I feel like it's a losing game to try to force yourself into a "productivity" mindset, as if you're some type of black box that needs to be optimized for certain behavior.
Structure is good and habit is key, but don't imprison yourself in it, in my opinion.
I resonate with this a lot and the part about not knowing if that lack of structure is what makes you unproductive is a question I’ve asked myself a lot lately. It’s hard to know the answer and I always get different feedback from different people when asked which almost always just boils down to what they do.
I've been reading through "I Didn't Do the Thing Today", which is in a lot of ways a rejection of the prevailing productivity sentiment. It's about self-care and treating yourself with grace, even when things don't come out as the most profitable or productive, at least so far.
And in that spirit I'll say to the author of this post: It's okay to nap in the middle of the day, or not eat breakfast, or work first thing in the morning and not do a Morning Page or Meditation or whatever aspirational-you has decided is worthwhile. We are all doing our best in the circumstances we have.
In my life I've found that better is really a game of averages. Some days are going to be great. Some weeks have a severe downward trend with no real reason that I can tell. Well. Maybe it's due to bad sleep quality or lack of exercise. All I can do is try to be the person that makes the good decisions and accept the person that I am, and that keeps me pretty happy.
I think it would be more beneficial if you examine your activities and behaviors at work hours. The wouldn't be much difference in your work output if you eat launch in the morning or spend a little time with your family. If there's a «problem» somewhere it's probably during work hours.
Throughout my career I've spent a lot of time stressing out about how productive I'm being. Trying many different methods. Finally I decided that if I feel stressed out about my productivity I would write down everything I've done during the day. Usually turns out I've done a lot of stuff that I it's actual work that I just discount as not work. Some days get taken over by mandatory work that doesn't feel productive but is.
In general, I find myself to be someone who operates best within certain confines - for example, the time blocking from Cal Newport has been highly effective for myself.
That said, I caution against too much routine. I used to get really into it but remember many days where I felt like the day was ruined because I couldn’t get a workout in, or someone scheduled an 8am meeting, or any other myriad of things I grew dependent on. Too much structure is basically a fragile crutch, in my experience.
My personal morning “routine” is a quick cup of coffee and a half mile walk, and then straight to work. I time block the day first thing based on whatever my weekly goals for the week were, and try to keep about two hours of buffer time to allow some shifting throughout the day.
I’ve done this about a year now and it’s helped me keep the benefits of structure, without the guilt of when something “optimal” doesn’t happen.
I’ve noticed in my life I really limit my “must-dos”. In fact I may only have one. I have to run the four or so days a week I plan to. Too much structure I think doesn’t leave enough slack time and then too often does the inverse of what it disposed to do which is help you feel grounded. Everything else is sort of “agile structure”. Planning athe beginning of the day or maybe the week, but having a strict routine is almost like trying to plan years ahead of time, you just don’t know enough about what life will bring.
With a simple structure it really does feel like it brings order to chaos, if I have a really bad week and maybe don’t even get my runs in, it’s relatively easy to get my runs in the next week. Six different morning activities all at once? That’s just asking for failure.
Is there a "lite" version of Cal Newport's time-blocking techniques? I'm super interested every time I hear him explain it but I get overwhelmed and never end up implementing anything.
I wouldn’t really say it’s a big implementation. I just use a piece of paper and denote a line to each 30 mins of the work day.
So it might look like:
10: meeting
1030: bug fixing
11: bug fixing
1130: bug fixing
12: run
1230: run
1: lunch
130: feature work
2: feature work
230: meeting
3: feature work
330: feature work
4: plan next week
The above was my entry from last Friday, where I had a late start to the day.
At the start of my day I had kept the 12-2:30 block fairly empty (I knew some form of working out + lunch would show up, and I had wanted to do some feature work that day, but I didn’t know if any other meetings would pop up. They didn’t, so it worked great!)
I basically fill in meetings first, then work around them to put in the work I want to focus on for the day. The main caveat is I don’t focus on anything else for this blocks, and unless I’m in incredible flow and the task is definitely important, I always make sure I stop at the end of the block time (the whole “we will fill up whatever time we allot ourselves” theory).
Maybe try defining your structure in terms of the effort you put in and what you accomplish (with respect to that effort), rather than a schedule or a sequence of items on a checklist. Your coffee or teeth-brushing rituals are minor, accidental details.
Structure is good, but it’s really hard to self impose. Before you had to do one thing: work within a structure. Having to self impose means you have to do two things: create structure and then do the work within it.
It doesn’t help that advancing as a technical worker often removes that structure, or forces you to create it. I am given freedom as a perk of seniority, but for me it’s been a burden.
I have moved between phases of high productivity and high procrastination. IMO a system and routine are great if you have a goal you genuinely want to achieve. The more time it takes to achieve the goal (I’m thinking 5+ years) the more helpful a system/routine is. The problem occurs when you find yourself working hard to achieve a goal you have no genuine interest in - and then no system is going to help you.
I know this feeling extremely well. Routines are routinely broken by me, but I found that I just needed someone else there with me to do the thing. Even if it is just their presence.
