boxing my self is far more productive than anything else, and it leaves me time to do whatever other thing I want.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sam_lowry_ 3y ago
Ha! It's the opposite for me. I work productively only when the duration is open-ended. That is, at night, when I can stay up as long as I feel comfortable or over the weekend when none bothers me. A slightest deadline in sight or an upcoming meeting break the flow.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  I think it depends on the kind of work you need to do. For creative stuff, I do the same, but I am also trying to reduce the number of hours at work. When being in the flow, I just let it continue without breaking.
  - sam_lowry_ 3y ago
    Software programming of the most mundane kind. I just take it more emotionally than most people, I guess.

sph 3y ago

Creativity thrives when constrained. I have been struggling with organising my time as well, and I found that fewer hours every day means I only focus on what's important, and I can achieve a state of flow, with a good routine, every day. I do 4 hours of 95% effort, no distraction deep work, and then I need to recharge the batteries. It all depends if you're doing creative programming work, or menial one. I'm building a business, and the software underneath it. It's not too dissimilar to sculpting or painting: bursts of intense work, with tons of space necessary to digest, plan the next step or just daydream and think out of the box around hard problems. Some people thrive in a brute force approach to creativity (work until the problem is solved), for others intuition is the driving force (think until the problem is solved) The issue is that as a society and the corporate machine is tuned for the brute force approach. We celebrate the 100 hours/wk Musks and Carmacks, and forget that their physiology, and more importantly, environment is much different than most of us. How many hours do you think Musk spends thinking about paying rent, cost of living, standups with a boring boss, endless Zoom calls that cut into his focus? How many hours does John Carmack spend, bored to tears, plugging yet another Slack library into their CRUD app for a boss than makes 500x his salary? How many hours of "brainstorming", daydreaming and reading up on exciting tech do they count as work? How many hours of daydreaming and "digesting" can you do sat in an open space cubicle? (Sorry, started talking about creative force, and went on a societal critique.)

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I work every day, but don’t have a strict time limit. Some days, it’s two hours; some days, 12. If I were to average, it probably comes to around four or five hours (out-of-the-arse guess). WFM. YMMV. Friday was a 12-hour, OCD day. I went the entire day without eating or drinking, as I was obsessing over finishing a dashboard app I wrote. At the end of the day, I had a combined blood sugar crash/dehydration event. FUN I don't recommend it. I usually drink a bit less than a gallon of water per day. I keep an insulated mug at my desk, and make sure it's always at least half-full of water.

ekianjo 3y ago

We'd have much less pieces from Mozart if he had followed such advice

wesselbindt 3y ago
Saying that OP's point doesn't/wouldn't/shouldn't apply to an extremely exceptional case is a tautology (and this is even assuming that Mozart didn't already follow OP's advice in the first place, which you haven't exactly established). Here's a more interesting example, which at least shows that it doesn't apply to a much larger category of jobs than genius composer: If Amazon warehouse workers'd follow such advice, much fewer packages would get shipped.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Amazon would just hire more workers... (They are paying them by the hour, aren't they?)
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    I doubt you could get enough people to want to show up to a 3 hour a day, 7 day a week job, and still be able to run a warehouse at the same cost.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  > If Amazon warehouse workers'd follow such advice, much fewer packages would get shipped. How so? Amazon is known for tracking performance very strictly. They will find the sweet spot for performance in case they see an opportunity.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ilyt 3y ago

[flagged]

cesaref 3y ago

The headline doesn't reflect the reality - I think what is really going on here is that 3 hours are spent doing what is considered 'work' by the outside world (sitting in front of the machine and writing the code that people believe is what the job is). However, creative stuff like programming doesn't tend to fix in such a neat box, and the preparation, or creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problems tends to benefit from spending time doing something else - your brain is still whirring on the problem whilst you are out walking, exercising, cooking etc. If you add on the time spent working through problems, you'll probably come to the same conclusion that I have that I spend 24 hours a day thinking about the problems i'm tackling. I often come up with great solutions whilst i'm asleep, and bad nights sleep is often correlated with a gnarly problem i've still not worked out. I personally don't get hung up on how much time I spend actually coding. Some days it's full on, other days I seem to achieve next to nothing, or if anything go backwards. I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right.

tkiolp4 3y ago
> I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right. And how many unproductive hours of work do you spend per day? I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day. When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  I'm communicating ideas to people most of the time.
- naavis 3y ago
  > When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours. Honest question, do you unilaterally ignore any other parts of the contract?

majkinetor 3y ago

This completelly ignores the inner and outer world that are somewhat or completelly out of your control in given context. For example, you might be immonologically or psychologically compromised, there might be a lot of noise in environment for some period of month, you got a baby etc. If you are alone, it might be a lot easier, but with family, any schedule that is not dynamic is failure.

kleiba 3y ago

Not convincing to me. I do agree with the general notion that working 8 productive hours everyday does not work long-term. But assuming that you could work three hours completely productively every day, that does not imply that the remaining five hours would be completely worthless. In a normal work week, I am sure you could get more out of the remaining 5x5 = 25 hours than the six hours at the weekend. Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day. I think the appeal of "3 hours a day" is that the number is so extremely low compared to the number 8. But I don't think that it will work. Flexible time models also give you a pretty good work-life balance, and they're more realistic. I mean, for one, you won't find an employer who will follow this 3-hour model, so we're only talking about self-employed workers. But even then, it has to be a pure coding or other desk job - if it involved e.g. any meetings at all, how are you going to fit that into your small time budget of three hours only per day? Yeah, like I said, I don't think that this model is going to work in most situations and for most people.

ilyt 3y ago
Pretty much. Near-everything aside from "one man project hacking" will have some amount of "office hours" just used to coordinate with co-workers, plan, code review, or frankly just doing stuff like reading the docs or specs. Even assuming "you can only do 3 productive hours a day" (which is a lie with appeal to authority mixed in. "Look that guy that made shitty web framework did it, it must be good!"), that does apply only to coding, there is more to being developer than just programming > Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day. I'd even call that advice outright idiotic. You wasted time to get in the zone only to throw it away I feel like any recommendation of "do X hours of this" is a delusion. We're not robots, we have better or worse days and more or less engaging tasks. If task is "here are API docs, make a bunch of code and tests for it" I can do it whole day without much slowdown.

grammers 3y ago

Sounds like a plan. How does one get such a job?

