How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely | Hacker News Reader

How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely

timeawareness.substack.com

147 pointssomebody3250 comments

I've worked remotely for 20 years on both salary and hourly (consulting). I found it especially hard to 'unplug' when working hourly, as you always feel like you could be making money. Doing laundry? You can get an hour billable while waiting. Watching a movie? Is the movie good enough you want to give up 2 hours billable? Also, this can be a lot worse when you're younger, just starting out, and money is generally tighter...Kids, mortgage, school loans can all make extra money from overtime very attractive.

On salary, I find its easy to lose track of time on an interesting problem. You get 'in the zone' and time just flies by...

As I've gotten older the first problem has sort of naturally resolved itself, as I start to value leisure over bill rate. Getting older - not only does your income tend to go up, but expenses can come down. Things like school loans, car notes and mortgages may be paid off. Kids grow up and become established in their own careers, requiring less support.

I still have the second problem though. In this case, I generally find having other _people_ ping me to be much more effective then alarms and to-do lists. Its too easy to turn off an alarm or ignore a list. Interacting with an actual person is much harder to ignore :-P

> Watching a movie? Is the movie good enough you want to give up 2 hours billable?

Lie?

Please don't go into hourly-billed consulting if your default assumption is to just lie about your hours.

Here’s what I do:

- never install slack or email on your phone

- use a separate laptop for personal stuff. I don’t/can’t log in to work stuff here.

- put your work laptop away and out of sight when done work

- (optionally) give a few trusted people your phone number if they absolutely must reach you

The last point help alleviate the stress of “I absolutely must always check slack to deal with the latest crisis”

That's fine it works for you but it just shifts the burden off yourself by putting it on your coworkers. Unless it's specifically discussed and agreed upon for your role, that's rather unfair to the rest of the team.

How?

Keeping work and private life sperate is normal.

The coworkers should all be doing the same thing. Only the oncall and their official escalation paths should be expected to be available off-hours.

I would say that it shifts the burden off of yourself by putting it onto management. Management then has the option to hire more people, to offset schedules to maintain better coverage, to establish more accurate goals and timelines, etc. These are things that are inherent to the role of a manager. There's no sense in me burning myself out to poorly work around a problem that exists at a different level.

The default assumption is that time outside of work hours is my time, and is not to be interrupted. Unless it's specifically discussed and agreed upon for my role, having anything else is extremely unfair and manipulative.

Hiring more people means less money at the end of the year for that annual bonus. So you’re kinda making that choice, even if you shift the problem to management.

Great I’ll take the work life balance over an imaginary bonus then. And if you can’t keep up in compensation then I’ll look for another job

Bonuses aren’t imaginary. In some industries like finance they are like 90% of your comp.

Less money for the manager's bonus. For line workers, the bonus is more or less fixed.

That's just not true in many cases.

Not true in finance.

Wow, so the solution is for workers to do as much work as possible to "help" management hiring less employees? Do you think that when they save money, they set it aside for employees bonus? Or may be employee compensation is driven by supply and demand and has nothing to do with you working overtime all year long...

A lot of finance firms have a “you eat what you kill” model where the compensation pool is a direct function of how much money the desk makes. So if you hire more people to do the same amount of work then yeah, the bonus pool gets divided more ways and each person makes less money.

Sure, but finance is the exact last place we want to look for sustainable, value-producing business models.

To be fair legal shops often have the same policy. (Bonus = your billed hours/total billed hours * surplus)

Incompetent management are even worse for the bottom line of the company.

There is no such thing as a default assumption. Every role has different expectations and none of them are canonical.

Without having the insight into another's mind that we have with our own, how could anyone make the claim that their coworker's burdens are as important to address than those of self?

I think the opposite is true: unless it’s agreed upon I work outside work hours, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to stop everything at a vacation with my kids to solve a bug. And I would not work anyplace that wanted that.

Ive been working remote long before the pandemic and cant stress these points enough. They might seem silly at first but they really work. At the bare minimum, no slack or work email on your phone.

