Being tired isn’t a badge of honor – Signal v. Noise
m.signalvnoise.com
m.signalvnoise.com
The past month, I've been assigned to work 17 miles out. My commute went from a pleasant 15 minutes one way to 1 hour and 15 minutes one way on sidewalks and shitty to no bicycle infrastructure in the suburbs. I take a bus for a portion of it.
This change has disrupted my whole life; I now truly know what people mean by the term "the daily grind". You wake up, do your routine, go to work, do work, come home, and go to sleep. Repeat. Every day. It's depressing. It seeps into your whole life outside of work and affects your well being.
After spending the last few years living and working within the radius of a few miles, after two days of working 17 miles away, I loathe it. The enjoyable work turns sour and it's hard to do your best.
I truly don't understand how people spend their days like this. I really feel for those who don't own a car and don't live close to their place of work. Some of the people on the bus work two jobs; just imagine spending that much time commuting and working just to get by.
You get used to it. When I lived in a more affordable metro area, I could live 30-45 minutes from work, and indeed it was nice. Now, in the Bay Area, it's more like 2+ hours each way, which I thought would make me want to slit my wrists, but you kind of just turn off your brain and deal with it. I find the need to "take work home"--because there isn't enough time in the day--to be more of a "grind" than the commute. You never truly end your work for the day. But you do what you have to to support your family, even if you never get to see them.
I understand why you would do this for your family, but surely there are other work options? If you're spending 2+ hours each way in a commute, that's roughly 1/4 of your waking time each work day. If you could take a small pay cut (retaining enough money to support your family) but get those 4+ hours of your time each work day back, would that be something you'd consider?
I live in the 'burbs now and I don't think I could ever go back to high-density living. When I was in my 20's, the energy of the city was electrifying. In my 40's, the peace of the neighborhood is calming. I love having community pools and tennis and basketball courts. I like having maintained trails for walking my dog. I love having a big garden. I like my neighbors and my gigabit internet.
I'm just waiting for self-driving cars to be available so that I can move further out of the city.
But we still have it relatively easy!
- http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-w...
- http://www.epi.org/publication/irregular-work-scheduling-and...
Assuming, roughly, 250 working/commuting days each year, every 2 minutes you spend on your commute equals 500 minutes annually, or just over one 8hr work day.
After realizing that my current 40min commute costs me 20 working days of time per year, with further costs of car maintenance, stress and risk, I've committed to finding a gig closer to home, or even better, one that allows working remotely. The opportunity costs of commuting by car are just too high.
I was quantifying it like this:
* work: 8 hours
* sleep: 8 hours
* commute: ~2.5 hours
That leaves 5.5 hours a day for myself, which includes eating and getting ready. So really, less than that.
I'm totally sold on the philosophy of eat, work, sleep, and play in the same area. You can rent a car if you want to go on a long weekend or something and not have to worry about any maintenance. It feels more liberating.
It doesn't bother me at all. The walk is enjoyable and during the rest of the time I read books, blogs, HN, etc on my tablet, I play games, or I just enjoy the view[1]. It doesn't feel like wasted time at all, though I certainly can't do everything I would at home.
I do find two things are crucial: the walk is on quiet streets with lots of trees, and the train and boats are smooth. I spent a few months commuting by bus, and it was much worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We%27re_Alive,_A_Story_of_Surv...
The linked programmes aren't currently available on the BBC site to anyone - but linking gives people info to buy the product or find it using other methods.
(I'd be surprised if there wasn't a private tracker for BBC content).
I would say adaptation is hugely important. Find some way to enjoy it, or at the least, find a way to make better use of the time.
I've worked some 30-35 hour weeks at my current job, but work has been super happy with my productivity that it isn't an issue (plus I do a lot of open source work outside the job, so work still benefits from that) - occasionally I still participate in some prolonged hours due to major deadlines, but those deadlines are malleable and not prioritized over product team work-life balance.
