Comment by incision | Hacker News Reader

Comment by incision | Hacker News Reader

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>"Is it possible for anyone who thinks for a living to truly 'segment'?"

Sure.

I'm finding this really hard to articulate, but here goes...

I feel like this should be self-evident, but we've been trained to think otherwise, to believe that giving so much of our time and energy is completely normal or even noble.

I've worked with my hands and with my mind, as a full-time employee, a union member and an at-will contractor.

There's actually nothing terribly special or unique about thinking for a living - it's still work with energy and opportunity cost for doing it. When the toll is primarily mental it's harder to perceive, but just as real.

The big difference between knowledge workers and everyone else is what individuals and workers as a group will put up with.

Tech workers accept being sent home with laptops and cellphones by an employer who doesn't want to pay three shifts worth of coverage for a 24/7 operation. Elsewhere this is prevented by unions, regulations and the implicit understanding that allowing the next man to devalue himself today will devalue the group tomorrow.

I have a difficult time stopping thinking; I consider this a big difference between thinking and acting: I would even argue I do not have conscious control over what I am thinking about... it isn't even clear to me I have conscious knowledge that I am thinking about something (hence why sometimes I seem to get more done while asleep than I do while actively thinking: sometimes I purposely go to sleep while working on a hard problem as there is a good chance I will wake up with an answer). So yes: I agree with you that thinking and acting can have similar costs and pains and should somehow be reglated to avoid serious problems, but I haven't figured out how yet: I don't even use email, and while I'm clearly addicted to my phone (I am at a party right now... clearly not ;P), taking my phone away would not allow me to stop thinking about the code I was working on earlier today... I was momentarily distracted while talking to some people, but as indicated by the person you were responding to, that's all I seem to be able to hope for: finding things that are sufficiently distracting to let me reclaim my own brain.

I know the problem, teaching can be a very absorbing occupation.

What I do is keep a notebook and write stuff down. That seems to 'earth' the thoughts in some way so I can stop thinking about that. I read the notes when starting a working day.

Surprised at downvote, just sharing my own experience.

> The big difference between knowledge workers and everyone else is what individuals and workers as a group will put up with.

There are exceptions, such as in Finland [1]

> Overtime work is allowed in Finland, and represents any work done extra the maximum regular working hours, to a maximum of 138 hours in a 4 months period and a total of 250 hours per a calendar year.

[1] http://www.workinfinland.com/what-are-the-normal-working-hou...

Sure, that's what the written rules say, but in reality, people put up with a lot more work. For example, they may not count work done outside the office, or even work done after 6pm in the office.

This is true, I suppose the difference here is that workers are offered some level of protection. I have had a Finnish person tell me he couldn't legally take on additional work before.

Why would you want to segment your work though?

Value creation is a major part of life, why try so hard to separate it?

If you have something fun to do, like going out, working on your hobbies / relationships / health, go ahead. But you don't have to put those activities in two "time zones". It can be a homogeneous mixture.

* Elsewhere this is prevented by unions, regulations and the implicit understanding that allowing the next man to devalue himself today will devalue the group tomorrow.

yeah, but we make 3x as much as the union protected workers. It's union protection that ruining this country, look at the entitlement problem, hell, you only have to look at the train driver in chicago who fell asleep at the wheel, it a non union protected area she'd have been fired, instead she goes right back to work and drives a train up an escalator asleep again.

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