Busyness is Not a Virtue | Hacker News Reader

Busyness is Not a Virtue

blog.idonethis.com

100 pointsraju33 comments

There have been a few articles recently complaining about people who complain about being busy. They offer the keys to unlocking what people really mean when they say they're busy, usually that they're super-important.

There is another thing that "I've been really busy" means: I'm sorry. I'm sorry I haven't kept in touch. I'm sorry I missed your concert/art show/party. I'm sorry I've been mentally absent, unfocused, and overwhelmed. Can we be friends again?

Recently, I've taken to just saying this directly. "OMG I'm so sorry X that I haven't called in like months. I'm a total asshole and a terrible friend. Lunch next week?"

"I'm busy" just sounds like "I have more important things than you."

This is a fine article if you already believe that busyness is bad. The trouble is that busy people are, by definition, people who think being busy is a feature not a bug.

For example, we can spin the wheel and play bug-or-feature:

> And when you start sounding like an appliance, it makes it hard to connect with you.

Bug or feature? Depends on your personality, depends on who's connecting with you.

> This is one of the easiest outs for stuff I don’t want to do.

Bug or feature?

Another sentiment I see in TFA and the comments is that saying "I'm busy" is a euphemism for "I don't care about you" so people shouldn't say it. But this analysis assumes that the heaviest rock is for a person not to be rude. I suspect that in many cases that if you remove the method for a polite brush-off, you could get an impolite brush-off instead. Nothing has been done to address the underlying motivation behind saying "I'm busy".

If you find yourself in the author's shoes being frustrated by how other people are too busy for you, I might recommend reading some sales books and figuring out how to make proposals that are more agreeable to others. Writing a blog post about how other people need to change will not help you solve that problem.

While I agree that saying "I'm busy" can come off as "I'm super important," I often use it as fill in for "I want to be alone with my thoughts." Often that helps me feel more joy and mindfulness in my work because my focus isn't as splintered. But I also procrastinate heavily, usually depends on the type of work and how interested I am in it. The interplay between mood, goals, self-control, work ethic, passion, etc is complicated. Things like this, breaking down tasks and reorienting them sounds incredibly beneficial, I'm just too busy to start.

I completely agree. A few months ago, I switched from being ultra busy on my company to taking some time to do what I really enjoy. As a result, I actually get more done now than before.

The article is well written, you should read it. Here is a tldr if you don't have the time though: http://tldr.io/tldrs/51680e1bc2bdcc645c000169/busyness-is-no...

"Here is a tldr if you don't have the time though" - Nice. I see what you did there.

I refuse to do what I think of as "building for inventory" -- working on things that I don't see a clear downstream consuming process for -- and I try to make everything I bother with perfect and part of a flow process (never one-off). I am one of the most productive people in my office, while my coworkers are always busy, busy and can't seem to get things done quickly.

If you're working at a big company you're almost required to be busy. In fact you're looked down upon if you're not busy enough. How many times have you ran into co-workers only to do a little smalltalk? You talk about the projects you're working on and how slammed you are with work.

Being busy at the workplace is a way to seem important. You might run into someone at the cafe and say hey we should catch up. Well, why wouldn't you just catch up right then and there? That would be the most efficient route. You're both already together in the same place at the same time. Do you really need to rush back to your desk to do some more busy work?

"How are you doing?" - "Keeping Busy"

It's an answer for original sin or low self-esteem or something; or fta : guilt. By default, I suck. But if I'm busy then you can't yell at me for doing nothing to alleviate my sucky effect upon the world, because I'm busy after all.

A busy person is worthy of existence. Call them a disgusting , lazy, stupid, stinky bum guilty of a thousand shameful sins - but at least they're busy.

I don't know why this should come as news to anyone here. It falls under the general category of: If you don't want to come across as a self-absorbed prick, give people your full attention. We've heard about Bill Clinton, that when he spoke to someone, he made them feel like they were the only person in the world at that moment.

> If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult.

This is the toughest form of procrastination to avoid. E.g. it's easy to just fill your day with things like reading news and doing email, but the coding isn't going to get done that way.

This is just incredibly presumptuous. "Here's what you probably mean when you say something." Thanks for that input, but I think I'll decide what I mean when I speak.

Sure, some people sometimes use "I'm busy" as an excuse, or as something to brag about, or for any number of other purposes. People say all sorts of things for those same reasons, though.

"I have plans."

"The cable guy is coming out that day."

"I just got a promotion."

"We just got a new dog."

All of these things, just like "I'm busy," can be used and are used as lies in addition to actually being valid excuses. I'm not sure where the author got the idea this is somehow insightful or informative, or even remotely unique to one claim.

I love that you quoted the Phantom Tollbooth.

"If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult."

That's the organizing hierarchy I use to schedule my day. Doing the most important thing first means I feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, no matter what else I did not get through. It works better than "I'll do this one thing real quick" or the easiest/hardest first, or even the one that is due the soonest.

Earlier discussion of a similar article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4184317

Less is more, as in coding.

It's funny, many coders are smart enough to figure out that the solution to an O(n^2) algorithm is typically not more CPU cycles but changing to an O(n*log n) algorithm (or what-have-you). Yet they often refuse to make the same observations when it comes to their own productivity, they just throw more cycles at the same algorithms and expect that to be the optimal solution.

