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I know this has been upvoted to the top, but this is the most matter-of-a-factly description of superhuman productivity I have encountered.

Can you elaborate a bit on how you get so much stuff done?

What do you see 'regular people' (or HN folks at least) complain/discuss where you just shrug and wonder why it seems so hard?

I have no social life. Without diving super deep into my past or anything, I just prioritize things and go do it. Have no interest in movies, TV, concerts, bars, or anything else really. I suppose I inherited it from my parents who are workaholics. Also, grew up poor and never want to experience that again so there's probably a bit of a deep-seeded fear in the back of my mind that going broke and losing everything is always possible. Also, I really only sleep 3-4 hours a night and if I'm not doing something productive I feel unsatisfied and generally melancholy. I also only eat one meal a day, sometimes two which combined takes around an hour to prepare, cook, and eat. So that leaves me roughly 18-19 hours per day to work. And in all my work, I automate absolutely anything and everything that can be automated.

There's probably a bit of underlying depression involved where I feel like if I slow down all those mental worries and fears will manifest and send me down a dark path which want to avoid at all costs.

I try not to judge other folks because everyone has different priorities in life. Mine is working, but others may want to travel, try different beers, play sports, have dinner with friends, etc. I can never stop thinking about projects I want to do so I really don't enjoy a lot of socializing.

More specifically - my two jobs are typical 8-4 hours. Before and after I do whatever maintenance is required for the websites I admin. The crypto/blockchain company will have meetings in the evening, occasionally on the weekends. I have friends and family assist with managing my properties and I pay them very well for their help because some properties are located in another state that they're closer to. This mostly leaves weekends available for some contracting projects in my neighborhood (new development, wealthy folks who don't want to do any manual labor!). Additionally, I'm able to check on my properties, do walk-throughs with tenants, repairs (normally plumbing related - sinks, faucets, toilets, boilers), as well as move-ins and move-outs. If it's an emergency I have contacts for electricians, plumbers, HVAC, etc. who can get over there when I can't. My biggest gripe is with modern appliances. Normally use GE appliances, but the quality has gone down-hill, tried Samsung and same thing. I'm spending more to put in higher quality products like Bosch or Miele when possible.

You’re one of these special lucky people who only needs 4 hours sleep. I have a friend like that and he uses his extra time to complete video games and be a dad/husband. I’m more of a 8-9 hours person myself so I’m super jealous

I recommend Nancy Kress's excellent science fiction trilogy "Beggars in Spain" for a good fictional exploration of this idea

My intuition tells me this can be learnt.

married? ex-wife? kids? age? :D

Thanks for elaborating - and reminding me there are no magic tricks; it's about the effort we put in (which you pretty much max out).

It seems you will eventually accumulate enough assets to pay for a comfortable lifestyle indefinitely. I wish you well and that you can use that to enjoy life on your terms.

Thank you for your open and honest replies about your hyperproductivity and optimization. There is an expression, "the days are long, the years are short." Do you see yourself building toward a point in older age where you can either relax, or focus on something that you consider a major achievement? Of course, that could very well be creating a comfortable existence for your family, which it seems like you've already done.

Yes and no. I want a solid nest-egg in the event that something happens and prevents me from working. No interest in traveling or doing anything else at the moment but of course things can change and as I get older my train of thought will probably change as well so I try to be cognizant of that. In building some level of wealth, I'd consider it to be an achievement and follow-up achievement is using whatever funds I have to help others because I don't care for things other than tools, computer parts, and things like microcontrollers (Arduinos and RPI's).

Sounds extremely corny but I lost my best friends a few years back and their families are not well off financially, one in particular is struggling so I help them as much as they will let me because they're in their mid 60's and have always treated me like family. Another friend wanted to start a remodeling company so I helped him with that. I think these are the kinds of that brings a level of satisfaction and joy rather than buying new cars or taking vacation - for me at least.

Could you describe #4 in more detail? From adding this all up, I figure you must be working 30-35 hours a week between those two jobs, so less than 20 hours a week each. What is the process by which you limit your capacity to only fill a small number of hours? Do the teams believe you to be slower than you are? Is this an explicit understanding that you'll only work half time?

I have never had a job where there is not more than enough to be done, such that I could always fill more hours than I have with useful work.

Yeah it's right around 30-35 hours per week. Not to toot my own horn but I am very good at what I do, which is software & data engineering. Most importantly, both are jobs that have a large and talented support system of fellow engineers, scrum masters, product owners, and management. In fact, that's precisely why I took these two. My previous jobs were extremely stressful and left me no time for anything outside of my immediate work and I ended up switching jobs last year as a result.

Both employers allow me a lot of leeway and flexibility so long as I can continue to deliver products on schedule, which to this day, I have never been late. So number of hours worked is fairly inconsequential to actual work that is done in both jobs.

