How I optimised my life to make my job redundant | Hacker News Reader

How I optimised my life to make my job redundant

troyhunt.com

118 pointshenrik_w94 comments

Having known people exactly like this, I'm going to guess that Troy is blind to the people he affects around him while he is working so "hard" and jumping around so much.

Unless he has some super-human abilities, doing things like stopping to "churn out a para or two" is NOT helping his productivity. I'd guess he's succeeding despite of that workflow (many hours spent) instead of because of it.

> "That might mean being on a conference call and also responding to emails (I’m happy listening and writing at the same time)".

The people who I know did this missed very important details of meetings, and even has to be clued in that someone was speaking to them. They constantly relied on others around them to pay attention to the important details of any meeting. Definitely led to confusion and issues (and blaming).

I stopped reading after the first section because all of this brought back memories (and a really strong negative reaction) of such crazy ridiculous ego's I've worked with in the passed. I won't believe Troy is doing life better than us. He's working (very hard!) and will be successful, but at the cost of others around him and ultimately to the detriment of his quality of life.

To be fair, I've known a handful of people who can do that effectively without getting lost. However, I'd say they are the minority and its really a "luck of genetics" thing rather than a learned skill.

No one I've met who claims it was a skilled they learned actually can do it. I'm willing to believe people exist who do, but I suspect they fall under the "luck of genetics" category and just convinced themselves they learned it. Or it could be a mix of both. However, 90% of people I've met that do it do meet the OP's "blindspot" criteria.

Genetics would def. be part of it, I think that's fair.

One person I'm thinking of in particular is VERY intelligent, which (unfortunately for those around them) helps them cope with (get away with) this behavior.

It looks like Troy works from home, so he's got an advantage there.

Really the majority of the article is about time management, and he does make some good points, not that I agree with all of them.

For me, I had never heard about RescueTime before, so I think overall my life has been improved by checking this out.

Having worked from home for 11 years, it's no advantage. As much as possible, I try to divide the time between home office and somewhere else quiet cause, eventually, something needs to be done at home and ruins the rest of the day. The dog, the wife, the leaky faucet. It's something every day.

You're just speculating. None of this needs to be true in Troy's case.

Correct. It's based on personal experience. It just strongly resonated with me.

You're free to believe he's different from 99% of us in terms of ability to multi-task and work 16 hour days.

>> "That might mean being on a conference call and also >>responding to emails (I’m happy listening and writing >>at the same time)".

>The people who I know did this missed very important >details of meetings, and even has to be clued in that >someone was speaking to them. They constantly relied on >others around them to pay attention to the important >details of any meeting. Definitely led to confusion and >issues (and blaming).

I have to agree. Certainly there are geniuses and other people out there who have "super-human abilities", but thats a very few people.

Troy could very well be one of them. But suggesting that this is "multi-tasking" is hiding the truth for the majority of people.

As you said, Ive known people who do this. They simply ignore one task while doing the other. It seems a bit naive of Troy to suggest this as a valid strategy.

  But suggesting that this is "multi-tasking" is hiding the
  truth for the majority of people. As you said, Ive known 
  people who do this. They simply ignore one task while 
  doing the other.

But that's all computers do. So using a definition of 'multi-tasking' that excludes that, you could say there is no thing as 'multi-tasking', unless you are able to juggle several tasks at once.

Which brings up a (few) problem(s) with that definition of 'multi-tasking'. Does that defintion define 'multi-tasking' as 'Doing two things at the same time', or 'Paying attention and doing two things at the same time'? If you use the former, then everyone everywhere multitasks when they decide to eat and walk, think about something and walk, etc.

If you decide to use the latter, then how do you define 'attention'? Is someone thinking about what to cook tonight while walking down the street really paying attention to where they're going?

The dissonance over meanings can easily be stemmed if you consider the second definition of the word 'multi-tasking'.

  2. The engaging in more than one activity at the same 
  time or serially, switching one's attention back and 
  forth from one activity to another.

Which means that 'ignoring one task while doing the other' is a perfectly valid form of multi-tasking.

I am not quite as interested in semantic accuracy as I am interested in the meaning of the advice itself.

Accepting your definition of multi-tasking, I simply will reword my objection: Dont suggest mutli-tasking is some virtuous and amazing quality.

in this definition, every single living being is probably multitasking... you, me, everybody

> I have to agree. Certainly there are geniuses and other people out there who have "super-human abilities", but thats a very few people.