I've also learned to over communicate. Usually when I step away I leave a pretty detailed overview of where things are and the feeling of "leaving the team high and dry" diminishes.

> give a few trusted people your phone number if they absolutely must reach you

My last team sent me a desktop IP phone they could call me whenever. I should have realized then it wasn't a great fit. heh.

This!

I'm doing exactly this since 2021 and it helped _immensely_

> (optionally) give a few trusted people your phone number if they absolutely must reach you

But HR has your number, for obvious reasons, and, as I've learned the hard way, cannot be trusted to not publicize it internally, even if you request that they not.

Good point. Phone numbers are cheap and it's worth thinking about having additional ones you can change. This also comes up for the problem of SMS 2FA, a coworker got tired of a headhunter (?) trying to reach me and finally gave him my cell phone. Very dangerous if it was a social engineer out to get enough data to break in.

I've been working from home for five years, and on and off before that. I'm certainly no role model for it, but there are two things that have helped a lot:

- Start at a consistent time. Right now my daughter is in school so I have to get up and get her going on remote school. This usually gets me started around 9am.

- End at a consistent time. I have a hard stop every day at 7pm, because that's when Jeopardy! comes on, and when we have family dinner. I even went so far as to create a voice announcement through the whole house that it is time for dinner and Jeopardy! so my family keeps me accountable.

This ostensibly means I work for 10 hours a day, but I allow myself to not feel bad if I need to take a two hour break to go shopping or fold some laundry or just take a break to watch some TV, since I know that my default is 50 hours a week. A two hour break every day would get me to 40 hours and I don't take a two hour break every day.

Currently I'm in a big problem with time because of the mix of psychological problems including perfectionism.

What I mean is: I spent almost all my time thinking how to plan my life. When I think about what I should do every day, I always find excuses why it won't work.

So it turns out that everyday is spent by thinking instead of doing.

Also I understand what the author meant when talking about the difficulty of maintaining work-life balance. But this happened for me all the time, not only when there was a lockdown, but really all the time.

I'm not working on hourly basis, but I'm working on my side-product. And the thoughts in my head are "Okay, we can spend a few evenings coding and we'll have that feature. Probably it'd be enough to breakthrough and we will become millionaires!" :D I'm exaggerating but still.

Then, after I spent all the time thinkings, I accuse myself that I haven't been working.

This is a vicious circle.

And after that, the "trigger" in the behaviour formula is something I'm waiting for all my life: the secret sign to start planning.

I have the same issue and two things:

- go take a walk alone for one hour. No headphones, no device. I’m not kidding

- make a list of tasks that you must accomplish. See it like a queue that you’ll pop from and get a task to focus on. Now take your days one at a time focusing on the task in front of you. Do this until you depleted the queue. For this to work the queue should not be vague, and have items that you really want to implement now (otherwise you’ll start thinking about re-ordering the queue)

Thank you

By queue you mean a set of tasks? Or a big goals or what?

I have a to-do list, a backlog in my project. The number of tasks just grow up, all I got power to do is to endlessly fill this list.

So we're talking about "small set of tasks", or a queue per project, or... could you clarify here?

And yeah, walking alone might help. Indeed. Will do

Tell me how you feel after the walk :)

By queue I mean a set of task yeah. The whole point is to take away your will to organize (or at least place it somewhere) and set a queue of tasks to work on in front of you. You can then spend your entire focus on the task in front of you, then when you're done go to the next task.

From time to time (at the end of every week) you can re-organize your task lisk, but most of the time focus on one task at a time.

One thing I'd add to this: Get used to the idea that removing one item from the list is acceptable. For me, the only way I could trick my brain into that is set the the start date for all but one task that doesn't need to be done today for tomorrow at the start of the day. Thus when I finished the items for today, the task list is empty and I feel "done". I can still look at future tasks if I'm feeling productive, but knowing I finished my to-do list for today is refreshing.

I know it's an illusion, but it works surprisingly well for me.