When I was a graduate student, I often participated in summer schools and conferences where there was a strict schedule that included two or three meals a day. I absolutely loved it. I would like to live all of my life so that someone else would schedule my life for me, cook meals at right times, etc. And of course part of it was that most of the other people participating the event also did the same schedule as you so you always had friends to have lunch, dinner and coffee breaks with.
If someone has any suggestions on how to organize my life like a one big summer school, I'm listening. I guess joining a monastery would do it, but I don't really care for the other aspects of monastic life.
Spot on. I don't want independence and I have no use for power. I just want to focus on having fun and spending time with good people without managing every single minor aspect of my life and having responsibility over stuff I don't care about. I could also to something useful, i.e. work, if absolutely needed. Is this too much to ask? I think that in the past loads of people lived like this; powerful people had lots servants to take care of the mundane stuff while they themselves concentrated on the big picture, while the servants lived almost like children in their master's households, focusing on the responsibilities they were paid for.
I already have a therapist, but so far he hasn't been able to turn me into a proper adult. Oh, and by the way, I'm close to 40 now so I don't think anymore that this is just a passing phase.
> I don't want independence and I have no use for power.
I used to think like this, it's easy to dismiss, "I want power" sounds like something a maniac would say. I don't believe you truly don't want independence, maybe less, but that still sounds like a real issue.
> I think that in the past loads of people lived like this;
> servants lived almost like children
That's absolutely not true, I'm no history buff, but servants had all sorts of pressure and responsibility put on them. Their tasks may have been menial in skill, but they were damn well complicated. Imagine bringing the wrong drink or spilling a glass of wine in front of the king, off with your head. They seem like children to us because life is so much more complex, we didn't die at 30.
> already have a therapist, but so far he hasn't been able to turn me into a man
Maybe I've mistaken your casual wording, but it's not their job to turn you into anything, they're supposed to at the very least analyze. Depending on their practice, they might give concrete guidance.
If you want to be some wealthy old mans pet, that's fine by me, but I don't believe you don't want independence, no one doesn't. I think you're just overwhelmed by the mundane obstacles we all need to pass to earn it.
For example:
>I just want to focus on having fun and spending time with good people without managing every single minor aspect of my life and having responsibility over stuff I don't care about
That's the bare minimum of reality, we've all got those things, even Kim Kardashian.
Maybe your job is too complicated and demanding? There's a place you can reduce your responsibility, but it doesn't have to be so black and white.
We used to do this with flatmates with dinner duty. One of us would cook dinner every night for the whole flat based on a rota. We were 5 people and all pretty close so that definitely helped!
You could live on a cruise ship. They have a daily schedule for fun activities and meal times. For many people, it is more fun than joining a monastery.
Flirted with a similar idea. The root of it was to externalize the mundane aspects of day-to-day life. The mundane: food, laundry, cleaning.
Food had two broad strategies: (1) Repeated Deliveries of staples with one afternoon a week dedicated to cooking, portioning and freezing. Meals are labeled and microwaved as needed. (2) Ad-hoc Food Delivery, think Uber Eats or Doordash for most meals. I found 2 to be excessively expensive. 1 requires dish-washing but I can mitigate it with using disposables whenever possible.
1 also requires setting up repeated automated deliveries. I haven't quite figured out how to do this yet, but I'm sure there's an Instacart-type service for it.
Laundry: there are door-to-door laundry services, and/or using an in-house cleaning service mentioned below
Cleaning: there are maid services. If well-planned you could have them arrive to wash the dishes created in the above step, as well as retrieve/put-away laundry. A robot-vaccuum helps between cleanings.
As for activities with people with similar schedules, that's the difficult part. Adults are chaotic.
There's signing up for the military, which would also neatly handle your other items.
So far I've found that a co-worker-based activity group is reliable. You all get off about the same time, the people are relatively stable from week-to-week, and you all have similar work lives.
Second best was a regularly scheduled meetup group.
I wish I had the option to have... any kind of flexibility in my life.
I'm forced to go to work at a certain time, which means I have to get up at a certain time.
I also eat at work, both lunch and dinner, so if I skip those then there's almost no time for me to eat.
I have to do chores when I get home for about an hour or two, then I have about 2.5 hours of "free time" before I have to go to bed and repeat the process.
Being able to have any kind of flexibility is an extreme luxury I think people take for granted.
This is one of the ways income inequality and systemic discriminations can drastically alter the life of people or groups of people. No time to think, to time to breathe.. no time to dream. The mind can die (or at least enter a sort of coma) long before the body in these circumstances. And it's incredibly hard to help yourself while in there, which is why the empathy and kindness of others matters so much too.
Hmm. I am taking this comment at face value and not as a sarcastic response.
Even if you prioritize flexibility, if your position is at the bottom of the totem pole, you will find it exceedingly difficult to get even minute changes in it. Those employees are increasingly monitored to the point I would not have accepted as a kid, but it seems a more and more common practice today.
I guess what I am saying is that what you do matters, but not nearly as much as you give it credit for. Some of it is just dumb luck.
I mean you can say the luck argument about literally everything. It's not a reason to dismiss making choices.
Not having kids/pets is a huge choice to make to have flexibility. If you don't have dependents you don't need to spend time looking after them. You also don't need to make as much money so you can take a lower paying job. By being in the position to take a lower paying job, you can negotiate more flexibility etc.
