The Two-Hour Rule | Hacker News Reader

The Two-Hour Rule

kenrockwell.com

102 pointsbaha_man31 comments

I think this article is sort of a work ethic litmus test. I'm actually considering having some contractors and business partners read it, just to see what their reactions are.

I realized the first time I ever read it that the article was a little tongue-in-cheek, but I still hated it. I could imagine the hordes of people reading it and rallying behind a "two-hour rule" banner, as if it in some way legitimized their poor work ethic.

I liked it a little better this time. If you read it and feel a little disgusted, then the chances are good that you probably aren't a bottom feeder.

I'm surprised to see so many negative comments. It's not about neglecting your duties or pawning your work onto someone else. It's about doing your job quickly and efficiently. My personal opinion is many jobs should not be structured as hourly full time positions but should instead be based off your actual value and efficiently. So if you can get the work done in 10 hours a week that should be it. You get paid 4x as much per hour. Many companies are starting to move towards independent contractors who are paid on a more realistic and honest scale and compete against each other on value & efficiency. I think it's a good thing. Of course it does not apply to all office jobs and probably not even the majority of jobs. It tends to be more common with engineers.

Ah yes, I've had that dream too. Unfortunately, the 8-hour, structured workday is in place because it works well for average people. It would be hard to find a workplace where you can say to your boss "I got my work done for the day by 11:30. I'm gonna take the rest of the day off."

Actually, I did know one guy who worked at a place like this in Australia. He completed his project for the week by Tuesday and when he asked his boss for more work, his boss just told him to take the rest of the week off.

Unfortunately, almost every other place requires you to still sit in your seat for the remaining time.

I've never really had an office job, and I am having a very hard time believing this. Can I get a corroborating account or two?

It think it's more like the 80/20 rule in most offices. 80% of the employees only work two hours a day and a handful work frantically to get all the real work done.

Varies a lot between particular companies. When I started at Google, one of the nearly universal comments from my fellow Nooglers was how much higher expectations were than at their previous jobs. (The workload is a little lower than when I had my own startup but higher than at both of the previous startups I've worked at, which was quite a bit more than I expected.) The two-hour workday seems fairly common among large companies in the valley though. I've also seen it at poorly-managed startups - those are the ones that either go bust or become small businesses.

I think that 20% time has a lot to do with this. I dunno about other folks, but I view 20% time as "All those other things I could be doing with access to Google's data that I try to squeeze in when I don't have an official project to do." Given the near infinity of nifty things to do with the web and a few zillion computers at your fingertips, that's quite a lot.

Another big factor seems to be whether companies assign tasks to individuals or to products. The number of tasks you're assigned is limited by your manager's bandwidth: if you're a fairly talented worker at the bottom of the totem poll, it's very likely that you'll be able to complete tasks faster than your manager can dream them up. But if tasks are just assigned to the product - "Well, we could be better in X, Y, and Z ways. Oh, and anything else you can think up" - there are a potentially infinite number of ways that the product could be better. If you just pick them off one by one as soon as you finish your previous task, without worrying about who owns them, you end up perpetually busy.

I'll just chip in an "aye" and leave it at that.

With government contractors, gov employees, and union workers, they actively avoid helping anyone out if it is outside their specialty, even if they are severely under tasked. In fact, they will actively try to avoid doing their own jobs. I've seen it happen too many times. I've heard worse than I've seen from people I trust.

The disgusting part is this is accepted as normal behavior. There's rarely punishment because these people earn their employer serious money. Contractors tend to be paid 1/2 - 1/4 of the money they actually bring in. For gov't contractors, there go your tax dollars.

People complain about government workers being lazy. No, they are just as lazy as most regular Americans[1].

[1] I have no idea if this applies to other countries, but human nature tells me it probably is.

Some people do more, some less.

Most people think they do much more.

At several large companies I worked at, it was absolutely impossible to do anything more that. Their structure made crushed any attempt at it with meetings. There were weeks where I had over 30 hours of meetings scheduled. Meetings where everyone felt productive but nothing really was accomplished.