> Troy could very well be one of them. But suggesting that this is "multi-tasking" is hiding the truth for the majority of people.

I honestly don't think this is true. Being bad at multitasking is simply part of being a human being. If you look into this you'll find people quite consistently overestimate their performance at multitasking and in fact do much more poorly at both tasks. They're just switching back and forth between the two, and the human brain does much more poorly with this context switch than computer processors do.

I mean I agree with the thrust of your post; I just don't agree with the idea that there are some supergeniuses who are an exception.

I don't think any study has shown that multi-tasking is faster/more efficient than sequentially processing tasks. However, that is quite different from saying some people are better at multi-tasking than others.

I remember reading a US air force study comparing fighter pilots to normal people and they found fighter pilots could multi-task much better than the average joe. I'll try and dig it up.

I can accept that some people are better at multi-tasking than others, but I don't think that anyone is better at multi-tasking than working sequentially, and I think that ends up being more important. The best multitaskers are a bit like the dogs best at walking on their hind legs.

Agreed. If you're responding to emails during a meeting, you are either missing important information from the meeting, writing bad email, or you don't need to be in the meeting in the first place.

Realistically the latter is extremely common in business settings. A small percentage of business meetings even need to happen, much less need the presence of all attendees.

This. 95% of meetings could be replaced by sending a couple of emails, or just paying attention to the bug tracker/version control system.

Or just paying attention and being focused in the first meeting.

Meetings are generally run by people that like to hear themselves talk. Those of us that have to get shit done don't get a lot of benefit from hearing people bikeshed and ramble for forty-five minutes or an hour, when you could write up the ideas discussed in a more concrete form in five minutes and email it around.

Text is a whole lot more efficient than talk. People actually have to present ideas in a coherent way when they are written down, since it's actually in a persistent form and doesn't admit the same hand-waviness and slop that speech does.

If you consider meetings as one-way communication then I understand that you think it is a waste of time. But if you are trying to understand what a non-technical customer actually needs, then a ten minute meeting might save you a hundred emails and a lot of grievances in the end. To write effective emails, you need to have a common language, which is missing more often than some people realize.

Many of those 95% happen because either:

1. People don't read their E-mails promptly or

2. It COULD be done over E-mail, but it would take 10X the time because the topic requires synchronous back-and-forth discussion, which is not efficient over E-mail.

I've seen E-mail chains that lasted WEEKS, where a 45-minute meeting would have been enough to resolve the problem.

> 2. It COULD be done over E-mail, but it would take 10X the time because the topic requires synchronous back-and-forth discussion, which is not efficient over E-mail.

Use IM, a chat room, whatever. Just use something that is persistent and can actually be referenced afterwards.

At which point, you might as well be in a physical meeting. You're either synchronously communicating (and not paying attention to something else) or you're not.

Except a physical meeting involves getting up from your desk, going somewhere, waiting around for everybody else to get there, having whatever meeting you're supposed to be having, hopefully without anyone taking it off the rails into some unrelated tangent, winding down the meeting, then going back to your desk. There's a lot of wasted time there, and I get very irritated by other people wasting my time.

Then there's the fact that nobody ever records the audio of in-person meetings, and almost never actually takes minutes or notes of what was decided, so the only record of it is the progressively hazy memories of the participants. So then you have another meeting next week to rehash the shit you just went over.

Besides the need for brief physical activity, these are people-problems and not problems specific to physical meetings.

Showing up late can happen in chat rooms.

Taking it off the rails into a tangent can happen in chat rooms.

Not ensuring accurate minutes are recorded is a failure of whoever is conducting the meeting, and should never happen.

I agree completely that these are people problems.

I have a huge preference for technical solutions that do the right thing by default, rather than trying to get people to do their jobs right. Most people are aggressively mediocre and don't seem to have any impulse to do their jobs in the most efficient way. So I can either get on their ass and chaff them along all the time to do things right, or you can use tools that make doing the right thing easier than not doing the right thing.

If that's the case, then isn't it part of the 5% that actually warrants a meeting?

Two things, was it something that needed to get done in the next 45 minutes? If not then a meeting is a big hammer for a small problem. If it only took 10 mins spread out over the course of several weeks it is still a time savings.