Obviously that doesn't apply if you were forced to drop out of highschool to get a minimum wage job to take care of your sick parents/siblings.
Some people are less lucky than others, but I'd be willing to bet that a large percentage of HN readers that finds themselves with no flexibility have made many choices to end up where they are.
On average, as related to HN, you are probably not wrong. I still hate averages, because they tend to hide the reality ( and individual plight ) based on its extremes. I have no real data to back it up other than anecdata.
I count myself as ridiculously lucky that I am where I am doing what I do. Here I am mid-day, discussing non-work related items in my down time. I have the flexibility ( and a pet and a kid although that is basically like having two kids ), but I am unable to dismiss the idea that it is not just me factor that got me to that point. Looking back, there were tons of things that could have gone wrong that would put me on the wrong track ( and as is often with life, some things did ).
Otoh, I am not that much smarter than my sister and yet we are in very different places despite having the same upbringing, access and so on. You could argue that she is not on HN, but I would say that is a self-selecting process..
Like the sibling comment, I feel like we are talking about different things. You're talking about right and wrong paths and careers.
I'm talking about choices like kids, prioritizing salary over flexibility etc. I am not arguing that people in tech are there purely based on merit and no luck.
I am saying people that are already in tech make choices that give them more or less flexibility. Chasing a job at FAANG to get a massive salary and then using the salary to get an expensive car and massive mortgage is the wrong choice if you want flexibility. But it probably is the right choice if you want an expensive car and expensive house.
This sort of approach sounds useful on paper. People should indeed make better choices. In reality, however, this solves nothing because we are looking at societal problems as varied and complex as climate change, obesity, rising house prices, degree inflation, regular inflation, global uncertainty, constant digital surveillance, and so on. Even a person who has made "good" choices such as becoming a SWE is still at the mercy of macroeconomic changes. Maybe next year's AI will nuke front end work just like it's nuking other white collar job markets. Maybe the market will by nuked by actual nukes. The modern day careers depend on so many conditions that are outside of our control and can't be fixed on an individual level, even if it's still a good idea to make good choices.
I feel like we are talking about different things.
I'm talking about not having kids/pets (which is applicable to everyone) as a choice to make for more flexibility where as you are talking about careers.
Also you're talking about good VS bad choices. I don't think having kids is necessarily bad or good, it just depends on what you want or priorities are.
Kids/pets are good example as it would make my argument a bit clearer. Today we have a sizeable portion of the population that has no dependents, made good choices (had an education, worked hard etc.) AND is still stuck financially and professionally to the point where they can't really have that much flexibility or make many more tradeoffs. It's a lot worse in countries like China or Korea but it's still pretty bad in the West. There is a reason why fertility rates are plummeting, and it goes beyond the classic demographic model of higher development for lower fertility.
In other words, though it's true that outcomes are linked to choices, just the ability to make real choices (flexibility vs. salary or family, to name one) is predicated on a large dose of prior luck.
Being successful isn’t about knowing CS. It’s about navigating relationships. Tech skills are now table stakes. Do yourself a favor and diversify your skills.
I was dealt a shitty hand and rose above it. Emotional and sexual abuse. I blame no one.
I spent a decade reading and studying psychology to rise above it. I’ve shared too much. Do what you will with my advice. The common denominator is my perseverance to survive.
I made a choice to follow something better instead of losing hope. It will get better through constant incremental improvements.
If you have no hope find other people with the same problem. Talk to them. Hire a life coach. Literally do anything other than give up or feel outrage and cast hate.
> If you don’t get what you want: it’s due to your decisions.
Asking genuinely, because I struggle with determining how much of what I don't get can be attributed to me:
What if I wanted to be healthy, but have $<any number of chronic, debilitating conditions with no clear identified cause, mechanism, and or cure>? I recently listened to a podcast where two people try to follow life-advice books and determine if it actually helped them, and one of the hosts had an extremely distressing time trying to attribute why her abnormal mammogram result wasn't being followed up on by her doctor, despite daily calls for two weeks, was something that was due to her decisions.
[How does this apply to being abused as a child? Being a domestic abuse survivor? Being the victim of a hate crime, displaced due to war or other disaster?]
Yes, I'm asking precisely how to think about external circumstances. If your thinking is that outcomes are because of your decisions, it means if a doctor blows you off after a cancer screening returns abnormal results you must've decided something to result in this. The podcaster decided the only logic there is that if you didn't want the doctor to blow you off you shouldn't have decided to proactively screen yourself for cancer.
Personally, I struggled with thinking about events in my life and my decisions leading to those events precisely because of seeing other people try to take that logic and apply it in good faith, resulting in horrible conclusions. That someone could've prevented their fibromyalgia and therefore they are at fault for getting sick. That someone's child abuse was something they need to take responsibility about.
Don't worry too much about trying to make sense of that advice. It's a bad take that only comes from people who've had the privilege of all of the problems they've known in life being self-inflicted[1]. (That's for the original commenter. The person you're responding to now is engaging in a major moving of the goalposts.)
Here's what I've been prone to tell people instead: you know how to always get what you want—always? It's by wanting what you're going to get.
