Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

This post is almost comically ridiculous if you try and apply any of it outside of the context of (I imagine) a small team that doesn't really do anything externally.

How do I tell my clients that I only do meetings on Thursdays? If they happen to be unavailable one Thursday, do they have to wait a fortnight before I deign to speak to them again?

Is this guy seriously suggesting that the way to stop being overwhelmed by inbox zero is by using Slack?

And honestly, doing one thing a day - really? How in the world does that work? Sure, doing one thing well is better than doing nothing or half-doing a bunch of things, but surely your goal should be actually doing a reasonable amount of things that reflect a solid day's work - and figuring out a strategy for reliably making that happen.

Perhaps I'm just a grouch today, but it feels like this post is either satire or written from a completely different universe, utterly unrelated to the one I inhabit and work in.

Coworker of the OP here. To elaborate a bit:

> How do I tell my clients that I only do meetings on Thursdays?

I generally do 10-15 customer meetings per week. When I get a meeting request, I ask if they're available on the following Tuesday or Thursday with a 90% hit rate. Meetings are almost always not urgent, so fitting them into Tues and Thurs, instead of spreading them randomly througout the week, has worked really well for me.

> How in the world does [doing 1 thing per day] work? [...] surely your goal should be actually doing a reasonable amount of things

In the context of software development, doing a large number of things usually doesn't push the product forward as much as doing 1 big 2-4 hour project.

Personally I still have 30+ things on my TODO list at any given time, but I try to center my days around getting one "big" thing done, and fill the rest of the day with smaller day-to-day tasks.

So you do meetings on Tuesday or Thursdays, and rather than doing one thing a day, in fact you do one big task a day and many small tasks. That's all fine and good, but 1) it's not really what the OP's post says, and 2) it's not really very revolutionary at all.

I'm glad it works for you guys, but I'm often irritated by these preachy posts which seem to say that developers should be treated as delicate flowers and suggest all manner of strategies to preserve their preferred ways of working, many of which, if you actually applied them to the real world, would result in clients saying, "Wow, these guys are hard to work with, can we please find someone else?"

> So you do meetings on Tuesday or Thursdays, and rather than doing one thing a day, in fact you do one big task a day and many small tasks. That's all fine and good, but 1) it's not really what the OP's post says, and 2) it's not really very revolutionary at all.

I would go further than saying this isn't really very revolutionary, rather it describes a fairly normal working environment.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of dysfunctional working environments out there, where this wouldn't be considered "normal".

Of course, in those environments, developers cannot say "no", they can either keep working under whatever unreasonable constraints they have, or quit. (I've found this a lot more common in companies where the main focus isn't software development)

I agree it's not very revolutionary, but I still find it useful to read about how other people organize their teams and how it works, and very especially what tools they use (Slack and a few others are on my to-try list).

Appreciate your thoughts! Definitely agree the article doesn't apply to everyone in all cases.

As a company we really want to spend time sharing what we learn.

This is one of the first posts we've written, so we'll try to improve in the future :)

Here's some more feedback, I cracked open the article, quickly identified it as one of the preachy posts he was referring to, and closed it without reading.

I too am tired of people discovering this "blog" thing.

I've been told that customers actually respect companies that say "no" to them more than the ones that always say "yes" to everything (as long as the rationale is explained and reasonable).

Just like you respect a romantic partner who is firm with you and has boundaries, more than you respect one who's a total doormat and lets you trample all over them.

While this sounds nice to hear, I would actually like to see some hard evidence proving this. If you have any sources backing this comment up I would love to see it. I work in advertising and I would love to tell account execs this because they are notorious for not being able to say no.

My only strategy to working is just to sit there and fucking work. It's not very difficult. You sort of just tell yourself you're going to do something and then you do it. Boom, saved this entire community a blog post.

" many of which, if you actually applied them to the real world, would result in clients saying, "Wow, these guys are hard to work with, can we please find someone else?"

Exactly. Totally flies in the face of saying "how high" when someone says "jump".

Not only that but a similar attitude of some old timers in a business that I was in (right out of college) was what allowed me to get their clients.

We live in a world where people want instant gratification and answers to their questions. While there may be cases where timing doesn't matter when you are dealing with sales and closing deals and keeping away the competition I have always found the early bird gets the worm. And sometimes you get the deal just by showing up because the other party is to busy to service the account.

So really, you don't just do meetings on Thursday, and you don't just do one thing a day.

Not just you. I feel like this post just regurgitates a bunch of other "every few days" posts. Doesn't really add much to the conversation.

That's not to say that it shouldn't be written, as getting your thoughts out there is always a good exercise. It being on the front page of HN is of questionable use, though. Might be of some utility to anyone who has never read HN before.

I've just canned a very similar post to yours.

Is there any explanation as to why this should be on the front page? This seems rather like Reddit - posts there often seem to rise up while most of the comment section is fairly negative.

Well there are people voting it up, which I can understand as the concepts are always popular. Not sure on the algorithm that's used.

There's no downvote function for stories, so even controversial stories will appear on the front page. The only reason something shouldn't be on the front page is when it's off topic or spam. As long as someone cares about something, it can be on the front page.

There is no "off topic" on HN since the topic is "anything that interests hackers" and us hackers are not going to up vote anything that isn't interesting.

It need to be reiterated until it becomes the norm.

I happen to use one-goal-a-day in my own career. It's amazing. There's so many things you could do, but would not really move any needles. If you pick the one thing you know will move the needle, and focus just on that, and be happy if you can accomplish it, you'll ultimately be so much more productive, even if it doesn't really feel like it. You can decouple the feeling of being productive from your activities without losing real productivity, if you can do that, you can be amazing.

I had only one thing to do this entire week, and I didn't even get it done. So from where I sit one thing a day is pretty optimistic. Granted I did a lot of useful things for people, I just didn't get my own priority completed. Hopefully all this other stuff will die down over time.

I don't think he is really saying to do just one thing, just that we should hang the success of the day on only one priority. It is somewhat similar to the 'today is the deadline' motto from scrum.

You probably made progress on that task, though. Added unit tests, clarified requirements, etc.

I did. I actually sent everyone a note one morning that I was planning to avoid email, and they should hit me up directly if they needed anything. I was going to suggest that in the comments here, but I feel like I need to see how well that works if it becomes a regular thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com