I'm sorry but I still don't get it. I've never had a job where being very good at it left a lot of free time during which to be very good at another job. It just left free time to move more things along more quickly or improving things. Like, I think mechanically I understand what you're saying; I think you're saying that each week or couple weeks or month or whatever, you commit to projects sized to fill about 50% of your time, and then you finish those commitments. But if I were your manager or tech lead or teammate and I knew you were employed full time at the company, I would instead want you to commit more than 50% of your time, like improving things or doing more projects or and same projects faster or helping other people with their projects or any number of other things, but not just, "welp, I got my tickets done, that's it for me!". So I still don't really get it, are you working part time at these companies, or are your managers happy to pay you for a full time job despite you working half time, or do they think you're actually filling all your time?

How so hard to understand? There’s an acceptable level of work at a company and this guy is meeting it without having to use 40 hours a week.

I kinda get where they’re coming from. Those kinds of companies are really rare. Generally management wants to squeeze as much out of labor as humanly possible, to the point where they demand exclusive access to one’s entire labor availability.

The fact that xxEightyxx has found not one, but two companies willing to pay six figures for a functionally part-time employee is pretty mind-boggling.

> The fact that xxEightyxx has found not one, but two companies willing to pay six figures for a functionally part-time employee is pretty mind-boggling.

There’s an entire internet subculture of people devoted to doing this. Check out r/overemployed. And there are far, far more people who do similar things entirely above board as consultants and contractors.

Working by project with set deliverables as a consultant/contractor makes perfect sense to me. What makes less sense is doing so as a full time employee.

The rarity of these companies varies widely on sector. I agree that it will be difficult to find typical tech startups that wont try to squeeze the maximum amount of time out of you.

If you want high chance of relaxed workloads, look for large corporations that exclusively contract with government out of a large budget. For example, the defense industry (e.g., the few companies designing and manufacturing planes, radars, avionics, communication equipment, guidance systems) is the biggest supplier of these type of roles that I know of. The pay in these roles is usually market competitive or better. At least from my experience, only about 20% of time or less is actually spent "working on something", much of which is sitting in irrelevant meetings. I would only recommend it if you are purely looking to collect an easy paycheck and you have a high tolerance for boredom, bureaucracy, internal politics and incompetence at all levels.

Post-covid remote work that much of government and contractors have moved to (permanently?) has likely also made it significantly easier to have multiple "full time" jobs. Management does not care about anything in this sector except that hard deadlines are met (the real deadlines, very rarely even gets close), soft deadlines are missed (used to justify "needing" more money), and nothing is completed too quickly (they want to give the illusion that hard work is being done).

Basically, this is just not what salaried full-time positions are. Hourly positions pay you for your hours worked, part time positions pay you for part of your productive working time, but full time positions pay you to work full time, not part time. But I think I get it now from OP's further explanations, these are just part time positions that are in the books as full time.

A salaried role is paid the same regardless of how long one works. A rationally run business should care about what's produced, not the amount of labor-hours it takes to produce it. Developer productivity varies wildly, so in a fair labor market, time worked and compensation should vary with developer productivity (sometimes compensation is correlated with time worked, but generally at diminishing marginal returns).

Of course there is a dynamic between the business and the employee when it comes to their expectations of each other. All else being equal, a business would like to get more output per dollar spent, and an employee would like to get paid more in total and work fewer hours. Nowhere in the goals of this dynamic does hours worked come into the picture. What does happen is that businesses believe they would get more output per dollar spent if they can get a salaried employee to work more hours, so they pressure employees into doing so. People generally like to be in charge of others, so un-enlightened managers force employees to be at the office because they like seeing them there.

Enlightened managers care first about cultivating great relationships, secondly about the total output of an employee, and therefore not at all about hours worked. Marginal productivity per hours worked eventually goes negative as hours worked increase, and in my opinion the point at which it becomes negative is a lot lower than most people believe (probably ~20-30 hrs/week over the long term).

Besides, highly productive developers are in very high demand. You're just shooting yourself in the foot if you don't give them a fair deal, because they'll go somewhere else, unless they're on a work visa in which case they'll remember if you don't treat them well.

Please do note that this argument applies mostly to salaried employees in knowledge-work.

> Besides, highly productive developers are in very high demand. You're just shooting yourself in the foot if you don't give them a fair deal, because they'll go somewhere else

Ok, but "we expect you to work full time when we hire you for a full time job" is a fair deal. It is not "unfair" to hire people full time rather than part time.

Pretend he’s an offsite consultant. Now does it make sense? His employers are aware he’s making them substantial money and it’s likely they’re aware he left his last, much more demanding job, for being too stressful. So they know if they put more pressure on him than he feels like dealing with he’ll leave. Whether he’s deceiving the two proper jobs he has as an employee or not is a separate matter but they have no leverage over him either way.