Some people misunderstand this. It's not about settling or doing nothing. It's rather the opposite. It's to get people to go through the process of interrogating themselves about their wants in a way that engages the logical part of their brain—which is ultimately most likely to be the thing that leads to working out a path to whatever that want is, so long as it's reasonable to think that they can actually get it. In the extreme case you present: "Is it unreasonable for me to want to the abuse to stop?" The answer, of course, is an emphatic no. There's no need to stop wanting that.
In figuring out whether it is reasonable or unreasonable, the question becomes: what is required in order to actually get it?
I'm afraid I don't understand how any of what you said has anything to do with attributing events in my life to my decisions. It just sounds like strategies to make decisions for future things, which isn't relevant. Could you explain?
Not the OP but I typically hear such advice in the form of thinking of oneself and one's circumstances as being entirely one's responsibility.
>What if I wanted to be healthy, but have $<any number of chronic, debilitating conditions with no clear identified cause, mechanism, and or cure>?
Then the person in the hypothetical would need to decide to define healthy realistically for their condition. While it may be something you want, wanting something impossible is a non-starter.
>one of the hosts had an extremely distressing time trying to attribute why her abnormal mammogram result wasn't being followed up on by her doctor, despite daily calls for two weeks
Great example, in this case the host can decide to call another doctor's office to get a second opinion. Or following up in person. Or escalating to that doctor's leadership/board.
The host actually did follow up in person and tried to escalate. There wasn't another doctor's office to send them to, because the tests were explicitly called by a specific doctor and there would need to be authorization to transfer the tests... authorization from the doctor who wasn't responsive. Like I said, this was extremely distressing to hear about the host needing to apparently decide that this was their fault and the resultant distress the host was experiencing when after two weeks and many attempts from many angles, they were unsuccessful, and according to the advice they had no one to blame but themselves.
Yah, when I visited North Korea I asked them why didn't they just decide not to live there, grow more food or get a better job? I say maybe they should travel a bit in order to broaden their perspective on life. Try meditation or use a pomodoro timer to get focused! Get your head straight and prioritize that flexible lifestyle and the options are endless!
You can quit your job, move somewhere else, and live a different life. Your daily routine is your choice. Technically, you don’t have to do anything at all.
This comment shows such a lack of understanding of how most of the world lives. OP could be working to support aging parents or be a single parent or live in a place where the ability to access social services are dependent on where you were born (as in China). They could also just not make enough money to afford to move and be stuck in a cycle where most of what they make is spent on maintaining life essentials.
Technically they could quit it all and walk off and become homeless, but is that realistic? This idea of endless choice, especially that without any potentially dangerous consequences, it's reserved for a small number of people.
Which country do you live in in which this is the case? Everywhere I've lived there have been jobs that are 9-5 and jobs that are less rigid, ranging all the way to self employment.
Yeah, obviously he meant "forced" as in "within the context of this job, if I want to keep it".
Taking too broad a view of what "forced" means just nullifies the term. Of course nobody could then ever be "forced" to do anything when suicide is an option.
It's hardly a luxury to pick a different job, this is complete and utter bollocks. There are people up and down the income and educational spectrum that do it, of every race, etc.
The narrative that people are forced to work a specific job is false and should not be reinforced.
> The narrative that people are forced to work a specific job is false and should not be reinforced.
Do you not know many people or are you 21? Those are two situations where your take wouldn't be confusing. It's not a narrative that people can't pick different jobs, it's a narrative that people can just get up and go work somewhere else. This can be true in any industry, unless you have a very scarce and in-demand set of skills and qualifications. Even then, your regional circumstances and any number of other things have a bearing on whether you can leverage that.
Sure, if you are single, young, and an extremely proficient software engineer with the paperwork to prove it and no dependents, and everything else in your life is totally arbitrary and can be rebuilt anywhere you are, then ya it's totes easy to just get a new that perfectly fits your lifestyle.
I have worked for years and made great efforts to get to a point in life where I have a say in what time I do my work. Most jobs I have had I did not have a choice. In the United States.
Do you have kids or otherwise responsible for anyone? If not, one or two hours of chores per day is insane. Take a step back and examine if the chores you are doing are actually worth doing.
Obviously if you have kids or are a carer that probably does not apply.
The story you're referring to was about a CEO who was looking for some relief from burnout and depression. He wanted the structure as an antidote to a specific feeling, not as a general desire.
All else being equal, I think the vast majority of people would prefer self-direction and autonomy to rigorous top-down order. People's choice and actions throughout the ages seem to reinforce this. I wouldn't mistake someone's personal choice to temporarily self-impose some structure as an example of "grass is always greener".
It is fascinating, how some people crave structure and yet cannot achieve it - and some are enslaved in structure and dream of freedom. Some are probably very happy within a given structure. Others prefer to create their own structures to live in. Myself, I suffocate in any structure, especially calendars and clocks.
> then I have about 2.5 hours of "free time" before I have to go to bed and repeat the process.
When I was younger, I switched to a 4x10s schedule for this exact reason. The limited time left after commute (long at the time) and other obligations at the end of the day felt wasted.
Somewhat surprisingly, I felt better when I decided that my 4 work days per week would be solid work/chores/obligations from morning to night. It no longer felt like I was missing out on anything because I wasn't trying to squeeze some hobby or social activity into a tired 2-3 hour slot at the end of the day. My free time and my work time were as separate as they could possibly get.
