I let a stranger watch me work for a day and I've never been more productive
melmagazine.com
melmagazine.com
Intense productivity with someone looking over your shoulder is great for a day. After a week you'll want to quit. After a month you'll want to kill yourself.
Whether it's in-person or with a tool like this, if your employer is creating an unreasonable amount of pressure/stress, then that puts them in a weaker position in the job market than companies that treat their employees well. Give them feedback, and if they're not receptive to feedback, see if you can ask for a raise or find another job.
This is really important. If your manager or PM is constantly bothering you, you won’t be able to get into your flow state, which is important in software engineering.
it doesn't impact my freedom and autonomy because i decide what to do every day, so i set my own goals and only report on how well i achieved them or explain why i didn't (run into a bug etc)
If you get ten times more stuff done than usual, it would be enough to do this one or two times a week.
I'm not arguing for having a stranger watching you all the times or that you should only think about productivity, just that it shows that there's a margin for improvement that can't be dismissed
Yes, being "on" takes energy, but it's counterbalanced by the buzz of productivity and working at your peak.
I'd expect to be more tired at the end of day, but also to feel more accomplished.
There’s also the element that when a stranger (or a subordinate) is watching you don’t just act busy — you act like you enjoy your job, you show off a bit. This is the kind of performance that soaks into the skin and becomes real.
Also, did your study group have stranger or at least you kind of a bit familiar with them?
pair-programming is also exhausting. after an 8-hour work day i am beat. however i can't think of any better way to work, and it it is practiced in several companies successfully.
if people would want to quit after a week or kill themselves after a month of pair programming we would see a lot of backslash against it.
That's been my experience. Even at the few places I've been were some do pair programming it's a very rare occurrence. Occasionally upper management will stump for it, likely because they (a) don't actually program all day and (b) see it as some sort of kale-like super habit. None of my IC have ever pushed hard for regular sessions.
More important than pair programming itself is the willingness to look at what works for the team and how you can improve the experience and productivity together. Most of the time we did traditional pairing, with two keyboards and mice on a dual-monitor PC, and simply signalled each other when we wanted to take over or cede control. Towards the end of the four years there we very successfully "mobbed" on some complex problems, and split up when we had worked out what to do next. We would typically work in different pairs every day, which resulted in everybody knowing the entire system to a similar degree — we didn't even need a handover when someone left, and onboarding basically meant that the more senior employee had to explain a bit more of the context while pairing with the new hire. I found it did wonders to my understanding of how other developers think and especially how to explain my thinking to someone else. But YMMV, and good luck!
Three years ago I finally achieved my dream of working from home. I was writing my thesis and believed I could finish my masters in 8 months. I decided to fully focus on it and, afterwards, I would create my long dreamed own software company.
It worked really well for some weeks. I was much more focused than I used to be working in regular offices, with bosses. But soon I started getting distracted with amateur radio, social media, couch and TV and so on.
Then I couldn't concentrate on anything anymore. After almost a year I had finished only half of my thesis. I started to feel desperate because I hadn't even started my company, and my savings were being burned day after day. This contributed to further drops in my productivity and concentration.
I finished my masters 14 months past what I initially imagined. And I eventually had almost no energy left to work on my products. I sporadically had some boosts in productivity and managed to get something done. But I wasn't able to commit to plans anymore. I was always getting stuck. And my money going away.
My life-worth savings are basically depleted now, I have no wife anymore and I feel pretty bad and alone.
Coincidentally, yesterday I started to work on a co-working space. That new atmosphere helped me significantly and I hope it keeps this way for some time at least.
Good to know about Focusmate and alikes. I will definitely try them if my productivity drops again.
Local libraries and universities over here are not quiet places, unfortunately.
And I saw some advantage in having an office with a fixed position, so that I can take there my monitor, keyboard and stuff, avoiding working from home and forcing me to follow a stricter routine.