What kind of benefits have you felt from long walks with no devices? I was on a good routine doing that earlier in quarantine, and kind of fell off the wagon. Could use some inspiration to get re-started :)

For some reason when I walk I get some time where I can really think, and organize my thought, and it gets me into this peaceful and calm state for weeks after. I used to do this when I was younger as well, if I'd feel really down I would just skip class and take the day off to walk endlessly in the city, always made things better for a while.

I think this idea has been echoed multiple time in history. For example, the Peripatetic school[1] (in ancient Greece) etimologic roots is in "walking" or "the pleasure of walking". Some rumors say that it is by walking that thinkers could achieve correct or deeper thinking.

Apparently, a lot more philosophers have a very deep relationship with walking. Nietzsche and Kant both spent hours walking to think[2].

I think inherently, we are not souls, we are not brains without a body. When we do something, our entirety gets to work, and sitting all day in front of a screen is no way to think or live.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripatetic_school

[2]: https://fs.blog/2014/05/a-philosophy-of-walking/

I have a dog and have set times where I have to take it out.

The benefit is like rubber-duck debugging. For about 45 minutes I have no interesting things to distract my mind and I automatically start thrashing any meaty problems I left specifically for this. Works for me.

It sounds like you are controlled by your thoughts. I'm looking into the concept of "Mindfulness" to get more control back and find more happiness. I also found that doing one workout every morning greatly improves my well-being and reduces thoughts that limit me.

I, too, struggled with wanting to to everything as best as possible but found that it really limits me. I eventually just started with very small iterations and even though I didn't write a lot of code yet the process itself already taught me quite a few things. The great thing with code is that you can come back later and improve it, so it doesn't have to be perfect on the first try!

Yeah, I'm looking into the concept too, as well as other therapy stuff. There is a therapy method called ACT, which has similar concepts I think

Thanks for sharing, great read! I was working remotely pre-pandemic, but back then I went to a co-working space on a daily basis with the exact goal of separating work and personal life. This obviously changed when the pandemic started, so I had to adjust to working from home (which is a small apartment with no dedicated work space).

I tried multiple technics over the past months to create a healthy work-life balance, and a here're a few things that helped me: - Building routines for meaningful breaks: a short walk, quick workout, calling your family/friends - something to pull you aside from the screen (scrolling twitter is not a meaningful break for me) - Blocking time for those routines by adding them to the calendar - Making the most of my work hours: stop all distractions and create triggers for deep work. My trigger is putting on noise cancelling earphones. And my family knows that I shouldn't be distracted during that time. - When possible, scheduling calls in batches, almost back to back - Bonus: external accountability. My wife and I agree on a time when we go for a walk, have dinner, etc.

Generally, I feel good about my day when I have 2-3 hours of deep meaningful work and I followed through on my scheduled routines. Currently I'm trying to schedule pretty much my whole day, though it's tough because often times I get unexpected meetings and things to work on. Another thing I struggle with is time estimations for certain tasks, because a lot of the work I do is open ended and doesn't have clear boundaries (I can always do more).

Without trying to trivialise this - it's a problem I have had and its an easy rut to fall into. Work can be a nice place to hide. However the solution is quite straightforward - stop. Work is not crack, it's actually pretty easy to not do when you try. Just don't do it. 5.30pm and you think about the next thing? Stop. 8pm and you think about opening your laptop? Stop. 6am and you think about getting up and looking at some code? Stop. If you are trying to hide in work it's probably not work that is the issue.

Yup! I have a notebook for thoughts that pop up when I’m not working where I can jot down ideas or things I need to do. Otherwise, I find I feel like “I better do this real quick before I forget.”

What's interesting to me about the comments here, is how much autonomy everyone seems to have about their work time.

I'm working 100% remote due to Covid, coming from a loosely enforced "only work remote if you need to be home for a plumber / cable install / snow day" policy.

We have a (loosely enforced) "start at 8pm" mandate, and mandatory daily calls at 9am and 3pm to report our "challenges".