It is a refreshing contrast with the typical startup here in the Bay Area
The truth is that I was probably being productive, but the reality is that I was being productive toward destructive ends. I learned a lesson and, unlike every other developer where I work, I stick to it. If I'm doing overtime it is because of exceptional circumstances. My company has learned to respect that - I'd wager that many would.
Just the other night I had a meeting with my brother about some design issues around an API (usability and guidance toward strong patterns for 3rd party devs). We have very similar brains (thought patterns and overall intellect) but unlike me he still overworks himself. Once I grasped the problems, the solutions were strikingly obvious to my well-rested mind. He'd been struggling for at least a week.
I wish we could have some more science done on this stuff (specifically relating to tech). I have a huge amount of experience-based evidence pointing toward the factuality of this article, but anecdotes and personal experience are not how you sway decision makers.
There is a lot of science out there. Henry Ford was one of the first major employers to figure out that when his employees had higher productivity when their work hours were reduced from 9 hours a day to 8. The interesting thing is that total productivity is increased (as well as productivity per hour) by working fewer hours. Working long hours long-term is highly detrminental.
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/crunc...
Spoilers: It destroys productivity and teams.
As for anecdotes and swaying decision makers, anyone who keeps a personal journal of what happens during a day and how much they've been sleeping will quickly correlate bad days with sleepless nights before. "Unlucky" events are more common on less sleep.
During my neurosurgery postdoc (I'm a BME with a focus in neuroscience), I helped develop a portable EEG system, with part of the focus on identifying EEG biomarkers of sleep deprivation and its effects on attention, response time, etc (i.e. changes in brain patterns related to sleep, or lack thereof). One of our first targeted populations were doctors and residents at the hospital I worked at. The administration and department chairs absolutely BALKED at the idea. If we were going to show what working 36 hour shifts did to a resident's brain by the end of the shift, and the very detrimental effect on decision making, etc., they wanted no part of it, and the project kind of fell apart.
Any chance you could point me towards resources that explain what we know of the superchiasmatic nucleus, circadian clock and regulation. I have a somewhat rigid tendency to live on 25 hour days which is typically an honor reserved for the completely blind. So far, controlling it socially has failed and pretty much nobody else lives like this, so I'm toying with the idea of a deep dive into molecular biology or neuroscience.
I'm watching with interest experiments happening in nordic countries about how actually working less could be beneficial, although as the article points out it's too early to draw conclusive findings[1].
For startups, it's sexy for founders to say they cranked 16 hour days and they had a great exit. They won! Sure, they may have won, but on the other side of that is that they've ground their employees into the ground. Families and friends be damned. Seriously. There's nothing worse having a family that's second to an unsustainable and poisonous work ethic. Talk about breaking down the American family, this is one perfect example; a society that values monetary success over raising the next generation...
I went through one of these and I'll never do it again. I've worked for a lot of startups too and it's only good for investors and founders that get a good exit. It's never good for the employee, even if there is a good exit. For them, the damage is done because they see "wow, we succeeded, this must be the way to do it".
I was close to leaving tech - something I've done for decades - because of this attitude that is really ingrained in tech now. It's a cancer, really. I couldn't agree with the article more and hope people really take it to heart.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/jan06/onit.aspx
"Bill Gates has been quoted saying that his
programmers can program for 72 hours straight,"
Stickgold says. "And I say: yeah, but their product
is Windows."
Taking a sick-day is definitely preferred.
(this only works if you have a safety-net where employees are guaranteed more than a week of leave for illness, compassionate or carers. Hard to imagine not having that protection.)
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/economics-sleep-part-1-freak... http://freakonomics.com/2015/07/09/the-economics-of-sleep-pa...
Know the difference and get to the former as soon as you can in your working life.
With a small business, I understand why there can be lack of sleep - you don't have the resources to hire more, but stuff has to get done. But with IBs/Doctors, why can't the Managing Directors/Head of Depts just hire more, but pay less (with shorter shifts)?