Even intra-day flexibility doesn't really solve the problem of having too much to do. My solution was to squish all of the to-dos together and leave my off days 100% flexible.
Even now, I try to finish errands and chores on weekdays for this same reason: Keeping weekends open is extremely valuable.
> I have to do chores when I get home for about an hour or two
How is this possible? Are you counting exercise as a chore? I probably do 2 hours of chores in a week and that includes a lot of things related to cooking which you don’t do
Not having kids, I feel like a family clears up the optimization problem of:
* what should I be doing with my time?
* what is important to think about?
As a software dev with a flexible schedule, my life feels arbitrary. I pick up hobbies because I need stuff to do, I try to eat better to take care of myself, I save money and live frugally for a rainy day. But there's no common thread to all these. It's just stuff I picked.
It is important to listen to the body. I tried to have a spartan level of self discipline and that put me in a express route to burn out. And I burned out.
Burn out is not easy to climb out of, so I would rather be less than ideally productive than be disciplined to an extent that ignores my humanity and that damages me severely.
Years ago I had the idea to create an automated "task assigner" to solve this problem. Once loaded with suitable data (perhaps a hard problem), it would just feed you tasks, "Do this now", and you'd do the tasks and feel happy that you had completed its assigned tasks. Based on the theory that the trouble isn't with doing stuff but more deciding what do do and in which order. Too busy to actually write it though.
I have a pretty well structured life because I enjoy it that way. Does it make me more productive than people with a less structured life? Maybe a little bit, but I doubt it makes a big difference. A rigid structure always means fragmentation, waste and unnecessary overhead.
It doesn't seem that there are many software development positions (which is relevant for many users here) in the (assuming US) army or military in general.
The Space Force is hiring devs and data scientists.[1] What they mostly do, after all, is collect huge amounts of data from various sensors and try to make sense of it. With college and engineering training, go for an officer position.[2]
I imagine the signals or intelligence corps will take you in a heart beat providing you don’t have a history of mental illness or some other condition that disallows entry such as autism. They were even contemplating lowering the fitness test requirements for devs because they were that desperate to recruit. At least that’s what I heard over here in the UK about our military. I thought about joining long and hard but ultimately decided it wasn’t for me.
Keep trying. I know it’s a struggle. Lots of stuff will not work or last. But once in a while you may get that one tiny little habit to stick, and every little bit helps.
I heard great things about this book called Atomic Habits, so I bought it. Unfortunately I could never remember to read it, and I'm not sure where it is now.
Ha, I finally ordered that book a few days ago, last minute before I’d set off on holiday (I procrastinated ordering it for about 2 months). It should of arrived the day before I left, but unfortunately it didn’t and now I’m on holiday without it. Was looking forward to reading it, but I guess I’ll have to wait a bit longer.
I spoke to a long-time Microsoft and Facebook eng leader who left his post as a nonprofit software CEO due to burnout and then spent many months languishing and spiralling into depression.
He actually decided to get a job as an Amazon warehouse worker for 6 weeks for exactly the reason OP is struggling with: to get structure.
> In November, I suddenly thought, "I should at least get some sort of job somewhere just to have some regularity to my schedule, to enforce some daily practices". My number one priority was just to have structured work that would force me to get up every day—work that was very different from white collar jobs, in that I did not want to be asked to make a lot of decisions everyday.
> I didn't want the stress of managing people and teams. I didn't want the politics of subjective decisions being debated amongst team members. I wanted literally to be told what to do every day and I wanted that structure to be rigorous. I strongly felt that would help me get out of my depression.
I can't speak for Amazon but I had an order picking job at a Volvo warehouse in college, and despite having to hit a certain number of picked items every day it was oddly relaxing.
Once you got good at it you could zoom through your day on auto pilot. Drive to aisle X, pick up N boxes at rack Y, rinse and repeat.
I have found myself day-dreaming about a manual labor job for many of the same reasons. I am supremely jealous of my friends who work these types of jobs and can "leave it at the door" when they come home. I can't do that as well, even when I try to enforce boundaries. Slack, emails, my home office, etc... make it impossible to shut it all out. I'm considering tearing down my home office and working solely from a coffee shop because of it.
This is one of the biggest benefits to working from the office, at least for me. The mental shift between home and work is so much easier when they are very distinct physical places.
I genuinely miss working in an office because of this, and am looking to return to one soon, but right now it seems that just about every company has a hiring freeze in place for the foreseeable future.
A hybrid 3-4 in office / 1-2 out of office per week seems to be prime for my personal and social values at work.
Why are you on your work PC/phone after work? Or is it all the same? I notice a lot of people do not have personal computers anymore... like back in the 90s.
For home office I shut off the work PC and turn on the gaming PC where I am not logged in on work accounts. Work phone on disturb mode.
Back when I worked my last job. I’d find that when work was scarce (pretty common mostly thanks to an impenetrable bureaucracy) My brain would wake up and I would suddenly feel motivated to think about and work on new projects, then I’d get home and for some reason not have the energy and just pass out instead.
Perhaps a contributing factor is that when stuck at work you have a limited range of options that don't include passing out whereas at home you have fewer restraints and more competition from the easy solutions
I think this highly depends on the person. For me, it wasn't just about enforcing separation of equipment.
