Forgotten Employee (2002)

I came to the conclusion, like you, that structure is good. Without structure it’s really hard to get started on things or feel a sense of progress.

Now if i take a long break i treat it like i used to back in college days. I have a schedule, high level goals and daily to-do lists. Those lists have productive things as well as free time or gaps of a fixed length to fill with whatever i want.

Sounds hellish when i write it out but without it I’m all about cat videos and noodling around on my guitar. Suddenly a month has passed.

We think ourselves as a stone monument "I'm productive" "I'm this or that", but the truth is what we do daily defines who we are, without the forcing procedure of work we lose our daily rituals and just become something else. People see this at retirement as well when they lose the structure of a regular job and need to manage their own time.

You are what you eat, and you are what you do regularly.

However, both times it took at least a couple months of passive life before I could do anything productive at all: I just slept, cooked, read, played video games, and scrolled Reddit. Almost as if I had to first flush out all the accumulated stress and get rid of the "muscle memory" around work.

I couldn’t take the boredom and quit to do a round the world backpacking trip.

My co-worker stayed and wrote a novel. It was a perfect setup: he got payed to come in and sit at the computer all day typing, and always looked busy. I think he played his hand well.

I agree that this story is probably fiction, but I feel like I broadly fit into this category of collecting a paycheck with minimal work. I feel it takes one or two days of effort per week at work to station keep.

I spend nearly all of the "extra" time on a few work Slack channels, goofing off with work friends, occasionally doing internal tech support, and reading the web. I feel regret that I'm not making better use of this windfall of time, but I haven't been able to take the step to working on my own startup or pursuing hobbies during work because it feels outright dishonest while "be available, but not very productive" doesn't hit quite the same way.

Do you actually have any data on this, or is this pure conjecture? You seem to have a sample size of 1, and perhaps 2, if you include the fictional story. Both indirect sources.

> But when we do get total freedom, we hardly remain as productive as we imagined ourselves to be.

Speak for yourself. Please don't lump us into your behavior types.

> I realized maybe 9-5 isn't as bad as it sounds and early retirement isn't as good.

For you, perhaps.

Reminded me to make plans for some of my personal time, not just piss it away.

Look how kids are raised. The majority of them have decisions made for them all the way to the grave, no wonder so many 'squander' their free time. It takes most people years to deprogram themselves to a significant point. First year is mostly recovering from something akin to burnout.

Relatable.

I am at a job currently where I can get past by working 3 hours a day. But what do I do with rest of time...well not much.

And I felt the same way during Covid when WFH started. If you had told me a month prior to that that I'll be able to save 3 hours extra every day from mindless commute, in office chatter etc I'd have told you about my grand plans of how I'd make the best use of those 3 hours taking that course I have been meaning to take or reading that book that's lying unread. BUT when I did have those extra 3 hours, I didn't really do much of it.

I guess it's some version of Murphy's law - aimless surfing expands to take the time available for it? Not sure.

I think the key is to identify these timesinks and to eliminate them one-by-one. Often these are dopamine-hijacking activities.

So, suppose you decided to yourself that you are not going to be surfing the web at all, or limit it to a strictly scheduled timeslot, or only use the web when you have a specific purpose in mind.

Suppose you did the same with videogames - limit it to a specific timeslot in your week, or eliminate it altogether.

What would you do then? What would you find yourself doing if you found yourself in living conditions where you do not have access to such easy entertainment?

You would probably get very bored at first. That's great! The first step is to stop seeing boredom as something to be avoided at all costs. It is ok to be bored - in fact it is good to be bored. Sit with it and do not allow yourself to fall back onto the easy entertainment options.

You will find that after a while you are actually just going to pick up that physics textbook you meant to study off the shelf - or end up doing whatever interesting project you thought you would be doing. It will be easy, interesting and natural. Just like it was when you were a child on summer holidays and probably didn't have access to unlimited video games, broadband internet or other dopamine-hijacking forms of easy entertainment!

Just eliminate the timesinks from your life one-by-one and allow yourself to become bored.

And as someone who is trying to do early retirement, the main reason is so I can own myself... I'll never have enough energy to do everything I want, even without a day job taking a tremendous amount of it.

And just to add another anecdote: I quit my job for 9 months (for burnout). I never felt the need to "go back to work" other than the bank account running out.

Where does that imagination come from? Or in other words: why do you feel such a strong need to be productive?

I think it is definitely psychological. Probably something to do with subconsciously feeling guilt for not doing what one is "supposed to", so they feel too guilty to embark on something else that's productive or educational (like reading that one textbook they planned for a while). And instead just go "ok, that one educational thing i wanted to do is gonna take a while, and i am already wasting a lot of my free time, so instead i will just check out a few cat videos and then get back to productive stuff". And then it just becomes a positive (aka self-reinforcing) feedback loop that keeps on feeding onto itself.