That's why I work for myself now. I used to work 12 hours a day for my employer, but it never got me anywhere. I don't think I'm the type suited for a 2-hour workday.

It varies by location and role, but yes, it does occur. In my last position, some of the goofs spend probably a minimum of 3 hours / day purely socializing. (You can then add on browsing and whatnot to that.) One person spent hours on their cell phone while sort of typing. Needless to say, the quality as well as the quantity of output of these people was hardly stellar.

Yet they were the social bugs, and in this part of the organization, that apparently was what succeeded. If where you are doesn't value your kind of input, then however good it is, it is others who will "succeed".

And they did "finish" things. Just in such a state, that others had to clean up the shortfall. But that wasn't really measured. I find most corporate "metrics" I've encountered akin to all the jokes you hear about statistics (lies, damned lies, and...).

Well, I've said before that I need to curb my "bitter old man" comments. But you asked for collaboration, so: Yes, this really does exist.

The amount of work I do is largely dependent on the number of projects our boss has for us to work on that day. So I can range from actually having work to do for 10 hours straight to having maybe a half hour of real work in the day to do. When I do have work to do I would say maybe about 80% of my time/focus is actually on doing the work.

As someone that runs a startup with a handful of interns, this is one of my biggest anxieties, that my interns will be sitting around waiting for "the boss" (me) to give them something to do.

To remedy this, I try never to give them tasks, but instead to give them expectations, targets, and responsibilities. Then my job becomes one of checking in on them and assisting from time to time if they appear to be struggling. They know they'll be held accountable for how things turn out, so they tend to work hard.

That said, getting away from task-driven management is a constant struggle.

Yes, it's like this. Depressingly so.

I used to work 3-month contracts, broken up by 9 month roadtrips, so coming back to the office I'd be stoked to get back to writing code, with months of pent-up energy ready to burst out in the form of productivity.

On two occasions, I took over projects from another developer who had been working on them the entire time I'd been away, and rebuilt them from scratch in less than a week. While it's certainly possible that I'm 100x-500x as productive as those guys, more likely is that they'd simply been coasting along that whole time.

It took a lot of diplomacy not to rock that particular boat. "Uh... yeah... it must be this new technology that's just so darn efficient. Certainly not any fault of the team or anything... Say, did you catch the game last night?"

This is true and does apply to most of Europe, as well. It is not as bad as 15 minutes for Peter Gibbons, but you never actually work for full 8 hours.

IMHO, if you get the job done in 4 hours, someone else does it in 3 hours, someone else in 10 hours, and someone else in 13 hours, there is nothing wrong with being that 4 hour guy.

It's not true in the legal field. Clients demand very specific breakdowns of hours worked, down to the specific issue researched/briefed/discussed, and will refuse to pay for fluff work. In the public sector end of the legal field, there's just too much work to take a break, especially in the DA and public defender offices.

I love Ken Rockwell - helped me decide on which camera to buy. And I love this article - "When I had a job, a day of vacation was like finding a pot of gold. Today, a day off costs me a day's pay. Always."

One odd bit: "42? What's with 42? Simple: at this contractor, we billed time in tenths of hours. 42 minutes is 0.7 hours." What?

The union wanted to move up go-home time, and compromised on lunch time alotted. So instead of working 8-12 then 1-5 with a 1-hour lunch, the schedule changed to 8-12 then 12:42-4:42.

That doesn't explain why :42 instead of :40 or :45. Hence the mention of 10ths of hours. That makes the choices :36, :42, :48, etc., and I guess ya gotta pick one.

(That's my best guess, anyway.)

The meaning of life?

I've gone through periods of life where this was true. There were reasons - truly bad boss, problems in my personal life, etc - but eventually I realized that slacking off had started to become the primary cause of my depression.

So I did what I had to do to actually start getting things done at work. (In my case, I did an end-run around the truly awful boss who was going through a nasty divorce and taking it out on me.) And it didn't take long before I stopped hating life and myself. And I left that job with my head held high. (Because once I was useful, why have a truly awful boss?)

I can't say that I go full steam every hour of the day, but I like to go home at the end of every day knowing I accomplished something real and useful. There are days where the answer is no, but they're the exception. And since I started actually working, I've gotten good, my salary has gone up, and I'm much happier. And I just recently got a great job offer in the middle of a recession!

