Ask HN: What's the biggest time waste on your workday?
I've been thinking about things I have to do regularly, but are not worth the time.
Examples for me:
- manual tasks I didn't have time do automate yet (technical debt) - writing boilerplate code - unproductive meetings to discuss things that would be 1000x more efficient over text/a document
These are things I do regularly and they don't make me learn or improve at the rate of more interesting stuff.
Are these the same for you?
What are you doing that you wish you weren't?
85 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadOne thing I recently realized is the secondary effect of gmail being open in a browser tab.
I like to be aware of my email in real-time so I can respond to pressing situations, therefore I keep gmail open in my browser's first tab. However, the secondary effect is that my browser is always open, and the distractions of the internet are just one new tab away.
I recently started using TwoBird as my gmail client, which now keeps my email and my web browser separated. Yes, everyone who's been using a stand-alone email application has known this for years, but it's new to me.
I'm happy that I can now live/work/breathe without having a web browser open at all times.
At my job, any high priority alerts are communicated via phone calls or Slack messages. Emails secondary, but it is annoying if someone sends you a last min event invite that you miss :-/
I keep Apple Calendar open and hope any invites appear on it.
It happened once or twice not to, as it has a couple minutes delay from receiving the invite in the e-mail.
I find the friction to rapid swiching that this division of communication channels and tools introduces quite helpful for focus.
So I have my own todo.txt with a plain old bullet list that I keep open in tmux+vim, and at the end of the day if there's some time left I update all the other tools.
Besides unproductive, these apps are extremely slow.
I started using Superhuman a few weeks ago, it's nice, but would need the same thing from Jira, Github, and other to get near something good.
Something like this:
Urgent Task to do
X Task done
==May 11-May16==
X Task done
X Task done
> So I have my own todo.txt ... if there's some time left I update all the other tools.
Do you see the irony?
Not saying this is wrong, just that you are a perfect example of how incentives perpetuate this problem.
The worst is where some middle manager or project manager or business analyst calls in 20 different people into an hour long meeting. 5 people might actually get some meaningful benefit from the meeting, let alone actually utter a single word.
You try to skip it, but then said organizer pings you asking why you aren't present.
The same meeting is scheduled daily, because reasons. Never mind that there has been no meaningful progress or update to the project during the last 24 hours.
There isn’t a simple answer to your predicament, but this can be managed. Take a look at my other comments in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23205684
It is generally a useful practice to ask about the expected artifact to be produced from any activity - it anchors the expectations and provides focus (narrows the scope).
If you’re really brave, or really desperate, have a chat with the organizer the day before and ask them which problems are looming over them and see how you can contribute to a solution - the meeting may dissipate by itself and you will gain an ally.
Or there was the company where we had four (!) hours of meetings per day: two in the morning and two in the afternoon. All we ever discussed is what we didn't get done during lunch time.
After I left all that, my one question when interviewing with a hiring manager became: "How often do you have meetings?" A lot of people got very flustered with that one.
It always amazes me that we have this whole reporting structure and tracking tools like Jira but somehow the critical information doesn’t really flow up. In theory they all would look at Jira and some status reports and then be up to date without wasting the time of the people who are doing the work.
Your situation is highly dysfunctional. If you are not quitting just yet consider taking charge - collate the status of your project (you and people you coordinate with) into a tidy status update that your manager can take to their manager. It’s a difficult skill, but you will earn undying gratitude. And god help you if you can add a meaningful chart (as opposed to a bullshit chart) to your stays update - you will instantly become the savior of the team.
Fun story. I have once received a promotion based on a single ducking spreadsheet of this sort. I was so mad about all my other “hardcore“ engineering work not meaning diddly squat by comparison, I asked if they can take the promotion back (they refused). I came to terms with it eventually - I started walking up the management chain asking what happened and eventually I was told that hiring someone to write solid code is a question of throwing money into the hiring pipeline, but hiring someone to provide meaningful insight or direction is mostly a matter of luck.
This deserves to be added to the Joel Test!
If either you or they do not both have 1) The understanding of why this is necessary 2) How to go about it successfully
Congratulations! You are now the lucky owner of two problems. You (or perhaps your manager) have your work cut out for you. For what it's worth, I was having a conversation with another engineer on my team this week, and we both thought a lot about how actually tricky and yet high value this labor is. The truth is, probably nobody likes that the meeting has become so large and unwieldy. Everybody can probably sense that something is not working properly.
But nobody knows what to do. Or maybe, they're scared to take initiative. Will you be the person that steps in and tries to turn things around? I promise, it's usually easier than it looks!
Meetings with no real agenda. The conversation will ramble, nobody is taking control, nothing gets decided and the meeting takes 4 times as long as it should.
And then we repeat it again next week, because nothing got decided.
They worked for a university's budget controller, so large meetings were regular, but, fortunately infrequent!
No one can agree on the definitions for the following regarding features and bugs: in production, ready for development, ready for QA, blocked, cannot reproduce. Jira simply exacerbates this problem by giving the appearance of the opposite.
At the end of the day, progress is only made when engineers turn ideas into applications, so the buck ultimately lands with us each and every time. However, we are not experts on product development so any criticism we may have regarding the process is not only misinformed but detrimental to our team spirit ...
