Comment by clubm8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clubm8 | Hacker News Reader

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Out of curiosity, how do you set boundaries with your employer?

One thing I've struggled with in the past is employers who seem to expect 8 hours of solid productivity a day if I'm remote.

When I was in the office, it was easier to say "well sorry, I've followed up twice in 3 days on issue x, and unfortunately you got back to me after I'd left for the weekend".

When I'm remote, since there is the flexibility to stop and start work, but that seems to come at the expense that when doing work that requires collaboration, someone can delay responding on something that's a block, and then there's some pressure to "make up" for the "unproductive" time. You don't get any good grace for "being present" and there's less of the social aspect. (If I had downtime in an office, I might make some tea and ask a coworker about their kids/hobbies, a random slack DM feels intrusive)

How did you handle this issue? Did you just establish "core hours" you are available?

I've encountered similar issues in non-remote workspaces, and it's something I'm keenly interested in. I am not a lazy person, but I desire a delineation between "work time" and "personal time", and struggle to set that boundary without seeing my career struggle.

A couple of things jump out to me. The first is that "hours" is a terrible measure of productivity. I find that I work best when I actually sit down and write code about four hours per day. Some days it's more like six, and occasionally it'll be even more, if I'm in the flow and have a clear path worked out. Even less often, I won't be able to focus and will instead putz around most or all of the day doing "soft work" - answering emails, reviewing small PRs, etc. The trick to this that I've found is to find an employer where you're evaluated in a way that makes sense. Story points work OK most of the time, but overall progress to goal is even better. To find a place like that, you have to evaluate the team you'll be working with. To keep it, you'll need to make strong ties to your team members and learn their rhythm. Your work schedule needs to work with theirs, whatever that might be.

The second is that you have to set expectations early, and stick with them. If you want to work set hours, then state that. Don't be easily accessible outside those hours.

Personally, I'm almost always available if something needs done at work, but very rarely have to jump up and do something immediately. It's rare that I want time completely separate from work, but when I do I just let my team know in Slack that I'll be incommunicado and it's not an issue.

>A couple of things jump out to me. The first is that "hours" is a terrible measure of productivity. I find that I work best when I actually sit down and write code about four hours per day.

I totally agree. However, the issue is being "engaged to work" as labor lawyers put it. If I am waiting for you to give me the information nessecary to perform those two hours, it can be a block on my day.

For example, my ideal day would involve waking up, doing some head down work for 2 hours, and then using the rest of the day to do more rote tasks - having meetings, reading up on technical developments, working less brain intensive stuff like tweaking some automation scripts, or anything else that can be done knowing someone might pop in with a question or concern.

But if instead I wake up, find no responses on 3 separate issues, sit through a long meeting skype meeting, then am frequently "pinged" for questions throughout the day as I attempt to do productive tasks so I can't take some "me time" and 8 hours later, someone responds on the core issue I need to work in... I think this illustratates the issue I and other remote workers often face.

>The second is that you have to set expectations early, and stick with them. If you want to work set hours, then state that. Don't be easily accessible outside those hours.

This is a good suggestion, maybe my issue was that the specific employer I'm thinking of did not have a good culture. I tried to set that expectation but got strong pushback from my manager that as a salaried employee I do not have set hours.

>It's rare that I want time completely separate from work, but when I do I just let my team know in Slack that I'll be incommunicado and it's not an issue.

You don't have any set times/days?

For example, I don't want to be inflexible - if I don't have evening plans I don't mind answering a slack query while I Netflix, but what I fear is if I do that sometimes, it sets a precedent I must do it at all times.

For me, having set times where I am "not at work" is very important, and I actively am thinking about how to set those boundaries without being a burden. I'm not a religious person, but maybe I should try saying Sundays are a day of rest for me...

> for questions throughout the day as I attempt to do productive tasks so I can't take some "me time" and 8 hours later, someone responds on the core issue I need to work in... I think this illustratates the issue I and other remote workers often face.

This is how my office life is..

This is how 90%, if not more, of all jobs are.

The sad irony of my situation. If given the right scope of work I can be productive almost 100% capacity (ie. it's almost like flipping a switch for me to get into 100% flow).

Except I work on a very large project. So my tasks are so much smaller and less significant than I could handle, it probably takes 50% of my capacity just to figure out how to work productively and efficiently. So regardless of my productivity I very rarely let myself work more than 8 hrs / day.

It's sad that in certain environments you're literally just not going to be "allowed" to work at your full capacity at any given point in the day.

I think this is almost without exception true in larger companies. There’s just so much communication that goes into doing pretty much everything.

I struggled with the same problem, the 8 hours of solid productivity a day is a killer after working remotely during several days. My solution for that is the Pomodoro technique, I wrote an article about that, hope you find it useful: https://medium.com/@marcochvez/how-i-get-my-workday-done-in-...

Sounds interesting. Maybe you could summarize here in addition to linking to your blog?

> I have been working remotely for two years and I struggled setting my own schedule. Sometimes I ended my day feeling unproductive or wondering how I was spending my time without being aware of what I accomplished.

> One solution to my problem is the Pomodoro technique, which is a method to break down work into intervals of 25 minutes.

> A study (that helped me to figure out that question) reveals that the average worker is only productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes per day, the remaining time is spent in activities unrelated to work (checking social media, reading news, discussing out of work activities with colleagues, etc.).

> Taking the 2 hours and 53 minutes as base, that gives us approximately 7 intervals of 25 minutes, although in practice I’m doing 8 to 10 intervals. This could vary per person and the type of work, but at least we could consider 7 as the minimum. Also I found out that writing down consciously what I’m going to do in my next interval helps me to create peace of mind about my productive time, because at the end of each day I finish with a task history that justifies my work.

> After a few months using a spreadsheet and a Pomodoro timer I was looking for a solution to integrate these tools seamlessly, Despite trying different and complex Pomodoro apps I decided to create a simple and minimalistic solution named Work & Flow

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