Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: Basically getting up early and doing 4 hours of deep work has changed my life from really stressful and bad to really productive and nice.

One thing really fundamentally helped me, as someone who works from home on a large project in an asynchronous 100% remote organization.

I work on a fairly involved project that demands a lot of hard work. At the same time there are other things I want to get done: some administrative duties, some nonprofit work, etc etc.

That makes me stressed and anxious, and my natural response to that is to buckle down and try to "finish" the big projects, by overworking...

Except overworking doesn't actually tend to mean getting a lot of work done, because I spend more mental energy being stressed about how much I have to do than I spend on actually doing it.

It's a pretty vicious cycle and I guess it is a proximate cause of burnout.

It all changed when I realized I cannot sustainably do more than a few hours of hard work every day, and took that to heart.

Now I don't try to get more done in a day than is sustainably possible.

I wake up pretty early, around 6, sometimes 7, sometimes 5. Then I make a cup of coffee, some small breakfast, and sit down in my comfortable coding environment, and do a sprint of serious working.

About 4 hours of that is usually enough to land a decent series of commits that definitely advance the project.

Then I do the mental magic that previous me never did. I think: "Wow, that's great work for one day! I'm definitely on track!"

And at this point it's like 11 AM. So I can happily go have lunch, another cup of coffee, listen to a podcast or something, and know that I have plenty of time in the afternoon for paying bills and whatnot.

I also like to take some time in the afternoon to improve my work life in some rewarding way. This includes Emacs tweaking, build server and CI setup, etc. Lately I've managed to get my business email into a form that I enjoy.

(Details: my maildir gets mined for all the important recurring PDFs which end up in monthly folders, and since yesterday I even have a shell script that uses "pdftotext -layout" to parse out due amounts and OCR/reference numbers from the few recurring bills we need to pay manually. This eliminates a type of drudgery that I really loathe, so it's a huge win in terms of mental energy.)

Sounds to me like you had some issues with distractions during the day, amplified by working at home.

Other people (like me) prefer to work late at night for the same reason, it also allows for a more social lifestyle (i.e. going out occasionally) than having to be in bed early.

It's less about distractions and more about never having the feeling of having done enough.

Being done with work by lunchtime is a way for me to be more social, but that's a matter of situation. I do "go out" sometimes; shifting my sleep time by a couple of hours isn't a big problem for me.

I'm sorry but I'm missing how can you have a more social lifestyle if you are working while the others are going out..

Not having to ”be in bed early” makes ”going out occasionally” easier!

I miss the times developers would optimize their lives without all the online rants and the sensitive encouraging, nodding and enabling of said behavior.

That said, don't you have banks which automatically pay your bills (electricity/gas/water)? Which country are you from?

I prefer not to pay my bills automatically because it doesn't take much time and lets me make sure they are correct.

Plus, you can more easily switch banks.

Provision and migrate accounts with Ansible?

In the UK the banks take care of switching over your direct debits and standing orders when you switch bank accounts.

Manually pay bills every month, or whatever period, so that it's easier to switch account? Even if you're switching every year that doesn't sound like a good deal.

You can still check if they're correct if you do it automatically though. You can just cancel the tranfer.

My bank doesn't make that easy for me. Besides, it only takes me a few minutes each month to review and pay bills.

You probably should stay away from comment threads about personal productivity then?

I think 'paying bills' here is shorthand for the general administrative burden of being alive, which seems to have grown substantially in recent decades.

In what ways has it grown? It seems easier than ever to track and automate personal finance.

For me, "paying bills" is not the literal act of making payments to vendors and creditors. It is the act of exporting one's labor outside the family, in exchange for the medium of exchange required to pay one's bills.

I don't "pay my bills" by writing checks and mailing them. I "pay my bills" by working at a corporate peon job for 40 hours a week. If I do the same kind of work at home on a side project, that is still work, but not "bill paying" work.

The literal act of paying bills takes me all of five minutes every month. An hour per year, whenever I don't have to add any new payees to the system. I spend more time voiding my bowels, which I always seem to have enough time for, regardless of how much time I spend working.

Maybe ancestor post was referring to doing accounts payable and accounts receivable accounting work for the business? Seems like that might be more labor intensive than hitting the "pay" button for the electric bill, even with modern business accounting software. Even then, it wouldn't be something I'd do every day, and if all I felt I could do in the afternoons is light administrative work, I think I'd just knock off early if I didn't have enough to fill at least a solid 2 hours, or if it was the last day of the month.

