Hacker News Reader

Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

> Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work.

Wow. Once I start doing this kind of work I both have a hard time stopping (as I find working on such problems addictive, both in good ways and in bad) and feel like it takes at least a couple hours of loading state into my brain before I could even begin to be working "at speed" on a hard problem, which means I actively try to schedule my life such that I either can spend a solid zero hours in a day working on hard mental tasks ;P or make myself ready to work until dawn (at which point I simply feel bad I am still awake sometimes more than truly feel like I am ready to stop).

View on HN

That's great until a PM schedules a quick meeting to make sure your progress is tracking their spreadsheet line. And there are 4 or 5 PMs. You end up with your days split into 6 or 7 segments between quick standups and triage meetings and status meetings and emergency customer calls where you're brought in "just in case" and because it takes at least a half hour of concentration just to get back into the zone, your week has passed without you spending any productive time doing hard thinky work. And you can't even explain at the PM's next quick progress meeting that you're behind because her quick status meeting has set you back a week, because to her reporting status at a meeting of 15 people is how things progress.

> [B]ecause it takes at least a half hour of concentration just to get back into the zone, your week has passed without you spending any productive time doing hard thinky work.

And when that half hour itself is semi-routinely[0] interrupted, the whole cycle becomes a form of aversion therapy conditioning you to avoid even attempting to concentrate.

Once you're stuck in that rut, you're really screwed because every failed attempt to break out of the cycle just reinforces it, and not being interrupted just means you're worrying about being interrupted instead.

[0] As with other processes, intermittent reinforcement is far more effective than consistency.

I've had a lot of luck with blocking out a couple hours a day for "dedicated work time." You have to aggressively defend that time and reject requests where someone carelessly double-books you anyway to be able to keep that time sacred. I've worked for places who wouldn't respect that and expected me to be "always available". Those places got the level of output from me that they deserved when I found myself unable to concentrate and would just be waiting for the next interruption.

I'm in the same boat as you, and yet my hours look like the post author's. One scenario that leads to this is that I simply have other shit to do, and need to hard stop my focus on something that I far too often want to keep working on.

This is partly a delegation problem (I'm trying to free up time by delegating certain things), and partly just a problem of growing up: What interrupts me might sometimes be other work or menial tasks, but it's often also just social life or having to go to to the ice rink.

I'm super happy with my current work-life balance, though a bit unsatisfied at how often I have to context switch. I wish I could just schedule as well as you do, unfortunately when it comes to social engagements for example I'm often more restricted...

I think I work pretty much the same. Usually get next to nothing done, or am extremely productive for most/all of the day.

I've found as well that once I get really going on a tough problem, it may consume my life for the next several days in a row, it'll be all I do or think about. I wish I knew how people turn it off after a few hours a day and think about anything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com