For a time, I was using the same desk for work during the day and then switching inputs on my screen to use my personal gaming PC in the evenings. I still shut off notifications, never had notifications on my phone, etc.
This wasn't enough.
So I set up a small desk in another part of the apartment and made that the work desk. It was better than using the same desk.
This wasn't enough.
I've realized that a lot of my emotional states and memory recall are very anchored to where I am physically. Just being in the same physical space after a stressful workday was the problem. Glancing at the plant in the corner that I was staring at while contemplating a challenging problem earlier in the day immediately made me start thinking about work again.
> Or go take a walk.
Walking is one of the best ways I've coped. But I also live in a four seasons climate, and this isn't always possible.
As much as I dislike the idea of going back to a physical office space, I think this is one of the hidden costs of WFH.
>For a time, I was using the same desk for work during the day and then switching inputs on my screen to use my personal gaming PC in the evenings. I still shut off notifications, never had notifications on my phone, etc.
I mean yea I have this too but I don't actively look at notifications. I'm constantly "on" and nervous but Ive just been that most of my life.
And now I'm in office. I do not know if its gonna get better.
For me, work from home didn't really change the hardest things about shutting down. It has never been (again, for me) the equipment or the emails or the messages, but that the mind doesn't stop chewing on things. I can put away the computers and go for a walk and still have my mind working over whatever problems I was trying to solve. I think it's an example of the mind working against itself, because I enjoy solving problems but I also enjoy putting work aside after hours.
> But I also live in a four seasons climate, and this isn't always possible.
Kind of curious what season it’s impossible to walk in, and how it’s related to 4 seasons?
I’ve lived in 4 season climates my whole live, and the only time I can think of it would be inadvisable to take a walk (though not impossible) is in the middle of a thunderstorm/typhoon.
I don't think it's about "advisability" per se, but desirability. I probably shouldn't have used the word "possible". I guess possible relative to my ability to deal with it.
Sure, you can walk in a snowstorm, when it's -15F, when it's downpouring, when it's 100F, but these are hardly a refuge from the inside environment in many cases.
Don't get me wrong. I've spent plenty of time doing exactly this, but my underlying point is that it's not a consistent or low friction option.
The best work experience I ever had was working in a warehouse where I just unpacked and repacked lumber all day. It was a lot of nonstop lifting. I felt happy when I went home because I felt like I worked hard and got stuff done and it was really good exercise too. I did that work because I didn't know what I REALLY wanted to do after quitting my job (disillusionment and naive startup dreams without knowing what it took to succeed) and I wanted to experience hard work that wasn't in an office (i.e. work in the trenches).
Someone I knew told me I could work in his warehouse. It's too bad that it was so low pay. If the pay wasn't the issue, I wonder if staying at that kind of job would actually be really good for me. I would be physically healthy, my mind would be clear and refreshed all the time, and I would feel good about having worked hard every day. Would the positive effect still last if I did that work for years, or was the positive effect only temporary because it was a novel experience to me at the time (and I didn't care about the low pay at the time)? Interesting to consider.
I did a bunch of warehouse jobs when I was at uni. Some of the most depressing and soul crushing jobs I've ever had. The worst ever one I had was pulling a massive roll of sandpaper to a line and then another guy pressed a button to cut it. Then we lifted the cut sandpaper on to a pile. Repeat for 8 hours.
I didn't stay in that one past one day, far too boring.
Let's not romanticise these jobs. I think you're confusing the endorphins from exercise, which most warehouse jobs don't need, with the job.
I think you can both have true experiences when it comes to this. Some people enjoy the monotony of repetitive tasks, whereas others want to gargle glass after 10 minutes of it. I certainly know I don't want to work a job that physically exhausts me every day, but some people do enjoy that. I don't think it's romanticizing to say that good-paying warehouse work with proper benefits would be a boon to a LOT of people.
The thing with hard working jobs is that you need to consider pension. Probably you wont bei able to do heavy lifting stuff fulltime in your sixties. What then?
I think their point is about rich people who don't need a job or money, but now treat hard labor jobs as gym work.
These sort of people can always go back to what they were doing after they got fit from the gym work, and of course they can always do another gym work sort of job at will.
This is far different than somebody working these jobs to put food on the table.
I'm a software developer, but I did these kind of jobs when I moved to New Zealand under the Working Holiday Scheme. The minimum wage what I got for these jobs was more than what I earned as a software developer back in Hungary. It wasn't just free gym as we needed the money to support ourself, but it was still relaxing to not care about the big picture and only do what I was told to do without any responsibility.
I had a similar experience in my teenage years working in Dell factories (back when they still ran them out of Austin/Round Rock). One of the jobs they had me do for a week was to simply unload trucks that came in and put the computers/monitors/whatever onto a conveyor than sent them on their way. It was surprisingly satisfying, not to mention some of the guys I worked with were absolute riots. Kinda miss those days...
It was pay by the hour. No, the main motivation was being able to feel like I reliably accomplished something each day and hung out with a nice group of guys throughout the process. Hard work, visceral daily achievement, and camaraderie. The physical work was a part of it, but I wouldn't say it was the core thing.
Thanks for replying me.
Did you have autonomy (like did you feel you could execute your job in the way you think it was right)?
