Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

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> Pfft. A man-hour of labor is a man-hour of labor.

Not all hours are created equally.

I do my best work with hyperfocus.

I don't just mean more work, but far higher quality work that's at the edge of my intellectual capabilities.

This is the work that's most rewarding and gives results that I'm proud of.

But I can't get significant time "in the zone" on a 40-hour week.

All the normal but necessary distractions take at least four hours a day, and I need at least an hour or two of "non-zone" work before I can hit my stride and achieve flow.

So I find 60-70 hours a week is essential to doing my best work.

But I can't sustain that level of effort continuously for years.

So I balance that out with a week a month of low-intensity "work" (slacking/procrastinating/socializing) plus at least twelve weeks per year of contiguous time for uninterrupted travel, long-distance trekking, rebuilding relationships damaged by hyperfocus, etc.

I think you'll find that pushing back on the four hours of usual distractions per day will be more productive than working long hours.

Personally, I find the usual distractions more tiring than coding, based on years of experience.

I estimate at least 2 hours of work lost per hour of meeting, once you add in meeting prep, calendar wrangling, walking, after and before meeting back chatter, realizing you have 30 minutes till lunch/commute after/before the meeting, being tired from presenting/listening/arguing, etc.

One strategy is to have meeting-only or meeting-free days, so meetings primarily ruin your productivity for other meetings and not your actual work.

Meeting-only days scale with team size, but can backfire by enabling the total number of hours in meetings to increase.

"I think you'll find that pushing back on the four hours of usual distractions per day will be more productive than working long hours."

Pretty much this. When you are explaing long hours by on the job ineffectively, then you need to deal with on the job ineffectivity - especially if you are in any kind of leadership position. Otherwise you end up rewarding innefective workers and punish workers with better organizational skill.

General feeling that it is ok to work ineffectively because we stay late anyway was one of the things I resented the most in previous job. And people who caused interruptions and wasted everybody time were seen as "hard workers" because they stayed late.

I think @jcadam was being snarky, not serious.

How do you get 3 months of vacation?

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