I used to suffer from a lot of stress and anxiety and I think that fueled my procrastination. Now that I no longer suffer from those, I can just focus on work.
For a while I've wondered how I even started procrastinating as hard as I did. I used to be the type to first get all pending tasks done and then go and enjoy my free time, but at some point it flipped. It's weird.
I used to be hugely self-driven and get a lot done but it seems that I get lost when working on really big projects. Some room for improvement in this field.
I will maybe write something about this in the future. When it comes to procrastination, people are usually so concerned about not realizing their full potentials. But it can be much worse than that. I was concerned about a suboptimal improvement and I ended up in a position worse than when I started.
It seems to me that what ruined my life was my inability to deal with the anxiety of undertaking a very large project totally on my own, having to deal with emotional highs and lows being patient enough to wait for the results -- very large projects take time especially when you are working alone.
I feel confident that things will improve, specially now that I think I understand better what I've gone through, but it costed me a lot.
I think that the biggest lesson I can draw from all of this storm is not to focus too much on the end result, specially when working on long-term projects.
At least this has been my personal experience.
It's easy to start a project to satisfy a creative itch, however, once committed full-time, passion may not be enough to keep you going. Then it becomes difficult to maintain productivity and focus.
Many folks don't realize that growing a business is a continuous cycle of iteration, and that they themselves must be included in this process. For me, motivation has shifted from satisfying a creative itch, to the joy of getting a new customer.
I also think that school (especially grad level studies) may be in some ways detrimental to an entrepreneur, in the same way that an athlete struggles to correct a flawed technique burned into their muscle memory from their youth.
If school has trained you to satisfy an external stimulus (e.g. your thesis advisor), then you may be looking for the same thing in someone telling you what to do. At the end of the day, a business is about customers. I'd heartily recommend you tie that into your own iteration cycle of how you work.
Did you have to pay for this space?
I know for me, the best way to kick myself in the pants is to start paying for something. If I stay in my apartment (which I'm paying for anyways), it's not easy to finish certain tasks, but once I have to start paying out of pocket that usually kicks me into high gear due to thinking "well I'm paying an extra $350/month for this space, if I sit here and slack off, I'm paying $350 /month to read HN, nope!".
IMO, if your focus starts drifting, find a new physical location to work from.
If you lost a spouse just because you had a bit of a down period in your life where you procrastinated, the problem in that marriage most likely wasn't you...
After sitting with the feeling for a bit, here are some ideas that come to mind:
1. Maybe we should ask why we feel shame/guilt in the first place. Is it "normal" to feel this? If it isn't we should not rely on it for our happiness (or productivity).
2. What is the value of productivity? Why does it make us happy?
For me, guilt/shame is something to be overcome, not used as a tool. And the value of productivity is something that has been handed down to us by a culture which we've been thrown into. And (at least for me), it's our duty to question these ideas instead of merely giving into them to self-reinforce themselves.
I'm focussing more on the aspect of having someone looking over your shoulder. Just a pair of eyes to watch you work (which I don't equate with pair programming)
OTOH I've seen similar things used in a different way which worked well, in places that have lots of ops centers to link them and make them feel like one - you can look up and see the other ops center with your colleagues there and chat etc. But that was less about applying a work/focus pressure and more about enabling communication and keeping the teams connected.
Wow, I think I quite strongly disagree.
What do you think it exists _for_ ?
It is good for society that people have the capacity for guilt and shame.
If we did not, I cannot see any other recourse other than fear!
You were probably thinking of completely different contexts.
Yes. Shame exists because it gave some evolutionary benefits to the primates who had it, like being able to live in a society and cooperate and don't cheat/kill/fuck over each other as much (if you think we do bad stuff too much, wait till you see what we can do without shame).
>I believe there are better ways to build relationships with others
The problem is that made-up (e.g. of our own making, requiring us to think about them and follow them rationally), not instinctual, ways, are none effective at all compared to innate, evolutionary, feelings like shame...
