Comment by 3u8Gf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3u8Gf | Hacker News Reader

My cofounder and I switched to working 4 hours of "productive" work per day and it is pretty awesome. I use RescueTime to track what app is in front and when it ticks over to 4 hours I generally call it quits unless I am in the middle something I want to wrap up.

I really like this because it incentivizes productivity over hours in seat. IE, right now this comment is being added to my "non productive" time and I am making no progress on getting my workday done. (I have 15m left at the moment)

I am generally pretty focused, but sometimes that wanes and I find this keeps me on task. On the best of days I start around 7am and call it quits by noon, but occasionally that stretches into 2pm.

I do occasionally hop on a bit in the evening and we are all basically all on call but our stack is pretty stable so that doesn't come up often.

Has been absolutely awesome, I don't think I could ever go back. I am far happier, spend far more time outdoors and I honestly do not think my productivity has dropped much at all. I think it is far too easy to just use wall clock as a measure of working and fool ourselves that we are doing more than 4 hours of real work in an 8 hour day.

Throwaway because I'm not sure my clients are ready to hear this.

Yup. I suspect this sort of thing is going on all over the place but most people don't speak openly of it.

All work is value-based. Never forget that.

No clients care if you spent 80 hours a week not solving their problem, so why would they care if you spent 20 solving it?

> No clients care if you spent 80 hours a week not solving their problem, so why would they care if you spent 20 solving it?

This has not been my experience at all. It's a different subject entirely, but it is very common for clients to be much happier to pay for 20 days at $550 a day than 5 days at $2,200 a day, even if they got it two weeks earlier. People are not rational.

Right right. They have other weird concepts like "market rates" and average timeframe lodged in their heads.

It's complicated and pardon me if I have glossed over the details somewhat.

If you're smart, you get all of the work done in advance, then stage it over the course the next few days, providing a steady trickle to create the perception of steady progress and to have something to mention at the standup meetings. I suspect a good percentage of experienced developers with good customer management skills do something akin to this.

This aggravates me, because as a customer, I want the expert who charges the highest rate, but also does things really fast and correctly, because I know what a difference there is between competent and incompetent people. But other people don't think like that, and if I say I'm ok with a high hourly rate, they think I'm saying I want to be ripped off in terms of both rate and hours.

If you spend 80 hours you're being inefficient. If you spend 20 hours (and they're being charged for value,) they feel they were deceived. Selling your hours to anyone truly seems like a lose-lose situation.

I meant more like 80 hours a week. It is, in my experience, difficult and cumbersome to charge for more than 40 hours a week since it kinda disrupts the usual cadence. You can do it sometimes for deadlines but wouldn't want to make a regular habit of it

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