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I work on a variety of development projects with sometimes entirely different technology stacks, goals, people, etc. Sometimes there's overlap, often there's not. It can be daunting jumping between entirely different sets of technical challenges, goals, and conceptual framing of problems.
The "wasted" part of my day is simply being extremely inefficient and dicking around simply because it's expected to be in the office or available online. I would get much more done if my job was to hit milestones and goals (perhaps with some designated "office hours"). And then I have the rest of my time to do what I need to. Fortunately the "dicking around" involves taking online courses, personal "stretch" projects, etc.. but still.
I don't want to sound bitter. I have flexibility when I start/end my work day. On any given day I can peace out at 1pm or show up at noon (so long as I'm not blowing anyone off). But that's on _any given day_, not _every day_. And so the repeated, iterated game that's going on between me and employer reaches a nash equilibrium where I do just "enough" that I'm advancing my career in the organization and little enough that I have enough lax time in the day to do whatever I can online for my personal life (coursework, shopping, personal tech projects/experiments, enrichment reading, etc).
It’s still wasting time, but it’s less mentally exhausting than trying to switch to something more “productive” for a few minutes.
Leads to: - Frustrated developers who thought they were done and were doing good - Frustrated QA engineers who can't certify the feature as written - Frustrated product owners who were assured the feature was "done" - Frustrated management who is told it will take longer than promised
It may be helpful to point out bad requirements whenever they're provided. Keep a copy of the bad requirements and why they're bad, so when they repeat their mistakes, you don't have to repeat yourself explaining why the requirement is bad.
I can relate. And often management behaves like bystanders instead of fixing these problems.
It's the reason why I work very late nights now.
... context switching is also a real pain. Slack is a killer for that because I obsessed over seeing the little dot on the icon. "What if it's really important? What if someone needs support to get unblocked now?", so I always check incoming messages. This one is probably mostly on me having some mild OCD or something.
For example, in practice this would look like: If your team has a project manager, then explain the situation to them... tell them that you won't take meetings after 12pm unless it is for some kind of an major emergency. Similarly, tell your teammates that you won't go to meetings after 12pm unless they are stuck on a problem. Ask everyone to schedule time on your calendar if they want to talk to you - and it'll have to be before 12pm.
If you don't control your own time, then other people will.
1) Turn-on the computer, log in Windows, enter the overcomplicated encryption software password, launch IE6 to go to a webpage which will launch the VPN native app. (at least 5 minutes)
2) Opening Microsoft Project takes ages since the Project Server is in Europe. Then there's some kind of macro that has to run which in the end fails because I'm not on-site. You pick a plan to open it, it takes another 30 seconds, another macro/prompt/check fails. The whole process takes a good 3-5 minutes until you can actually work on it and I have 18+ plans to manage.
3) You can run reports of said Project plans and export them in Excel format but the formatting is all junky. You have unused columns, titles, hidden columns. I had to create a macro to import the exported file, import all the data, and creating a pivot table automatically instead of doing it manually X times a day.
4) We're still using Office 2010 while working a lot with Excel. The limitations of the 10 years old software is a real pain. Do you want to manage two Excel files in two separate instances of Excel? You'll have to open a separate instance first then open a file. You also can't use all the new formulas or enjoy the improvement made on the ones that already exist. I get that Office licences are not cheap and the "Fix What’s Broken, Don’t Break What’s Working " motto but the time wasted on all this by everyone working for the group worldwide must be way higher.
5) Enterprise network is slow on-site, it's even worse on a VPN. Opening up a simple Excel/PPT file takes a good five minutes.
6) We're still using Lync, it's easier to send a screenshot/file via email than using this nightmare of a software.
7) IE6 is the "default" browser for everything
8) With the COVID-19 situation, we're not allowed anymore to use conference tools while being connected on the VPN. You have to save all the files you need for the call locally, log off the VPN, join the call, and then re-upload everything on the network.
And in every project there is a ton of discussion about what regulatory process to use. Instead of figuring this out beforehand usually it holds up the whole development process for a long time. It can be really frustrating.
I often times find that making functionality takes me barely 30% there. Making even a short stand up status update that drives the point to the whole team is very valuable - it energizes everyone seeing that good progress is being made, it makes sales (they also do customer development) know to push new things or inquire about adjacent needs, informs support of what’s possible and worth asking about.
Then there are more detailed feature lay downs, for the same reason. Then there is the interface itself. And fumbling through often imprecise and sometimes angry customer requests. It’s all non-feature work, and it takes huge amount of time, but it seems very valuable in the end, however non-fun it seems.
So I’m wondering if I’m a regulated work like yours there is similar benefit to non-feature work?
I can't wait until I can afford better, reliable help.
It's not that much extra work to grab a few screenshots and write a paragraph or two. Then it also becomes permanent, and not ephemeral. Bonus points if you can take the extra minute to mark up a screenshot or draw a sketch.
I'm trying to evangelize coworkers as much as I can, sharing content on the topic, asking for things to be written, but it's something slow to change.
Writing well is a very difficult skill to acquire.
Tons of time wasted reverse engineering what the developers did, because they don’t document decisions and protocols between modules in any precise way.
Project planning is big show for management and ends up very disconnected from reality. So many status updates. Sigh.