I wonder about that kind of argument. I find it super appealing because I would love to work a lot less and yet get more done. Unfortunately I've found that if I work more, I do get more done. Granted, there's a time for stepping back and thinking about a problem rather than continuing to brute force your way through it. And you can get to a point where you spin your wheels and it's better to stop. But generally, more time spent does mean more done, no?

Software development is a created process, like writing fiction. Imagine a fiction writer doing a 60 hour (or hell, even a 40 hour) work week to try and get more work done. It just won't work, certainly not long term.

But you do need to put in the practice time to be able to be productive when you need to be. If your process involves a lot of procrastinating with intermittent bursts of brilliance ,you won't be able to be relied upon when things get tough. Stephen King became the writer he did because his wife would tell him to write a story, the baby needs diapers, and he did.

So before you can work smart, you have to know how to work hard. Otherwise you're just goofing off.

Yes, it is a creative process. I think that a better analogy is to a scientist though. Sometimes, scientists spend a lot of time thinking about what an experimental result means and planning out their next set of experiments. But oftentimes, they also have to crank through a bunch of experiments that they've planned. The more time they spend at that point, the further they get.

I find that it can be really difficult to measure productivity some times, especially when long hours are involved. If I work 2x hours and I get stuff done all throughout that time (beginning, middle, and end) then I'll tend to think all of those hours were well spent. But when I spend the time and effort to really look at productivity I find that typically spending more hours only produces the illusion of greater productivity. Often times I'll easily forget the downsides of working more hours, such as poorer quality of work, less focus and ability to concentrate, more down time between periods of work, greater likelihood of being OK with partial or inferior solutions, etc.

Over time I've come to the conclusion that except for "it's broken, and time is money" or "I've found inspiration at midnight" situations it's pretty much never a good idea to consistently work long hours on software projects. It's better to work smarter and more efficiently and to have the resources available to do big refactoring / redesign / performance improvement projects when necessary than to just work flat out and always be in an "ok, that's good enough, moving on" state of mind.

This also applies to "scaling." Scalability seems to be a major boogeyman among tech startups. The way you make something scalable is by improving the big-O of your processing algorithm, and the way you do that is not by throwing money and processing power at it (buying more servers, hiring more developers with "scaling experience," etc.), but by optimizing your application logic to do as little as possible per input.

Scaling is just a large value of n.

Not to detract from your metaphor, but I think the main problem with scaling is to make as much as possible parallel, so that you can throw more cores / servers at it. Often this is at the expense of raw big-O efficiency I guess.

I guess in terms of your business metaphor, that would be establishing 'big company' things like written processes, constrained departments, and managers who don't code, so that more people can work for the company than the founders can talk to in a week.

I'm no expert in scalable algorithms, but my rudimentary understanding is that there are a few different ways to handle a problem with n inputs when n becomes a very large number:

1. Run it on a faster processor

2. Rewrite your algorithm so that it can run in parallel and the tasks can be divided among more cores/processors/servers

3. Rewrite your algorithm so that it's non-locking and the tasks can be completed asynchronously

4. Rewrite your algorithm so that each task takes less time (fewer/faster queries, fewer array accesses, fewer object instantiations, etc).

In terms of the analogy, #1 is equivalent to working harder on the problem--just throwing more time/money/energy at it. Staying late at the office. This is the wrong approach in programming and in life, because it does not scale with the size of the problem.

#2 and #3 are basically division of labor and task delegation in order to divide the time that it takes to complete the problem. This gets the job done faster but at a cost--you're paying for more heads to work on the job.

#4 is finding a better/cheaper/faster way to do each individual task or sub-task in the problem. It's improving your big-O. Having a better big-O alone will not make #2 and #3 unnecessary, but it will exponentially increase the effect of #2 and #3. It's what business types call a "force multiplier." It's really just reducing the amount of sub-tasks an individual worker has to do in order to satisfactorily complete a task. It's achieving the same thing by doing less.

I agree. If I spend a week doing more than around 20 hours of work, then I'm usually doing something wrong. The following week, I will spend some time trying to figure out what went wrong. There's usually always a better way.

Programming is the perfect lazy-man's work. If you're really good at changing O(n^2) to O(1), then you can pretty much double the output of other teams while also reducing your work. It's pretty fun.

Also, this applies at scaling. If my business model can't afford to hire more people as the demand for the business grows, then the business model is just a bad idea.

I think the meaning behind "I am so busy" sometimes is just a true statement and nothing more. I don't automatically assume the person saying it is bullshitting me in some way. That said, I never say it. I'm usually the one complaining about how I'm not busy enough, which is probably just as annoying.

Agree that we do in reality get busy, and it's a legit thing to say at times. My sense is the perpetually "I'm so busy" types are the subject of the post.

I agree, telling someone you're too busy is just telling them they are not high on your priority list.

I use the "I am busy" phrase to make boring people go away without being too offensive.

*business

My mom always going around telling how busy she is, just annoying as hell...

Mothers, especially those of young children, tend to be legitimaly, significantly busier than most of the other people.

I liked reading this after reading the poll about how old average HN readers are. Different ages have different priorities. Sometimes people aren't busy simply because they want to be important, or feel that they are better than you, or have over extended themselves. Sometimes people are actually busy.

Depending on where you are in life, sometimes you realize that the "Terrible Trivium" is actually the people around you who keep demanding focus.

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