Did you have a mission (the feeling that your job was part of something bigger) ?
Nope and nope. Just clear instructions, clear tasks, and clear outcomes. Monotonous work and no sense of vision at all. No sense of responsibility either.
When I was an intern I did a lot of boring work in data centers now and then. Unloading servers from boxes, labeling everything, making connections, installing stuff on racks, etc...
This is disturbing on a deep level. A person taking on such a job for self-discovery as if it were tourism. Most workers in that warehouse need those jobs, including those 60 year olds the ex-CEO felt sorry for. It reads like a parody of tech culture.
It reminds me more of Kevin Spacey's character from American Beauty. After quitting his job in advertising, he takes an (explicitly) non-managerial job in fast food: "I'm looking for the least possible amount of responsibility"
It isn't disturbing on a deep level, there is just inequality on many levels. Most people who get an unequal share of the wealth are probably also taking on way more stress than the average person undergoes.
An ideal world would be one where someone was able to do focused creative work for a few months and then mindless manual labor for a few months and trade back and forth as desired. That will never happen but I would love it.
I agree with this a lot. It's the shakeup, I think. I've wondered in the past about companies pulling their skilled knowledge workers out of their usual roles and saying, "you're working in HR now" or "you're working in the warehouse now (if you want)". Let them do that from 3 weeks up to 3 months, and then go back to regular work. Or maybe inverted 20% time: Monday–Thursday in the warehouse, and Friday at your desk inside your IDE. I'd be really surprised if all the "obvious" reasons why this experiment wouldn't work actually showed up in the data at the end. My expectation is positive gains in productivity.
The lack of self-awareness is the disturbing part, or that the person interviewed failed to understand the actual lesson about the nature of working a shit job for your whole life like those presumed 60 year olds.
On a deep level? I once worked at UPS loading trucks for a winter season just because I was in between jobs. It was just about the hardest I ever worked and was an interesting experience. Are you implying that I should be forced to work tech jobs for the rest of my life just because I qualify for them? Should I view my specialized skills as chains?
It's a free country (the U.S. is at least) and by working in one job you are always implicity creating an opening in whatever other jobs you have opted not to take. I do understand your argument, and theoretically you are right: he perhaps took a job from someone who needed it more. But I can make the same argument about the service economy: if I mow my own lawn, am I taking money away from landscapers? If I cook at home, if I learn to fix my own bike, etc. etc. That kind of think is deeply disturbing to me. We each have to live our own lives at the end of the day.
I didn't mean it at all in the sense that he's stealing those jobs, but that he is seeing it as personal development where most people in this situation have little choice but to bear this sort of profession over the course of their lives. He gleefully recounts how he now saw takeout food in terms of the manual labor he had to do, but sees it as a fun life lesson as opposed to the crushing realization that your life-force is seeping away with every bill. The poverty tourism is what I find sick. He can, and did quit the experience as soon as he was tired with it.
I think intention matters here and his was not to demean or "sight-see" the life of poor people. _You_ are choosing to view this from the most unfavorable angle.
I've worked tech jobs, bio lab jobs, warehouse jobs, call centre jobs, and been unemployable for long stretches while depressed.
Working manual labour jobs is deeply humbling and in my opinion actually builds solidarity with the working class in ways you simply can't by intellectualizing from afar. If more people in privileged positions did this, I believe the world might be better.
Maybe you are right with the idea that more people should at least try these jobs. I agree it would be helpful. However what frustrates me is that they seem to draw all the wrong conclusions about this sort of work, and see it as character building which draws back to the directly unhelpful ideology of characterizing harsh labor for low pay as morally constructive. It is constructive in the sense that it gets you used to hardship, but it is still your life seeping away for little gain, which is the raw fundamental fact from which working class solidarity germinates the strongest.
Some time ago, John Stewart made the observation to Bezos that people would not want to just spend their working lives doing errands for the wealthy and would rebel. I suppose it's mindset like that of Bezos or the person in the post that made me react with disgust. I am failing to propose a solution, but the problem seems to be in part a lack of awareness from the well-to-do of this world that has dangerous consequences for the rest. After reading the post, I can't even think of something to suggest to the interviewee because the mental and class distance to be bridged seems so vast.
I totally want the employment system from Ursula Le Guin's The Disposessed. People cycle through jobs and everyone gets a feel for everything. Of course, it's not perfect...
"I took a warehouse job at Amazon". Then 1 year later they wrote a fascinating tale of the subcultures that develop within an Amazon warehouses, the stories and aspirations of people who arrived at that job, and how this quiet army of faceless people enable a service that even kings 100 years ago would have killed for.
Would that not be equally as bad since at the end of the day they took a job from someone that needed it?
I'm not talking about the availability of the job, but the difference between poverty tourism and having to do those jobs for 40 years as opposed to 6 weeks.
As a burned out founder with ADHD, I took a break from tech and did a year as a personal trainer at a big box gym. It was such a great difference from tech work: physical movement, human interaction, paper-based, etc. The high levels of accountability (in addition to physical movement) were extremely satisfying.
I dream of a future of tech work that is more similar to the gym, rather than sitting at a desk. Some kind of augmented reality work space where you intentionally add physical friction (reaching, pulling, pushing), physical objects, human interactions, etc and lots of standing. I imagine the mental rewards of this approach would be really interesting, and you might finish the work day feeling physically energized.