Second sure the discussion part could have been dealt with in a 45 minute meeting but how long did the thinking part take? Perhaps someone tested a few theories before presenting what they thought was the best approach in a short email. You aren't going to do that in a meeting you either end up taking the path of least resistance or you end up in another meeting after everyone has had a chance to go think and try stuff out.

"Two things, was it something that needed to get done in the next 45 minutes? If not then a meeting is a big hammer for a small problem. If it only took 10 mins spread out over the course of several weeks it is still a time savings."

Not true. There is an overhead to loading the relevant context into your brain each time you approach the issue.

Looking at an issue 10 times over the course of a month is typically going to take much longer "person time" than blocking out the time to look through an issue all at once.

Perhaps it's a combination of both?

Most of the meeting being irrelevant, and the quality of the email not mattering?

gotclocked.com

he multitasks all day, from 6am to 1am. Not a really great way of life.

he's really context switching constantly.

Which is actually far less efficient.

> The people who I know did this missed very important details of meetings, and even has to be clued in that someone was speaking to them.

I agree. Few things annoy me more than having a meeting to discuss an issue. A big discussion occurs while a 1-N people are on their computers claiming the meeting is a waste of time so they need to be working instead. A decision is made and everyone leaves. Later, when the decision is about to be implemented/executed, people who said the meeting was a waste of time now make me re-hash the entire meeting because they disagree with the solution.

I've actually just started responding to these people that they should have paid attention at the time, because I have work to do.

Are not the meetings properly documented and the actions minuted?

Mostly, but the same people who don't pay attention are the same people who don't go and read minutes. Basically their time is more valuable than anyone else.

So have the Chair call them out on it - Gently at first if that doesn't work raised formally at their 121

I'm a Scrum Master who took over for a SM who was fired. The first thing I did was ban computers from the planning meetings.

Tangent, but several friends said I should look into being a Scrum Master. Any advice on where to start? I'm going to a meetup on it Tuesday.

That's a good start. You'll need to join the Scrum Alliance mostly because that's where employers look. Lots of info free online. Feel free to PM me if you have questions.

Your profile lacks an email or point of contact. Maybe I'm naive and don't see what you mean

Everyone says that they can multi-task (maybe not everyone, but a lot), and in my long long old life, I've only met one person who could talk to me on the phone about weird music at the same time she was actively editing something that was going to go to trial the next day. And be fully active in both parts of this.

It was freaky.

I don't believe that most people can multi-task. I believe that one person can multi-task (that I have met), that some people can switch very quickly, and that the rest are delusional.

For myself, I can process vast amounts of information, and I can context switch, maybe slowly -- but I can't multi-task. After 40 years in the field - I'm not sure that many claimants can.

CMV: It's just a way for douches to say that they aren't paying attention.

> I often worked until 1am. I’d usually start at 6am. I always worked on weekends, albeit with leaving time for family activities as well. The laptop came on every holiday and I had to work very hard at balancing productivity with time out. Like I say, that’s not very palatable to many people but this is what it took for me to get this amount of stuff done.

Does anyone else feel like this falls under a combination of "workaholic" and luck of genetics?

Even with caffeine, I simply can't do two nights in a row with less than 7 hours of sleep and retain a level of mental acuity I need to "work" effectively.

Of course he may not be meaning this literally but I have the feeling the way that is written he is.

Perhaps, but I've fallen both in and out of this mindset, so I think it might have more to do with your state of mind.

In my mind at the time, something needed to get done. And I was the only one that could do it. And I'm too proud to admit failure, so damn the torpedoes, and full steam ahead, about a weeks worth of no sleep, caffeine induced, coding frenzy.

Both before and after that experience however, I'm the opposite. Unless it's a task that I own, and I feel like I NEED to do, and won't rest until it's done, then it's whatever man. Let me sleep.

So for my situation, maybe it's all about getting yourself into that mindset and hyping yourself up for something. (Though all things considered, I was mega burnt out after what I did and would not ever try it again.)

Perhaps. Out of curiosity, were you doing something that had a high-cost-per-defect? [e.g. All bugs lead directly to a loss of money for the company and/or accounting uncertainty on exactly where the money/inventory went]?

The reason I ask is generally the only people I ever see saying stuff like that tend to be engaging in projects with low-risk-defects that don't translate to 4-5 figures of financial losses per defect but rather a "meh, I'll spend an hour later figuring it out and it costs me basically $0" kind of defects.

What I find striking about this, and other parts of the article, is how they seem like they must be contradictory.