As for being productive with the least amount of tree time, I can confirm that my best GPA in college was during semesters when i had the heaviest workloads on top of a part-time job. Reminds me a lot of what many parents on HN say in the comments, how they became way more productive in their efforts and focus after having kids (as soon as they get to about 1-2 years old). No experience with that one myself, but seems very similar.

Learned to play the bass guitar, found a partner, contributed to Firefox, took a few CS courses, etc.

I can believe it is real, if possibly embellished or simplified. Crazy things happen in larger organizations, especially before every department's computers were all tied together.

I was once the subject of a dispute between three departments in a large company, and ended up spending several months at work with nothing to do but browse lolcats. I had to put on a suit and come to the office every day, but I was prohibited from doing any work.

I was NOT popular among the people who knew that I was collecting a paycheck all that time.

I guess time spent relearning to walk after a traumatic injury is also squandered time as well then?

(Clarification, just in case: I'm not saying that this kind of person is better or worse than the other.)

I suspect that guy didn't do anything and probably still is getting paid to do nothing.

also good nutrition and have commitments to do things

It is possible to be so busy that this is really what holds you back. But very few life situations outside of the gulags are really so grueling that work is really able to squeeze your free capacity down to nothing. It is like wanting to go to space, and being intimidated by having to drive over a hill. It is possible for a very high hill to be a practical problem, but if an ordinary one looks insurmountable to you, you very likely never had the energy to go to space.

That's not to say you never need to quit a job to give an extraordinary venture your full attention. It's more to say that if you are doing nothing right now, if you tell yourself work is the problem, work almost certainly isn't the problem. If you have the drive to do something once you have more free time, you'd be doing something with your free time right now. You wouldn't be able to not. Don't wait; start now. Can't? There's your problem.

I have noticed, with myself, this scales right down to tasks that literally take one minute to do, like loading the dishwasher. If my energy is high, I do it almost without thinking, while I'm waiting for water to boil, while I'm thawing hamburger. No big deal. If my energy is low, I don't do it at all, and I spend those same minutes staring at the floor. I tell myself I don't take care of the house because I don't have time, but as a lot of people found out during COVID, that was never the problem. I didn't have the drive. Free time turns out to matter, once I get going and want to do big things. But it matters little if I can't do little things that take no time.

I know the sensation! I'm currently taking a week vacation, and, although I've gotten a lot of work done around the house, my primary motivation for taking the vacation was to study cybersecurity stuff. I had been putting in 2 to 3 hours a night but had found it frustrating to have such a limited window after work/before bed. Now that I have that time, I'm either walking the dog, cutting up unused boxes, sweeping and cleaning, or watching random stuff on Odysee. It's not that those things are necessarily bad, but it is such a poor misuse of time.

It's almost a sense of fear of productivity. I can't quite put my finger on it. It's like an apprehension to get started. That, if I begin, maybe I won't want to stop. Or that, maybe if I do it, I won't make the sort of progress I would expect to make with the amount of time I can devote to studying. I justify this misuse of time as being "Time to relax, no wrong choices" Etc. Yet somehow, I know that that isn't true. I can feel the regret in the time I've already wasted. Come Sunday night, I'll probably be back to studying, wishing I "just had a few more hours".

I have to imagine that part of the issue is conditioning. We get into our various habits and when those conditions change - even when we ourselves make those changes, intended to benefit us - it puts us in a kind of state of paralysis, leading to indecision. Perhaps it's that we need meaning to define what it is that we're doing, and know that it could have been done better.

I was working in a secure building and for whatever reason, it took them weeks to get me basic account access to their network. I wasn't even permitted to enter the area I would be working in until everything else was all setup. So, every morning I would show up, be escorted to the break room, wait around for someone in my department to stop in and say Hi, then mention "Yeah, it's still not done yet." I would then sit there and watch TV (CNN or Fox, depending on who was hiding the remote) in a break room for the remainder of the day, and eventually be escorted back out of the building.

It wouldn't have been so bad if I was at least allowed to bring in a book to read or a phone to play some music, or anything, but no outside material was allowed unless you had some special work-related reason. I must have read the introductory booklet pamphlet thing they gave to me about 100 times. It was like 20 pages long. I could recite some of the pages word for word for about a year after the fact.

The worst part was that some employees were really set in their ways and would come around at the same time every day, down to the minute. After a day or two of me rotting in the cheap plastic chair, counting the seconds until I could go, they would just say something like, "Still nothing, huh!?" "Yep..." "Ha! Good luck with that!"

Day, after day, after day. After day.

Originally, it did. Back when we didn't have computers in the office, it was a copy made using carbon paper, as the original was being typed on a typewriter. ("BCC" was Blind Carbon Copy.)

I had always thought a "Courtesy Copy" had specific legal meaning and was a copy of a filing sent to the judge and/or other parties when a case was filed.