Think about it... as you tire, the quality of your work declines. That's obvious. Taken far enough, you can become counterproductive, making so many expensive mistakes that you'd have gotten more done by not working at all. But rest resets our bodies and energy, right? But what if you don't get enough rest to reset? Then you're starting the next day still carrying the debt of yesterday's overwork. You're not as productive as you should be.
There will always be lots of very interesting things to do and some things you are forced to do, such as academic work or job related. I think at some point you have to take a step back and take a look at what is it that you are spending your life doing.
So recently I had made a list of all the things I wanted to learn and have a working knowledge of: Ruby on Rails, Git and Mercurial, WebRTC, Go, Android development. iOS development, Shell scripting, Python, R, machine learning, server adminstration, Angular JS. Yes it sounds crazy probably because it is crazy. Then I reached a point where I was pushing myself to learn new technologies at an unsustainable pace. And the excuse was always "today is the last day I'll need to get by on 3 hours of sleep". Then I finally got to the point where I was completely exhausted and that forced me to take a step back and learn what was absolutely important to me (for my startup) and stop trying to learn/understand every single interesting language, framework or platform I come across (thanks partly to my HN addiction).
Regarding the discussion about commuting to and from work, it's a real drain on employees, employer and the environment as well (pollution). This might not be applicable to most types of jobs, but living far away from cities and working remotely are something worth exploring. I say this from first hand experience, living in the country side, close to beautiful farms, flowing rivers and with access to hills with trails, and working on my personal projects and constantly in touch with the outside world through the internet, I never feel like I am missing out much on city life. It's probably the best of both worlds.
I think eventually, the preference of living in densely populated cities will give way to leading a more peaceful life and yet continue doing creative work in smaller, less dense establishments. Hopefully a reverse urbanisation.
I wrote my own similar thoughts here: https://softwarebymiles.com/startups-vacation-c1c9d4ceb7ff#....
I'm fortunate enough to wake up naturally however I hear foghorn ringtones echoing from my housemates rooms most mornings and that's just a terrible way to start your day.
Leads to a grogginess that's hard to shake.
I have generally tried to take jobs that work around this, but it hasn't always been possible.
http://blog.netizencorp.com/2014/03/30/working-rediculously-...
'It works through matters you can’t address during the day.'
I'm curious how you assume this or what papers you read that makes you think this.
Being tired can certainly be a badge of honour. It's where for example you continued to get things DONE... and others simply say, tomorrow another day, i don't care what happens after 5PM. It's called responsibility. Though this obviously doesn't apply to everybody in the same way.
also please read:
Purely anecdotal, but it happened to me zillions of times that I got completely stuck at a problem at work, only to solve it within a few minutes the next day. I've yet to come across a single developer who doesn't acknowledge that kind of experience is very common. I see it regularly, the longer coworkers trudge along trying to get something done after 10 hours of work, the more problems and crap they produce.
I'm not sure why you need more 'proof' that working long hours kills productivity and creativity, and rest (sleep) replenishes it. It seems completely natural, both from experience and from an evolutionary perspective.
Also negative experiences create a more clear memory of the event then a positive one. So it's even possible you only remember the times you couldn't come up with the idea that same day vs not having memories of the times you did came up with solution that same day (because, you didn't have to wait till the next day to fix it, which didn't create such a strong memory of that annoying moment).
Some people perform better under hard deadlines and pressure, others can't cope with pressure at all. I would not be surprised if same applies to people performing with a lack of rest/sleep.
Though I never said or meant to give the idea that it doesn't have any effect, nor if it always have the same affect. I merely wanted to point out there are quite a few cases, situations where i think being tired does warrant a badge of honour. And that going that extra mile, even when super tired, where others give up is (very) honourable.
And calling it a day, and accepting you can't find a solution that working day, is not very honourable (in my humble opinion). And yes there is more to life then work, but that's not the point i try to make. :)