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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

> You would think that the more time you spend working, the more results you produce.

No, if you are a remote worker who sits at a desk and forces yourself to work at specific times solely because you feel you should be working, you are doing it wrong.

Go the other way. Figure out what times naturally work best for you, and work at those times. If you are sluggish in the afternoon, take breaks. Work early mornings, late nights. Go spend time with kids if you have them. Then sit down and work while they spend an hour at a friends house after dinner.

If you are remote, you should not be spending more time working. You should be working less hours, but more effectively.

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>Go the other way. Figure out what times naturally work best for you, and work at those times.

As someone with a tendency to procrastinate, this advice would easily turn into an excuse to avoid working at all. The best advice I ever got is that you don't need to feel motivated to do something - waiting to feel motivated is a trap. I think self-discipline is really important for remote work or working on personal projects at home.

I don't know about this to be honest.

I don't feel like I'm being more flexible than when I was working in an office, because I worked in a company with a "get stuff done, butt-in-chair doesn't matter" attitude. Hence I could just go to the dentist in the middle of the day or arrive at 11.30AM if I wanted to.

But now that I work from home, I actually like having a predictable schedule. Plus on top of that, even when you work remotely you still have meetings so that limits the flexibility a bit.

I don't think I'm doing it wrong. But it might not work for everyone.

I would tend to agree with this. I might be working from home but that doesn't mean that I want work to bleed into all of my waking hours.

Nobody at work would mind if I needed to pop out during the day or do something, but equally, I think it's important to have some boundaries where I can turn the computer off after a certain time and not think about work. I certainly wouldn't want to be going back to it at 9pm unless there was a good reason to.

If that works for you, then you are doing it right, even if it is a traditional schedule. The "wrong" part is when you force yourself to a schedule that doesn't work, simply because of expectations of the "proper" hours to be in your seat.

I agree, but my employer runs a scrum meeting each morning. I've talked to them about moving the time later, but they are inflexible. Thus, I typically work starting at that time until quitting time. It's far from my most productive time, but it's forced upon me. They get whatever productivity I can scrounge up. If that's not much because I'm not working at peak hours, and often working at the worst possible hours for productivity, that's their problem. If they were flexible with this inane, pointless, stupid meeting, they would get productivity. Instead, they only get it when I need to do other things during the day, simply by coincidence. It's frankly amazing to me how employers ignore little changes that could impact things in a major way. But they do it on purpose. No one expects peak productivity anyway, and if they do, they really need to provide the incentives towards that goal. Otherwise, they get what they get, whether that be a new feature or bugfix or a few hours of HN. It's a crap-shoot. Whatever, it's literally not my business and therefore, I do not give a fuck about productivity since there are no incentives to do so.

seems like a no-win situation, unless everyone is on the same productivity curve as you. if they moved the meeting, couldn’t that negatively affect your coworkers?

i'm a morning person and am pretty useless later in the day now. it wasn’t like this when i was younger.

I doubt it as the meeting is pointless bullshit for the managers like all scrum meetings I've ever been part of. Also, there is no need to be alert or mentally present for it. The engineering team is ok with moving it, but management isn't. Also, I'm talking about 10:30 or 11 instead of 9:30. It's not exactly a huge move. Starting the day off with the most unproductive task possible, is a terrible idea. I'm not a morning person, but I do get decent work done once I'm awake. I bet it's even worse for morning people to have half an hour to an hour at the start of their day be a pointless, monotonous meeting hearing about other people's projects that one simply does not give a fuck about (every scrum meeting ever).

I agree. That was a rhetorical statement, but looking back in hindsight, maybe I wasn't clear.

I didn't mean that the more time you spend working, the more results you produce. The Parkinson's law states the opposite - if you have more time in your hand, you will most probably be less productive and produce less results compared to the actual time you spent working on it.

This doesn't work if you have a family or involved with anyone that has a regular 9-5.

Most businesses will also have meetings during regular business hours.

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