He spent 19 hours of his day working? Thats exceptional. A feat I certainly couldnt achieve.

But... he also spent an hour and a half playing high intensity tennis and/or taking regular walks to the shops near his house? That dosent sound like 19 hours of work to me.

And he balanced his personal life and relationships whilst working 19 hours a day? Or did his family only see the benefits in the last 18 months (as he states near the end of the article)?

So often when I read these "hack your life/productivity" articles and actually try to figure out the logistics, it just does not seem to check out.

Depends on the work though. If he was spending 2 hours/day reading and writing emails, maybe half-asleep is a perfectly appropriate state to be doing that in.

I program more than twice as well when I've got a good night's sleep, and I'm happier. But if I wanted to get promoted at all costs, I'd probably sleep less and spend more time in the office. I'd be less productive, and less healthy, but I fear that, sadly, in many corporate environments I'd be more likely to get promoted.

Not really "sadly" though I guess. If your manager has ability he'll know whether you've produced quality work or not. Just working for extra hours for its own sake at the expense of low-quality work, that doesn't contribute anything at all. If the IT managers are like that they'd be doing a horrible job.

I suppose it's possible that he's right, but it seems more likely that he was not being very productive due to being tired all the time. That's why he felt like he had to work such long hours. Probably, if he had worked a normal number of hours a day, he would have accomplished as much.

Back in my high school when preparing for university application etc. I used to sleep little and work a lot. I'd say that was the time when I was most productive. I slept at noon which must have been very helpful. Now I just can't find that level of concentration and efficiency back.

I got myself stuck in a bit of a rut at work a couple of years ago and had basically let myself become worthless in the job market and to get myself out of it I re-skilled (re-learnt an old skill) in my own time, got a new job working with that and also started writing / blogging / coding on the side.

I regularly go to sleep after midnight and get up before 6 (young children etc).

What I am getting at is that it is hard but possible to get by on less sleep (although 20 mins meditation helps) - although there are def times when I realise that I should just stop and go to sleep from a quality point of view.

Having a family who actually wants to see me they wouldn't put up with me taking a laptop on holiday and I won't work on weekends during the day (maybe a conf or something once or twice a year) - I will work in the evening.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.htm...

> The six-hour subjects fared no better — steadily declining over the two weeks — on a test of working memory in which they had to remember numbers and symbols and substitute one for the other. The same was true for an addition-subtraction task that measures speed and accuracy. All told, by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.

https://hbr.org/2006/10/sleep-deficit-the-performance-killer

> People like this put themselves, their teams, their companies, and the general public in serious jeopardy, says Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, the Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School.1 To him, encouraging a culture of sleepless machismo is worse than nonsensical; it is downright dangerous, and the antithesis of intelligent management. He notes that while corporations have all kinds of policies designed to prevent employee endangerment—rules against workplace smoking, drinking, drugs, sexual harassment, and so on—they sometimes push employees to the brink of self-destruction. Being “on” pretty much around the clock induces a level of impairment every bit as risky as intoxication.

The majority of people can't run on 6 hours of sleep. It is the luck of genetics to be able to do that on a regular basis and pretending it is anything else is silly. I can point to numerous articles like these with similar results.

This almost made me sick. This article is pages of bragging basically. "Check out all my things", "I have money and can buy other people's time", "I quit my job", "Here's a pic of my wife".

His tips? Give me a break.

Haters gonna hate. He figured out how to milk Pfizer for a salary to underwrite him while he built his personal brand. So what if his github account is weak, this guy hacks life.

True. This guy surely has a massive ego and talks all the way about "earning money", "building brand" and "socialization" and stuffs, which I don't think a reliable engineer in his right mind would put first. Not to mention the "ending quote". Some of what he wrote might be a bit helpful but the base tone just doesn't sound right for some reason.

After reading that article it did not answer the question of how he made his job redundant.

It did tell me to hyper multi task and be more efficient (wow ground breaking /s).

Am I being obtuse? Was there an answer in there that I missed? I was really curious how he quit his day job...

Same. I was looking for how he was able to survive financially and quit his job. It just seemed like many paragraphs of bragging and rambling (and boasting about his speaking/blogging engagements).

maybe he started writing about that but got sidetracked context switching :)

After 2 years on HN, I finally created an account so I could upvote this comment.

Conferences/talks/pluralsight/consulting. His a big name in ms world, so he could do it pretty easily.