So, believe in the two-hour rule at your own peril. There's a sweet spot between this, and married to your job. (Workaholics really are a drain on morale too, but that's a different post.)

So Ken Rockwell was essentially stealing tax dollars. I am sure that happened and still happens a lot. It has nothing to do with the supposed lazyness of the american worker or anything like that -- it has to do with the idiotic cost plus basis the government uses for military projects. This means that the higher the cost the higher the profit. The more hours billed the higher the profit. SO his managers make sure they overlook his slacking as long as there is government money coming in and he keeps sending those timeslips in.

If cost plus accounting is removed and the military actually did projects based on competitive bidding and if the government made them stick to those bids, then you would see that most of the companies Ken worked for would not allow that type of slacking.

So yeah it sure it happens a lot, but at least you'd expect most people to feel slightly guilty about it. Ken, on the other hand, feels proud.

BTW I have some friends that are engineers in the defense industry and most of them work pretty hard, so i am not sure his rule applies for most of the defense industry even.

IIRC there was a study done along these lines a couple of years ago. The actual number was 90 minutes. Among the chair-moistening set, actual productivity per week boiled down to 5 * 90 minutes.

Here's what I've gleaned from this article:

>If you don't own the business, there isn't much to gain by putting yourself out as hard as if it were your own.

Be selfish.

>My dad never fell for this. He completed all his real and personal work on time, and always left around 4:30 PM as everyone else did (while charging until 4:42PM) so he was always home for us at about 5PM every night.*

Charge for work you don't do.

>Because of this, you need to play it cool. It's always good idea to look busy. Whenever I was working on important personal projects at work, I always had a back story prepared about how that work was critical to my real job in case I got busted. I never did; bosses rarely get out and walk around.

Lie.

>Another tactic is, presuming your work has more than one precise location where you might be working, is to make it look as if you're at the other place working. For instance, those of us who design and build Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), have a desk in an office, as well as laboratories, machine shops and test ranges. If I'm not sitting at my desk, people then look for me down in the lab. If you make each location look as if you're in that day, but probably at the other location, you can go home for a few hours at a time. For instance, if you leave a half-full drink and your jacket at your desk, people will presume you're down in the lab.

Deceive.

Joke or not, this article revolted me. Regardless of the pay, the constant lying and slacking just screws the "clever" two-hour worker. After a decade or two of that, they may not be capable of actual productivity. I just may not be cut out for work in America... at least not the one this guy is living in.

I suddenly feel so productive...

I'm usually most productive when I am about to leave the office. It's kind of strange and annoying at times.

This is one of these "truths" that make you smile, but are actually not worth writing and reading. Sure, lots of people waste time unproductively in and out of offices, but these people are b.o.r.i.n.g. I much rather read about the few that actually accomplish a lot.

I read this while at work on an entirely meritless conference call. I would get far greater satisfaction from additional hours of what I consider to be actual work. [not regular account]

I think that thinking of this as satire is a defense mechanism. Because the turth of what the government does with our money is horrific.

>If you don't own the business, there isn't much to gain by putting yourself out as hard as if it were your own.

The corollary to this is, of course, why one might want to found a startup.

I work almost all of the time I'm at work, and I certainly am not most productive in those hours. I'm most productive from like 8-10 and then from 2-3.

It's semi-satire, but a lot of it rings true, based on my experience working in several big corporate office/cubicle types of jobs. In that environment, people who work smart/fast generally are not rewarded proportionately to their merit. Whereas if you go freelance/contract or start your own business it does become more about effectiveness, efficiency and working "smarter, not harder". What you do, not where you do it. What you achieved, not how many hours you clocked. Social networking and relationships are still important, but it's more horizontal and collaborative rather than vertical up/down and master/slave. Also when working in the corp/office/cubicle/9-to-6 sort of job a fairly narrow slice of your talent is used, whereas it's more broad and I think satisfying and challenging intellectually if you're self-employed or freelance. Again, just a generalization based on experience in both worlds, and there are exceptions.

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