Well, with that I agree.
For one, it cheapens the quality and utility of shame.
Following this to the end, could end up with cheating on one's spouse or killing someone feeling only as bad as checking your Facebook page when you should be working...
I think so, yes.
Evolutionarily, as humans, social inclusion was incredibly important. Being removed from a tribe was likely a death sentence. As such, we have some very strong social drivers like shame and embarrassment that people feel quite keenly.
But these social drivers caused people to do things that were good for society. You felt shame if you didn't contribute to hunting or gathering, cooking, planting and harvesting, building structures, raising children, or other crucial societal factors.
I think you're on pretty solid ground to say that shame and embarrassment go a long way toward the foundation of the society we have now.
I do think shame and embarrassment are useful tools that we shouldn't want to get rid of entirely. That being said, I think it's totally fair to question whether our current-society over-relies on these kinds of things, and asking if it would be healthier to scale them back rather than expand them.
That something exists and that people are using it doesn't at all mean that the use is still valid, that it ever was valid, or that there are not much more fruitful alternatives.
Moreover your argument that you need guilt and shame to have a good society is the same sort of argument that Christians use against atheists and their lack of religion. The reason I don't go raise hell is simply because helping other people is what has been burned into my mind as a child. I don't hand a homeless person money because I'm worried about the shame of not doing it, nor do I feel any real happiness from when I do it; I do it because I believe it is my duty (which is the same reason I rarely miss deadlines).
How was this done?
I don’t mean to suggest that shame/guilt aren’t sometimes (often?) overused.
I just think that attempting to entirely excise them is a mistake (and that they are at times useful in moderation for certain things).
Society must have a way to discourage bad behavior, not only encourage good behavior.
Ruthless con named Frederick Taylor looks for a way to make himself a ton of money by "consulting" on improving worker productivity.
"How did Taylor arrive at forty-seven and a half tons for Bethlehem Steel? He chose twelve “large, powerful Hungarians,” observed them for an hour, and calculated that, at the rate they were working, they were loading twenty-four tons of pig iron per man per day. Then he handpicked ten men and dared them to load sixteen and a half tons as fast as they could. They managed to do it in fourteen minutes; this yields a rate of seventy-one tons per man per ten-hour day. Taylor inexplicably rounded up the number to seventy-five. To get to forty-seven and a half, he reduced seventy-five by about forty per cent, claiming that this represented a work-to-rest ratio of the “law of heavy laboring.” Workers who protested the new standards were fired. Only one—the best approximation of an actual Schmidt was a man named Henry Noll—loaded anything close to forty-seven and a half tons in a single day, a rate that was, in any case, not sustainable. After providing two years of consulting services, Taylor billed the company a hundred thousand dollars (which works out to something like two and a half million dollars today), and then he was fired."
[0] Genesis 3:7
The way I see it, the mind is extremely complex, and the decisions you make in the moment may not be the decisions you'd like to make in life. In the moment, you might end up eating a tempting ice cream sandwich, or you might get distracted by Facebook when you meant to be working on a meaningful project. The sort of accountability from the article is an example of understanding your goals, emotions, and habits, and harnessing that understanding to better achieve what you really want. The pressure/shame/guilt here is a tool to be used with care, and if it negatively affects your life, then certainly you should stop or scale it back a bit.
I find happiness from productivity because I try my best to work on projects that I find meaningful (inside and outside of my job), and I find pride/meaning to be one of the most satisfying forms of happiness. People who don't find meaning in their work might still feel that productivity helps them achieve their goals by getting a raise or keeping a job, thus providing money to use for other goals (like happiness).
And I think it's easy to read what I wrote to mean that "shame is objectively bad," but that was not my intention. The intention was more to question (and possibly reevaluate) our own relationships to it.