You can check the first link in his post where he explains more of that http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/05/so-dust-has-finally-settled.... as well as the first link in that post http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/04/today-marks-two-important-mi... :)

You might have missed it among all the bad advice about multitasking and working stupid hours, but he did give one piece of good advice in all that. His job was to do with systems administration/operations, and what he did was to write down everything he knew or had to learn about how to do his job, in the form of public blog posts, which he refined based on public feedback until they actually worked and were understandable. Then on the way out the door, all he had to do was give his successor the keys and the URL to the blog posts.

I also think multi tasking is usually inefficient.

I get a feeling that he supposes his readers will mostly have been loyal followers for years or something like that, which unfortunately is impossible to be the case.

>> I’m happy listening and writing at the same time

Right. Stop multi-tasking in our meeting when you should be paying close attention and participating. I'm tired of having to repeat myself because you're writing an email.

As others have said in this thread, it's entirely possible (and, in a corporate setting, very probable) that he could've been writing an email during a time in the meeting where is attention wasn't needed.

I can tell you that there have been plenty of meetings I've been in where I'm hard at work on something actually important while listening at the same time, because I know I'm not missing anything. I know which meetings are important and require my full attention (a requirements meeting for a new project, for example) compared to something I can just kinda half-listen to (e.g. the weekly team meeting where everyone discusses what they've worked on since the last meeting)

I have two distinct experiences giving a presentation to "executives". One was a CEO who is very widely known, and has a lot of respect. The other just got promoted after the person above him got axed.

When I presented to the first guy, everyone else in the room was half listening, on their laptops "multi-tasking". He was giving me 100% of his focus. When the demo was over he shot me several really insightful questions. No one else had any substantive comments.

The second he spent the whole meeting writing an email on his phone. When the demo was over, he said "great work, keep it up", got up, and excused himself.

One of these guy is a multi-millionaire, the other is unemployed.

Task switching absolutely kills my productivity but I think that may be down to procrastination. I procrastinate more than I would like and once I've gotten myself going I need to keep momentum. If something kills that momentum - like switching tasks, I'll quickly find myself checking my email or looking on Reddit, PH, or HN again.

Procrastination is a form of task-switching, you're just switching into things that are less productive. :) I'm trying to improve on that matter too.

Task switching tends to kill software development productivity, period. My own personal experience mirrors that outlined in the "Human Task Switches Considered Harmful"[0] blog post; interruptions can takes minutes or hours to recover from, leaving me functionally unproductive for this time that I'm re-building my mental context.

The OP even admits to this ("That’s not just for the sake of clean audio, but it’s for my own concentration"), they just seem content to accept the lack of attention for most of their tasks.

Personally, I've found that I am much more productive when I focus on one task to completion (or to a natural stopping point) and then switch tasks. In series, I can complete a set of tasks in a fraction of the time it would take to complete them in parallel. Also, my colleagues on phone calls tend to appreciate my attention to what they are saying.

[0] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html

It's a fallacy to assume if you're not able to task-switch efficiently, there's something wrong with you and nothing to do with the nature of your work.

As an example, Feynman would avoid distractions as much as he could, would make excuses to stay away from administrative duties at Caltech to dedicate solid chunks of time to his research work.

And when you're thinking in abstractions while programming, interruptions and task-switching is the last thing you could afford in order to stay productive.

    85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in "human
    engineering," your personality and ability to communicate,
    negotiate, and lead. Shockingly, only 15 percent is due to
    technical knowledge.
    
    -- Carnegie Institute of Technology

Uh oh...

I don't know this guy; I've never heard of him until now, but based on what's I've seen, the theme seems to be "how awesome I am." Something about this rubbed me the wrong way, like a lesser version of Tim Feriss.

We get it; you're really busy. Multitasking is less efficient: http://simple.icouch.me/the-waiting-room/multitasking-psycho...

Yeah, those are the types of people who are like "You too can be rich just like me, buy my ten step book to learn how!"

The post only implicitly answered how the job was made redundant. I'm assuming he lives off what used to be sideincome (consulting, training courses, blogging etc.) now?

