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Comment by bertlequant | Hacker News Reader

A lot of this seems to blame others for a personal lack of attention and productivity. Even the Joe Spolsky article someone linked to below, lists a whole lot of reasons that diminish his productivity, none of them being directly caused by him. I am quite the opposite. I tend to think focusing on maximum productivity makes me less productive, as I will tend to get peeved about things I have no control over.

Sure, if someone interrupts you while you have set it up to be clear you are busy (whether on your work messenger or email) then that is annoying and not cool. But it's hard for me to get annoyed at others when I haven't done the ground work to set up those obvious protections.

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So much this. As a practitioner of modern stoicism, the idea that my productivity should be tied to external influences is anathema to my philosophy.

Working from home and having three kids between 6 and 10 months, the onus is on my to manage my expectations and my spouses expectations for when I'm going to be working, what work is interruptible, and what's most important to me. Given that my priorities go: family, friends (spouse included here), work, volunteering, that means that if the family isn't functioning well, that's where my attention goes until we're in a good place.

I've seen a lot of people either neglect their personal priority list or simply not have one, and then wonder why their life is falling apart around them, or they from time to time feel void or uninspired.

All this to say, productivity for productivity's sake is the behavior of cancer. If I have an un-productive day from a work perspective, it's usually because I was tending to higher priorities in my life, and thus it is hardly the end of the world, and I make a plan for getting things back on an even keel there so tomorrow or the next day I will have a more productive day, and make sure to communicate this to my supervisor in my next 1:1.

Aren't you throwing many different things on the same pile here? If your 3 kids interrupt you, each one each hour. Do you get stuff done?

Your priorities are excellent. But unless you are wealthy enough that money is not a priority and/or have a wife that's a housewife, or nanny or maid... all interruptions in the "zone" are real interruptions that have a significant cost involved.

PS. Modern stoicism is awesome.

Off topic: When you say "modern stoicism", do you mean applying classical stoic principles to modern life or are there certain books, authors, or websites that offer a modern interpretation of classical stoicism you're referring to?

A quick search yielded this site: http://modernstoicism.com. Any other references would be appreciated.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29093292-the-daily-stoic

This is just a really good book. Get the hardcover version, so it feels a bit like a bible :)

Basically, yes. Classical stoicism applied to modern life, with concessions made where needed to adapt to reality.

Thankfully, ancient stoics were quite avant garde in many of their social norms, so it doesn't have be modified as much you might thing. Musionus Rufus makes a damn good argument for the intellectual equality of men and women, in the first century after the purported birth of Christ.

I should add that I am blessed to have a housewife for a partner, though I realize I may get thrown under the PC bus for acknowledging that. Also, I'm not wealthy enough that money is not a priority (i.e. my debt exceeds my income), but I do not consider money to be the pinnacle of my wealth, either.

If I were a single parent, or primary care giver, my solution to interruptions while working from home would be considerably different, but all I can offer an opinion on is my own personal circumstance.

P.S. I have found great joy in stoicism, and avoided even greater strife :)

3 kids between 6 and 10 months.. I was struggling to understand how it's physically possible with the same mother to have 3 kids between 6 months and 10 months.

But now I see you mean 6 years old and 10 months.

Thanks for sharing your perspective, I work in a similar situation (at home and family around). I'd be curious to hear more about

> I make a plan for getting things back on an even keel there so tomorrow or the next day I will have a more productive day

And

> make sure to communicate this to my supervisor in my next 1:1

Yeah, typing too fast. Thanks for parsing my terrible grammar. Ah to be human :)

First off, I mean I don't get angry about the disruption. Honestly, nine times out of ten, volunteering once a week to do something like take my daughter to gymnastics class with the other kids and leave my wife at home puts things on an even keel faster than almost anything else I've encountered. That's just one example, but acknowledging the flexibility working from home provides and taking advantage of it, so long as deadlines don't slip.

Then making sure I'm honest in my conversations with my supervisor about the time I took off in the middle of the day, especially if she wasn't aware of it, so that she knows what I was doing, my plan for getting my work done (usually a little work after kids go down instead of a TV show with my wife), and that I don't plan on doing that every week.

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