> I find happiness from productivity because I try my best to work on projects that I find meaningful
In the end, it comes down to what makes you thrive, and only you can answer that. Productivity, in its most general sense, can be a way to achieve that. At the same time, for me, it is healthy to question these assumptions every once in a while.
I think it's more that the business-speak label of "productivity" bothers you rather than its underlying idea of efficiency of input effort in relation to desirable output.
The concept of "productivity" doesn't have to be a Peter Drucker style management guru propaganda. Productivity makes us happy because it's an intrinsic human desire to improve our lives. For example, consider a prehistoric hunter in Africa that's running barefoot with a spear in hand and chasing after antelope to kill and eat it. He doesn't need modern McKinsey consultants to tell him he wants to do the least amount of running for the most amount of food. The better that ratio of expended effort to food quantity, the better the productivity. It's just that the hunter didn't label that concept as "productivity". If he has a sprained ankle, his chasing ability will decrease and his productivity will also decrease. He becomes unhappier. If the hunter uses his brain and notices the paths the antelopes use to the watering holes and takes advantage of those patterns to intelligently intercept it, his hunting productivity increases, and he becomes happier.
In the case of this thread's article, it looks like the author is a freelance journalist and so "productivity" to her is writing articles faster and/or writing more articles.
I've been reading Being and Time recently, and Heidegger makes an interesting distinction between what is "ontic" (a writer writing, for example) and "ontological" (a writer investigating the state of being behind writing). In this context, productivity interestingly can be in both the following ideas:
Ontically, productivity writing a book. Ontologically, productivity is understanding of the way of being a writer comports oneself to be a writer.
I think both ideas are equally important. I'm not sure why I'm writing this; maybe to address the difficulty with pinning down a consensus of what productivity means. but happy saturday!
The mutual focus is definitely a big part. You're in a social context, and there is no place to stray from the mutual task, and that discipline is very liberating, weird as it may sound, for someone prone to procrastinating like myself.
Aren't these pre-requisites to all work? How does working alone solve them?
The thing that's often overlooked is that pair programming is a skill, and you need to learn it to do it well. Just putting two novice pair programmers at a computer and asking them to "just do it" will usually result in a lot of frustration.
I was fortunate to be pairing with a lot of seasoned pros in my first time.
i don't think pair programming necessarily means typing 100% of the time. I get a ton of value in tackling a very ill-defined task with another member of my team, especially in the design / architecture phase where I find that a lot of engineers tend to over-think and over-engineer a task.
i don't want to discount your experience tho - i def. have moments where i absolutely do not want to pair, but i do think it's a practice that is super context (team) sensitive
sometimes that means bucking the rules of whatever the methodology prescribes and doing what works for your team.
for example: xp people tend to suggest frequent pair rotations in order to spread knowledge (faster?). I know half my team, though advocates of pair programming, would be pretty unhappy with that given the costs of context switching.
maybe some people will point at that and say we're not really pair programming /shrug
What I've found pair programming useful for is tooling and workflow.
When working that closely you'll notice when they hit a few keys and are suddenly in the right file, and you go "wait, what did you just do?" and they tell you about this great new Vim plugin.
Inversely, they start doing something really manual and you can say "hey, I do this a lot do I wrote this utility script that automates it"
I know a bunch of people who hate their jobs and would feel pretty bad if someone would supervise them 40h a week, even if they may perform better under such supervision.
What I'm saying is that the agonizing thing for me was the contradiction, the equivocation between saying "you're employed to program, etc., but you also have to do all this stuff that interrupts your thought process, but we don't really care how you cope with it..."
Now that my primary task is the administrative stuff (working with project managers), suddenly it doesn't hurt! I'm being compensated and valued for doing it. Any programming I may do is extra.