The way he works sounds pretty unhealthy (or at least it would be for me) and is often the exact opposite to what I strive for. I don't write mails while waiting I let my mind wander around and try to "do nothing". I have batches for handling email and don't check outside those times (surprisingly the world doesn't stop if you don't answer email for most mails). If I'm in a meeting, I'm in the meeting. If the meetings seem irrelevant the right course of action is trying to get rid of the meetings not hanging around but writing mail (imo)

Basically feels like he needs to "actively do stuff all the time". I'm quite the opposite and try to actively do nothing (my brain will work really well during those times but it's not looking active). And when I'm doing something I try to optimize doing exactly that and not squeezing in other stuff.

I would lose my mind if I was like this all the time. Sometimes it feels great to be very busy as you get a nice flow and momentum going that leads to more productivity. But I need downtime to retreat into my head. I don't answer phones or emails on weekends. Guess I'm destined to be poor.

Most research on multi-tasking shows that the difference between self described multi-taskers and others is not the ability to multi-task but the awareness of cognitive deficits induced by multi tasking.

My take away from the article is "having a supporting wife, multi-purposing, and working very hard helps one achieve success despite constant context switching".

So this guy works a ton of hours, after work hours. He works from home it appears. He is constantly double dipping his time multiple ways. How does this actually effect his family life?

Some of this write up makes him come off incredibly selfish with his time.

"How does this actually effect his family life?" It's probably where the wife part of his article comes in.

I can empathize with others in this thread saying that his lifestyle is unhealthy (which is probably based on the anti-workaholic ideals a lot of us hold). However, he is just describing what worked for him to get to where he is and he seems to have accomplished a lot. Not only that, he describes how he is keeping himself healthy.

One reason for his success is that he multitasks well, whereas humans typically do not. This enables him to work the way he did/does.

The top post at the moment states that he will cause the "detriment of his quality of life." Actually, it seems he has improved his quality of life significantly (he left his corporate job, has more time to spend with his family, etc.). The top post OP also mentions not finishing the article so he may have missed all that.

Someone else stated that he is just boasting about "how awesome" he is. I did not get this vibe, but from my perspective, he is someone who has the confidence to speak about his subject. Which is completely fine. You should have a level of confidence when it comes to your craft and there's nothing wrong with that.

As stated in this article, this might not work for everyone. This is true, people work differently. Some people, oddly enough, don't need breaks. I do. And so on..

> One reason for his success is that he multitasks well, whereas humans typically do not. This enables him to work the way he did/does.

But this is self-reported and multitaskers are known to significantly overrate their own performance.

Yes, it is self-reported but the evidence is there to back it up.

Is it really? Maybe he would be producing much better work if he were to focus. We don't really have the information to judge.

I'm terrible with task switching also and have had to do some reduction in my side stuff to keep my sanity. I have code projects that I want to build, but I can't focus on those while focusing on the code for my full time job that is by far primary.

I had a programming business with a lot of legacy contracts when I shut it down to go work full time, so I sold off the business to another guy just because it was killing my focus.

Now I blog and present about a lot of tech related topics where in almost every situation it's something that overlaps with my full time job. That way, just as he's describing, I'm more thoroughly researching and articulating things that will pay dividends at work as well. The overlap makes it like getting paid (sometimes) for side research that I would have done anyway and it keeps me sane.

Also makes it easier for my wife to understand me spending time outside of work reading about this stuff. :-)

So, basically the guy is a CPU.

He claims that he is using a Lenovo W540 "for punching out emails laying on the couch". My colleagues and I are forced by our employer to use the exact same model and everybody hates it.

Lenovo omitted designated buttons and as a result the navigation is a mess: One clicks, if one wants to scroll and vice versa. Maybe Troy is using a mouse when he works from the couch?

I find it interesting that writing this post he is using his own advice

Because this will help him In his task of helping his spouse to do the same

This seems like the opposite of the Four-Hour Work Week (which I also don't buy, because while most office jobs can be compressed into 4 hours/week, most worthwhile work can't) in the sense of the emphasis on multitasking and working hard early in order to be able to relax later.

I do think that there's value in it. If you genuinely enjoy what you do, you work in a low-stress environment, and you're not a subordinate, you can work 60-70 hours per week continuously without ill effects. If you have a regular office job in an open-plan environment, and you're a subordinate, then a 60-hour week will murder you over time. If you call the shots over your own work (there's always a boss, so the distinction of "not a subordinate" is more about degree and the people around you than formal reporting structure) then you can work harder and much more efficiently than typical disengaged office workers and it won't hurt you.