I understand it for contract work, yes, but full-time salaried work is different, for exactly this reason; the expectation implicit in the relationship is that you are working full time, not just on a contracted project basis.

He negotiated different expectations. He was explicit about wanting a job with different expectations than the usually implicit ones and if at any point any of the parties find it no longer to their liking they can just end it.

If you don’t like the usual game you can make your own new game with your own rules if you can find someone else to play with you.

Yeah like I said in another comment after getting more info, these are just well paid part time jobs, which is fair enough.

Without getting too specific - company A pays me to fulfill contracts we bid on within government entities. There's a ridiculously ludicrous amount of red-tape that translates into down-time for someone like me. I do one of three things: software dev, data engineering, or ML modelling. Only one of those three domains because the way this company works, everything is compartmentalized so there are specific folks for specific tasks. I'm a senior/lead so I do my part and pass it to the next fella. Company B is more end-to-end full stack dev work. I just happen to know this domain very very well, along with the libraries, tech stack, and business goals involved in it which translates into rapid development on my part supported by mid and junior level engineers.

Also, having been burned by companies in the past, I no longer make it a priority to "go the extra mile", I do exactly what is expected of me to do and generally no more or less. Although, I am a stickler for documentation so I do write up a lot of our code-base, architecture, and other things.

The last couple of companies I worked for were fairly bad in terms of quality of life so I've moved around a bit until I found jobs that were a good fit for me. The last two years especially have been somewhat of a blessing because engineers are in high demand and I played it to my advantage.

I'm employed full-time at both companies, both know that I am doubly employed and have no issue with it as they are more concerned about project/task completion rate rather than hours on the clock. Which I would argue is how it should be at most companies. Additionally, I work from home.

The reason I keep having this discussion with you is that it's interesting!

I agree that work being accomplished is what matters, not hours. But you are clearly not working full time, you could clearly accomplish more for each of the companies within the boundaries of a single full time workload, hours aside, because you do indeed accomplish more than what you're accomplishing at each company individually.

But from your description here, based on the expectation situations with the companies, what you're describing here is just two part-time jobs that are well-paid, and I certainly don't begrudge you that!

I mean if you can negotiate well (& are absolutely amazing at your job), you might be able to convince them that they either pay you full time even though you only work part time, or they pay you more than full time (i.e. give you a big raise) if they want you to work longer, which would result in >100% output for the current position... which they might not need. The guy sounds like a f'ing machine (in a good way), so probably he has big leverage in his negotiations...

Yeah that's basically where I landed on this discussion. There isn't really a "pay you full time" vs. "pay you part time" - there is just what you're being paid and the kind of work you're putting in. It's totally plausible to me to work part time for the same amount of pay as your peers make working full time, which I think is exactly what the OP is doing. But what was confusing to me is calling that "full time work" because it really isn't; it's just well-paid part time work.

i find this....doubtful. sorry i'm just not one to believe everything i read online from anonymous people.

4) do your employers know that you are working another full time job?

Have you found the magical eighth day of the week??

Yes both are aware and are not concerned so long as I continue to produce results.

WRT #1: How does one get a board position for roughly $1k/hour?

A fair bit of luck really. Met the CEO at a specific crypto-development conference back in 2016 and we hit off and he gave me an offer right then and there. Initially, had to prove my worth for the first 2 years and when my full-time work and other life events started getting in the way I gave him my two weeks notice and he countered with more money and less day-to-day work so long as he could keep me on "retainer" which he did by creating a board and placing me on it. There's a few other folks on the board which I'm quite certain earn more than I do because they're former Googlers/Apple employees and I have never worked for a FAANG company. Company has taken a big hit over the last 1.5 years due to the poor performance of cryptos recently and waning interest from our existing and potential client base.

Beware of board member liability for that crypto stuff.

Regarding 3, are you interested in another client? If so let me know how you’d like to connect.

Not OP, but also run a tech consulting firm. Email is in bio, happy to talk.

I want to do #5 so badly but don’t have millions in cash - how do you arrange financing?

There's many ways - traditional banking being the route I took. Initial sunk-cost was $350k, interest rates were low, and my loan amount was small all things considered. I had most of the cash on hand and collateral in the form of a house. I did all the building and excavation myself, the only things I subbed out were plumbing, electrical, HVAC, and some drywall because I really don't like drywall.

Also fortunate because the last few years has seen a huge run-up and appreciation in property in my area specifically where the median house price 10 years ago was around $250k, it's now just under a million for a run-of-the-mill 4 bed, 2 bath, 2200sqft home. The buyer was a small investment company from out-of-state which is really unfortunate because I was hoping to sell to someone local but given the offer they made me, no one could match or even come close.

You sound like a person of renaissance