I used to get extremely frustrated whenever I got bogged down by inefficiencies, grunt work, or bad technical/business decisions made by others. Until one day I came to the realization that my employer isn't paying me to do things I enjoy. They are paying me to provide them with services they need. I certainly speak up if I think there's a better way of doing things, but I recognize that big corporations by their nature are bureaucratic, political and inefficient. If I dislike my work so much, I can certainly leave and work for myself, or find a different employer. Until then, they are certainly paying me extremely well, so I have no reason to complain for having to do some grunt work.
This subtle shift in attitude has made work so much more enjoyable. Every time I find myself frustrated by something, I remind myself this is precisely the reason I'm getting paid the big bucks. My job isn't to solve all the company's problems, it is simply to do the best job I can within the work hours agreed upon, so why complain. Having low expectations truly does make you happier.
I also have found that I have no increased tolerance for what feels like abuse when I am paid more.
The only way I have ever improved my situation is by seeking out an environment in which the people I directly dealt with were clear about what they want from me.
If you see your job as doing what the business requires or needs, that's easy to say, but nobody knows what it needs! Even the CEO probably doesn't have a clue. Any large business is IMO mostly a kind of self-organizing machine with random actions directed from the top. For years, my employer was doing acquisitions and trying to diversify. Then they reversed it all and broke up their parts under different names.
This is called "office". Somehow absolute peak of my procrastination happened in those human filled dedicated work places with supervision, from bosses, peers and subordinates.
Companies are digging their own grave with shit like this.
Though I do agree I was significantly more productive at companies where I had my own office/shared with only one other person.
I've worked from home full-time for just over 5 years now. I'm self-employed and answer to my client directly. I operate almost entirely autonomously and am given a heap of freedom, both tech-wise and with respect what hours I work. I've not once in 5 years reported my exact hours worked - but of course do report days off sick etc.
However, despite my client not being a developer (or overly technically inclined) I can assure you my client still notices if I'm being less productive than usual - which over the course of 5 years is somewhat inevitable e.g. when my daughter was born.
Actually, I find that not having someone knowing that I'm ticking over hours sitting at desk, hitting buttons, and making the screen flash, causes me to work more. For the last 5 years I've consistently worked more hours than I ever did in an office environment, not by a small margin either.
Sometimes you just don't feel "switched on", but if you're working in an office you're still tallying up hours. However, if I'm not totally switched on, I somewhat subconsciously know I need to work longer in the afternoon/evening. This is simply because I feel pressure (am motivated) to live up to the standards I've established with my client. I must add though, that my client is absolutely fantastic, any perceived pressure is almost entirely self-inflicted.
If anything, I need to start setting firm boundaries so that I work less. This means I need to start considering those less productive "hours worked" as genuine hours worked, just as I would if was working in an office.
I think you need to have some explanation, at least for yourself, what kind of value you deliver even when you are just around not so occupied.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
In short iirc at first they thought the changes they were making was what caused the increase in productivity but then they found out that the people worked harder because they were being observed and felt special.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4661940
Or perhaps testing websites... drunk? I love and loath these articles. They are the equivalent of "and you won't believe what this madlad did!!!!" of hackernews.
The other problem is that any kind of outside force that pushes you to work harder also creates stress. This stress isn't entirely regulated by yourself and it's possible for it to backfire.
The usual excuses presented to employees are handwavey things like "collaboration" and "teamwork", but the excuses presented to other managers can also involve things like "employees are more likely to feel self-conscious from visibility, and less likely to slack off". Even that's just scrounging for some excuse other than cutting corners to save money.
I can’t believe anyone even feels this is worth discussing or disagreeing. From the mountains of evidence refuting the communication conditions of open plan offices, we know that knowledge workers require privacy to be productive.
The case is closed. This essay is arguing against the tide. Move on.
Pairing in particular requires you to schedule time for it, host it in a private conference room for those two people, and have adequate video conferencing. If pairing happens at someone’s desk in an open plan setup, looking at the same laptop screen or monitor (instead of a projected version), then it universally falls apart, and is significantly disruptive to other around as well.