Slack messages flow freely at all hours, with a policy that emails and Slack messages always be responded to within an hour. The culture is such that any Slack message not responded to promptly (even during lunch hours) is, at the very least, cause for concern. At no point would "taking 2 hours at lunch to run errands" be acceptable without prior approval, even if we routinely worked past 6pm (as I often do).

I expected this to be a bit extreme, but I'm beginning to wonder just how extreme is this culture right now in previously "non-remote" jobs?

Your job sounds horrible, look around more. The "respond within an hour to slack" sounds downright torturous.

My last week of week consisted of my coworkers freaking out if I didn’t respond in 5 to 15 minutes

On the other side, my last job had no work for me and never merged the stuff i did that they asked for, and that was pretty annoying also; sounds like you got out though, so hopefully you found something better!

Yeah, I’m in the same situation and have anxiety induced by the Teams notification sound

My entire office has been work from home since March, I don't think any of us have been having issues (we're hourly and there's no work you can do without being clocked in and leaving timestamps) and I 100% hope I never have to go back to the office. Ever. I have MORE time for life, I'm not in a car an hour a day driving to and from work, I don't have to get to work 15 minutes early to make sure my system boots so I can actually clock in, I don't have to fight for 1 of 3 microwaves in the break room on the 30 minutes I get for lunch, I clock out and bam my wife and I can get on with our evening instantly, I can eat much better because I don't have to worry about what food I can keep in a small lunchbox without it spoiling/without losing too much space to ice packs, I don't have to use an often soiled public restroom and dodge puddles/piles of human waste, I don't have the distraction of 100ish people in a cramped open office talking/walking around, I have an entire bedroom as an office to myself instead of a few square feet of space, I can listen to music/books/YT videos without having to have earbuds jammed into one ear because we're supposed to always be able to hear people at work, I don't have to smell a 3-7 burnt bags of popcorn a day or someone's frozen artificial crab/cheep microwaved garlic monstrosity/boiled greens they microwaved about 3 minutes too long. It's great. I never, ever, ever, want to go back to an office.

Sadly we'll be back to work, sharing desks/keyboards/mice with another shift, as soon as they feel covid is under control :( it's going to suck and absolutely destory my desire to work.

I've been working remotely for about 5 years and the first two were like this.

When I realized how unhappy it made me I made a conscious effort to stop.

I set an alarm at 6pm and when it rang I'd stop working.

The most difficult part was stopping to feel guilty when someone contacts you after hours. But after a while I managed to get over that as well.

It was practice, that's all. It got easier after a while.

There were two things that helped quite a lot (besides that I worked for decent people the entire time)

First, I told a few people who would contact me after hours frequently thay I wouldn't reply after office hours but that they're free to contact me and I'd get back to them first thing. And I always did. I also told them not to call unless shit is on fire. When they did call if things were on fire I'd fix them immediately, but if they weren't I'd repeat to not call me and told them I'd handle it tomorrow.

Second was to make a dedicated work area. In the beginning I was in a small shared apartment and the desk was next to my bed. After I'd moved to a bigger place I had a spot in the living room made up as my "office". I'd not use that space for anything else. It was just the corner where there desk and the chair were but I'd not sit at the desk or use that chair other than while at work.

I'd guess it took about a six months for this to be normal but it survived changing jobs.

For those of you who follow the post’s idea of filling up your calendar, do you mark the time as “free” so that your employer/coworkers can schedule over your time for meetings? I’m thinking of the feature “find a convenient time for everyone in the invite” in calendars. If your calendar is booked, does that mean people have to come to you out of band to negotiate a time?

Do you fill your calendar up day of (I.e. Monday morning you fill in around the meetings you have)?

I have on my calendar a 2 and a half hour chunk of time every day for training/lunch. But that’s the only recurring meeting I have for delineating my day.

For time awareness, may I suggest my https://crushentropy.com/

It is markdown for planning and keeping track of your day. It is free.

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