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wildrhythms

tl;dr

Step 1: Define “After Hours”

Step 2: Have Mental Clarity

Step 3: Communicate with Your Colleagues

Step 4: Get Work Done at Work

And I will add my own personal experience:

Step 5: Realize you (probably) work a B.S. job[1].

I realized I was dedicating my precious life to the pursuit of profit for people at the very top to the detriment of my own well being. If my job disappeared tomorrow, would society be negatively impacted in any meaningful way? No, in fact it might even improve. Realizing this, I just stopped caring about expectations to sacrifice any more time than necessary to my job.

[1] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeb...

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#5. Amen. My blue collar friend has a saying - "8 and gate". I used to spend lots of time at work trying to get something finished. Or started. Or whatever. But at the end of the day I'm not getting paid for that, or praised for that. And if it doesn't get done today, or tomorrow - the world won't end. And I could be doing something more productive like exercising, spending time with my kids, etc. etc.

Same here, but I suspect many "career" people here on HN, who grind away in startups imagining they are designing the next big thing that'll save humanity, don't want to hear this.

That's a pretty good summary, but .. I think it depends.

IMHO for many tech companies, "After Hours" has come to not exist for many employees, especially in engineering. I work with teams in India and Europe; since Covid there's been a serious expansion of meetings with these teams, so 7am, 6:30 am meetings, 9pm meetings, and so on.

For a little while, it was fine, I am a helpful person by nature. But after two months or so, I decided this was not being treated as temporary, so started simply declining. It is not without political cost to do so. Being able to decline is a privileged position, and definitely there are many people in the company who don't think they have that option. Obviously that's wrong, but it has been so easy for many companies to impose this on their exempt workforce that I think turning back the dial will be a struggle.

What if you have a BS job, but want to raise your income? You need to put in the effort to get those promotions.

"Step 5: Realize you (probably) work a B.S. job[1]."

Very important to realize this. Also, from my experience if you just work 35 or 40 hours per week but use this time to really work, you are already way more productive than most people.

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