* email inbox count (differentiated by email inbox)
* unmoderated comment queue on website
* Facebook unread message count. Similar ones for other social media inboxes
* and maybe some custom metrics or ones triggered by a spreadsheet or todoist or something
I think this would be immensely useful for my own purposes, in seeing where I wasn’t on top of things. But also useful for sharing with someone else and being accountable. Would allow analysis too, such as eliminating a certain inbox entirely, or delegating some sections, etc
Then I remembered I use Numerics to put monthly sales on my apple watch. I checked, and it can get email inbox counts at least! They have a ton of data customization. Will see what other services I can add.
Ios only for now unfortunately. May come to mac once Marzipan happens: https://cynapse.com/numerics/
Edit: doesn’t have messages beyond email unfortunately. Though there is perhaps a way to jerry rig something using zapier and one of their supported services such as Trello or Todoist. Klipfolio does support Slack.
Also, I've recently realised what makes me productive as fuck:
Pressure.
The key point from this article to me is "just telling someone I was going to do something made me get it done".
So what keeps me on track is that I discuss with the client every week or few days what it tasks I should to try to complete. This is based on his priorities for requirements and the technical issues that I know about. Usually there are one or two primary tasks and one or two secondary that I honestly say may not get completed.
Every 1-3 weeks usually one or more of these items is something concrete that is supposed to show up in a computer program or report that the client will actually see or touch.
So for there is usually already an accountability structure. It's just not someone looking over my shoulder constantly.
I have actually worked on Upwork or whatever they call it with the constant screenshot of what you are doing. To be honest, in a way that does make you productive. However it also makes life more stressful. And I feel like I would prioritize more poorly because I didn't want to look idle so rather than doing a hard task that might require more thinking or googling or something, I might be more inclined to tackle easier tasks that would make things seem more productive from the screenshots. Overall there was just a constant distraction of wondering what people would think if they reviewed the session. I would never willingly choose to work like that again.
When I don't actually have someone looking over my shoulder I honestly do spend somewhat more time on non-work items. However, it seems like my this is automatically limited by the needs of the task items which I will be reporting on to my client in a few days or a week. And even on days when I am getting distracted, I put my main energy into my tasks until they are completed.
The idea of absolutely constant supervision during work only really makes sense when there is no trust or real respect for the worker and no other way to have accountability. I am worried that this type of article or service may reinforce management's tendencies to not respect or trust workers and want constant proof of total productivity from the wage slaves.
This sounds a bit extreme though, and I'm not sure if it actually reinforces the bad habit of needing someone watching you in order to do any work.
Still, when I was freelancing I dealt with a significant amount of loneliness, such that I now actually enjoy the buzz of a workplace, so I could see using a service like this if I worked from home constantly.
Also, many glassblowers work while hanging out together on video chat.
Committing to (and reviewing afterwards) what you want to accomplish does somewhat work for me. Ultraworking work cycles [1] are based on that by making you write down what you'll work on, how you'll start before each (short) session. When I really need a push to do something I don't enjoy at all, this usually does the trick.
I used some desktop recording software and recorded myself daily with instructions on how to execute various tasks.
Through out this process I would be talking and narrating the task explaining this or that while doing the work.
Sometimes I would end up finishing the task and just delete the video, I would be really focused and prefixes when making the videos it always felt a bit weird.
Thinking back there were even a few times I would record myself just in efforts to get something specific done.
Maybe this is ok for some line work but not for more complex problems wher you need to discus or brainstorm things. My friend who is dev/architect quit such job after year with severe burnout. Hourly compensation was very good though.
The problem lies in how focusmate and pair programming are implemented.
Inexperienced dev managers, who have little or none knowledge of XP, use these techniques to micro-manage developers, making their life's miserable.
Me..? I'm a Questioner. But I'm happy for her to find whatever makes her self-employment day-to-day life more manageable and uplifting.
I don't feel the need for a virtual nanny.