BlueTemplar 3y ago
> I am an indie iPhone developer
- hereonout2 3y ago
  Indeed! As a more senior programmer at a large corporate, I'm lucky if I only have three hours of meetings per day.
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    But are those meetings "work" in the sense he's talking about? I would guess that for most people, most meetings are not "work."
    - raydev 3y ago
      Meetings require some base level of focus on the meeting, so it is still work. Some people might get away with playing games or reading Twitter or whatever during meetings, but it isn't actually a restful break.
    - hereonout2 3y ago
      Most meetings are not coding but they are all work. No chance I would be attending without getting paid and by the same token I'd likely get sacked if I failed to attend. I can't imagine a solo indie dev has those meetings though. So their definition of work is somewhat different. Also I guess the three hours is a consequence of them having a successful product, which is somewhat akin to winning the lottery. I can't imagine if they were struggling to make rent they'd down tools at 11am for an afternoon of reading and walking.

BlueTemplar 3y ago

> First, the most productive time for me is after I wake up, so I need to sleep well, and start working right after I wake up. I don’t read any news or SNS because even if I only read them a little bit, it could affect my productivity because it distracts my mind. > I even disable all notifications on my iPhone before I go to bed, so I don’t see them before I start working next day.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rvba 3y ago

Congratulations to the author for building a successful product from which they can make a living! Even bigger congratulations that the product can be maintained / extended by working few hours per day. For example 4 hours x 31 days = 124 hours per month. Now compare this to a corporate job where it feels like you are setup to fail. Every day 3-6 hours of meetings / conference calls. Constant flood of emails that are often irrelevant or unclear, but you need to stay focused reading them because something can be relevant to what you are doing (often the part important to you is written in an ambigious way, since they dont know what to do with your case - so you have to ask for clarifications - more meetings). Constant context switching due to having to drop what you are doing to do something else. Trying to do you your actual work.. often after hours, when they still call you. Or you cant even do your job, because someone who is supposed to provide something for you didnt do it on time, so you are waiting. (They update that it will be there the next day, on next day -> they again say next day and so on). 10 hours per day x 21 days = 210 hours Of course corporate work is safer. Somehow the corporation exists and moves forward. That's why it is so impressive that the author can be their own boss. Could even make some contracting work from time to time.

JonChesterfield 3y ago

Work is a mixture of thinking through problems, writing down the answer, debugging systems, talking to stakeholders, writing prose for engineers or management. An idea from the creative artist world is to consciously divide the tasks into creative and other. Game plan goes: Wake up. Do not read email. Or slack. Breakfast then walk, thinking about things. Write down the ideas you want to come back to. Then lunch. Then take a look at email, slack. Do the traditional fire fighting while trying to write code simultaneously game until the evening. Spend the evening socialising, reading, generally taking in new information, probably in the hope that it gets sorted while you sleep and takes your mind off the fires of the afternoon. That's not a path to three hours a day of work. But it probably is a way to make progress on hard problems despite a software dev day job that applies pressure against that, via cultural firefighting.

herodoturtle 3y ago

The merits of the idea aside, I find it quite interesting that this was written 7 years ago (2016), and that the author had been doing it for 2 years already. At present the idea of working 3 focused hours per day doesn't seem outrageous, but back in 2014 this would have been quite progressive.

lhoff 3y ago

I recently read the book deep work by Cal Newport. He introduces the concept of deep and shallow work. Deep work is the part the needs focus, concentration and complex thoughts. He argues that there is a limit of about 3-4 hours that one can spend in the state of deep work. That doesn’t mean in can’t do more shallow work in addition to the deep work. But the brain also needs rest, therefore working long hours consistently diminishes the ability to work deep. Also some problems are better solved unconsciously while the brain is resting. I can really recommend that book, I haven’t adopted to many of the practices that he recommends but I am working on it and it already had a profound impact on the quality of my work but also my general mental health.

amelius 3y ago
Ok, but the shallow work can perhaps at some point be done by LLMs. If we have to compete with AI, then we might get more pressure to spend more time doing deep work.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

Whatever works for the author, he is self employed. For most companies I have worked for I would get to the office very early in order to have at least 90 minutes of total concentration before other people came to work. I would usually leave work around 3PM, a few hours before other people left work. That always worked really well for me. During the day, I would routinely shut my door for a while and relax. re: author of article: I wonder if he does technology learning activities outside his 3 hour work window?

mnw21cam 3y ago

"Everyday" doesn't mean the same thing as "Every day", just like "Everybody" doesn't mean the same thing as "Every body". Pet hate of mine.

wly_cdgr 3y ago

Sounds about right. Maybe you could do 4 hours if you really wanted to push it. I do think you could then have another 2-3 hour block of something completely unrelated every day and be very productive doing that as well.

karlclaude80 3y ago

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maryfisherr6 3y ago

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