I'm the ancestor, and yeah, I do work through my own firm and there are some monthly bills and bookkeeping that's not automatic. I also live overseas and pay my utilities and rent via EU bank transfer.

exactly.. it's literally a job in itself.

My bank doesn't know how much my bill is going to be every month, so I have to put the amount in. Fortunately, I use simple.com and paying a bill with their mobile app takes a couple of seconds (once I have entered the companies info). Some companies have decent recurring billing via ACH, and I use that on most of my credit cards (I still check the statements each month), but my electric, water, sewer, and gas companies (all separate where I am) all have absolutely terrible websites (and the electric company just plain sucks generally), so I often find myself just paying those bills manually as they come in (after checking them for accuracy).

You don't have direct debits for this sort of thing ie bill is paid automatically?

Yeah this amazed me too. Usually gas and electric companies make a yearly estimate based on last year's use, then divide that by 12 months. If the estimate overshot, you get money back, otherwise you have to pay a little extra at the end of a 12 month cycle.

That is an option for most of my utilities, but I haven't set it up. I moved a year ago so it would have been difficult to estimate usage at that point. I guess I could set it up now.

YOu have to setup the ACH/Direct Debit with each utility here, you can't just set it up at the bank. And the utilities have crappy websites/processes for doing so- if they allow you to do it at all. They have a monopoly, so why bother with improving customer service?

They should bother because it saves administration, and they get the money at the expected time.

Most utilities companies in the UK are private and must compete, but even the few exceptions encourage people to pay using direct debit.

I can't speak for others, but there's no way in hell I'm giving any company direct debit abilities to my bank account. Given the fuck-ups we see here daily by banks and businesses, I think anyone who does that is playing with fire. But if it works for you, go for it! I'll spend the 5 minutes every other week to type in the amount needed on my bank's website to send whoever an electronic payment rather than letting them pull money from my account. It's worth the time to me.

In the UK, and I think many other European countries, the direct debit system is very heavily slanted in favour of the customer.

Here[1] is the UK Direct Debit Guarantee. It's extremely easy for the customer to reverse a transaction, and (advising the merchant) "Given the limited scope for appeals [against counterclaims] within the Direct Debit scheme, most disputes happen outside of it".

https://gocardless.com/direct-debit/guarantee/

Same, it's usually the utility companies that I have trouble getting automated. They have shoddy websites/weird rules/etc.

Everything should have automatic payments, and if they don't then they don't deserve to get paid. That said I use Prisim to take care of the rest that don't.

If someone writes about how THEY do things it's a good way to improve MY process. If it improves things for me, what's wrong with saying thanks to the writer?

Most of my bills can be automated, but a few cannot. I also take time to read over my statements to check for fraud/bad habits.

How did you get your employer to agree to 4-hour work days?

The first half and one of your comment replies spoke to me deeply - especifically the part about having the feeling of never having done enough, haunts me everyday, but also pushes me.

So thanks so much for writing this! Just wish you could speak more about how you were able to negotiate your current work schedule.

I'm guessing that his employer is agreeing to take the 4 hours of productive work he achieves, which is likely much more than the average "sit in front of the keyboard for 8 hours" worker.

Yeah, that must be the case: a smart employer and demonstrably productive employee.

I don't have an employer that cares about my schedule. It's literally never come up. My daily productivity has increased noticably since this regimen, and if my employer didn't understand that as a benefit, they'd be silly.

By the way I'm active for more than 4 hours a day, and after the morning sprint I'll spend some time chatting about business, reading and learning, triaging issues, etc. It's just that I don't spend more than 4 hours intensively coding or debugging.

Great response, thanks!

This is so much relatable to my situation. Thanks for the tips!

i agree with this. as i've gotten older i've become a morning person, usually starting around 6, but sometimes earlier. you can easily belt out 4-5 hours of real work before lunch time, and then take a leisurely lunch/walk/coffee, and do administrative / non-intense tasks in the early afternoon, leaving a relaxed afternoon and evening to do real life things.

and, when a true emergency pops up, it's rare, and it doesn't trigger your stress/frustration response.

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