An important concept, that I've cribbed from Havel, is Living in Truth. At some point, I realized (to my annoyance) how much of an advantage the rich kids had in the career game. (Growing up in Central PA, I thought I was a "rich kid". Then I worked in finance in NYC.) They worked as hard as anyone else-- I'll never say that they didn't-- but it was received better and led to rapid promotion. If you're from a middle-class background and bust your ass, your bosses assume that it's because you want money and to be like them, and that doesn't really endear you to them. If you're already from a rich family, then people assume that you have a genuine work ethic when you put in the 40-55 hours that is taken for granted from everyone else.

So, I started thinking about it, and I realized that, most of the time, it's not obvious what peoples' actual backgrounds were. No one consciously favors the rich kids; it's the confidence and status that they carry with them that gives them the advantages. They expect to be treated with respect, even by powerful people, and most of the time, that's what happens. Paradoxically, the people who didn't fear their bosses or take the corporate nonsense too seriously were the ones who got ahead. That's when I realized that it's possible to act as if you were economically free-- to work only on the stuff that matters, either because it advances your career or because it helps someone or some cause that you care about-- and, most of the time, to get away with it. If you're ethical and hard-working but, at the same time, don't allow anyone to lower your status, ever, you definitely invite short-term rockiness (see: my Google experience) but people respect you more in the long term. Obviously, you have to be tactful and sometimes a bit political. When something not worth doing gets dropped on your plate, you need to find a way to get higher-priority and valuable stuff on it...

I bring this up because it's impossible to be efficient if you don't live in truth. You'll have recurring commitments and drudge work delegated onto you, and eventually the only escape will be to change jobs and, since you're going to be tired and bitter by that point, you'll get a mediocre raise (the 3-5% per year that you didn't get where you were) but no real promotion. I don't know the OP, but I'm guessing that he mastered the art of Living in Truth. For example, in an hour-long status meeting, he probably had a rehearsed and compact 2-minute update that didn't invite follow-on questions (status meetings are like Scrabble; good players aren't trying to drop 100-point words so much as they're trying not to open up the board) and 58 minutes to work on stuff that actually mattered. And while there's a lot that's in productivity literature that isn't replicable for most people, I think that the general concept of Living in Truth has a great deal of value.

If you're from a middle-class background and bust your ass, your bosses assume that it's because you want money and to be like them, and that doesn't really endear you to them. If you're already from a rich family, then people assume that you have a genuine work ethic when you put in the 40-55 hours that is taken for granted from everyone else.

Repeated for emphasis.

Current execs are a little puzzled that gasp I want to get paid what I'm worth, and am puzzled when my enthusiasm matches my salary and equity.

Fuck you, pay me.

> No one consciously favors the rich kids; it's the confidence and status that they carry with them that gives them the advantages. They expect to be treated with respect, even by powerful people, and most of the time, that's what happens.

Yes this is a very important and subtle dynamic that this group uses to great success.

Though I think it's worth mentioning that it's just one of a few archetypes. There's also the street-smart working class hustler type who is just absolutely relentless and tireless as a self-promoter and takes no opportunity for granted, always puts in the extra effort. That approach can be effective too.

What's common to both is that they are not passive, and that neither believes in a myth of "fairness" that promises them rewards simply for their work ethic. What rich and poor have in common -- and the middle class often misses -- is a keen understanding that the system isn't fair and isn't designed to be fair.

You nailed it.

That's not really true. I'd say any basically intelligent guy will have immediately figured out the injustice of the world when he matures, no matter his class background. And what action to take after this realization also differs a lot. Maybe he'll just think "fuck it I don't care climbing the ladder with you lot" and sets his sights on some other pursuits. And also a lot of rich kids are just spoiled and do nothing well. It all depends.

Disagree. Favoring rich kids will obviously get you a lot of favor in return. Class delimiters abound and it's really not much to do with how you expect to be treated by others. It extends to the clothes you wear, the way you talk, your interests etc. It's just normally obvious.

I think any wise and conscious lad will know that there's just no inherent difference from man to man. He'll expect to be treated with respect by everybody while he also treats the other side equally. An example that immediately sprung to my mind is Jobs. He obviously didn't take any nonsense when he found his Atari job, though he didn't have a rich background at all. This is how any sensible and determined person should behave, nothing much to do with family background IMO. And I'd say even you're middle class you're still largely "economically free" in our modern society. It's all about luxury from this point on, economically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com