This. So much this. Over quarantine I found myself spending increasing amount of time cooking after coding time. Just because the difference of doing something productive with your hands is so sorely missed.
If something bridged those two, like Minority report but with even more movement, it would be gold.
Someone ITT mentioned warehouse jobs and workout endorphins coloring our view, but I think its more missing just moving things around with your hands.
This is a great comment, I've found myself wishing for a work environment that provides us with these human elements. We are animals that are designed to move!
Walking meetings, some type of AR technology so we can perform email responses/research while moving, and physical interaction with digital systems is the future I want.
I'm in tech and work from home. I own the home. I get heaps of physical exercise gardening and maintaining the house. Cutting back plants that are too big, putting new planets in. Mowing the lawn. Painting here and there. I have a leak in one of the bedroom ceilings. I built a deck out the back - that was a big job. You know there is also just normal chores around the house that keep me moving. Doing the laundry. Cleaning.
Anyhow, I say embrace your chores. Don't pay somebody to do them for you.
I agree, as a child I was mostly indoors and non-practical. Typical techie nerd reading a lot of books. Having a home now, I've started learning to fix so many things. Today I just replaced 2 shower taps (washers and valves) for a leaky shower. Was a little short on time and had some issues unscrewing the spindle so reached out to a plumber and was quoted $350 so screw that, I finished it myself. Anyone can do this with the help of a YouTube video. For all its faults, YouTube is an absolute treasure for DIY.
Cooking is another one I really leaned into during COVID. I think it's important to scratch a creative itch in these activities since many of my hobbies are consumption-oriented e.g. video games.
This is such a fascinating story, I was literally thinking about this a few months ago when Equinox randomly contacted me. Also identify as an (ex)founder with ADHD. Would love to hear from you and hear about this journey if you're interested in connecting. jason @ jasonshen
I think what the person is asking for specifically is some kind of responsibility to an external force that will force them to keep a schedule.
The thing in my life that most rigidly enforces a schedule on me is definitely not my job. It's my dog. No weekends off there, and I haven't slept past 6:30am in years.
Good for them to envision a structure of their own. If they end up not being able to build the habits I can only say that in case of having kids you will find structure alright.
That or you‘ll simply disintegrate into the void.
Pick life though and just do it (Atomic habits is probably a good start, check durmonski.com for an efficient write up).
I recently left a 400k+ job to work full time on an app addressing this exact problem, despite having a wife, daughter, and Bay Area mortgage . Of course productivity apps are a crowded space but I have a burning need to build the right tool for myself , and I believe might help others.
Remote work has pressed the need for me to improve here since I think I benefited by being in the same room as coworkers and being alone in my home the whole workday has pressed my ability to stay focused.
I struggled with ADHD , but because of past health issues, medication is off the table. Even though Vyvanse was a miracle for focus it caused some serious other problems. And the more I read about psychiatry and psychology the more I’ve gotten excited by lifestyle changes.
One thing I feel strongly about is that productivity tools need to be descriptive, not prescriptive . I’m not a robot, I need to work on what my gut is telling me to work on rather than what some reminder is telling me to work on. But I also need to do work and not scroll Reddit for hours so a tool helps with accountability for that.
I can’t over emphasize how enamored I am with Andrew Huberman Youtube video on the topic. He’s a Stanford neuroscientist with all sorts of suggestions on managing our dopamine levels with techniques like cold water therapy and intermittent fasting.
Social media, including hacker news and excessive email checking, can destroy your motivation if you don’t keep it in check. If you’re struggling with focus you simply have to monitor and moderate these things.
Please email me, username at gmail if this topic is of interest to you.
What I don't understand is that with a $400K salary you should easily be able to retire altogether within a few short years, which should completely solve the productivity issue. You wouldn't even have to dial back your lifestyle too much unless you are currently burning it on Veblen goods.
I'm grateful you are working on the app, however, as that sounds very helpful.
Instead of retire, let's say never having to do something you don't want to do (professionally) at which point you don't need productivity boosts. You just do things you'd do anyway. And if you don't do them, were you that interested in it to begin with?
A typical Bay Area mortgage is what, $8k/mo? Add say $2k/mo for health insurance premium close to what a big co would provide. That's $120k/yr plus living expenses (call it $50k). At a 3.5 safe withdrawal rate, you'd need to save about $5mm. If your take home is say 280 of which you're spending 170, that's 110k/yr saved. So almost 50 years of savings, not counting appreciation.
You really don't have to be at the median mortgage when working (or even on a mortgage), or to live in the Bay Area once you've accumulated enough money, or to need 170k per year outside of the crazy places. If you do have a house, you can always sell and bounce.
We could argue semantics or find gotchas but at the end of the day getting paid 250K+ means that you can find financial independence very quickly, and that freedom becomes a choice attainable through some modest amount of diligence and planning over a relatively short period of time rather than an unlikely expectation. Having the most important resource, time, fully at your disposal is an immeasurable boon.
There are many counterarguments regarding work or maybe wanting to buy expensive things and whatnot but the choice is there and any highly paid person can figure out the planning part with maybe less than a week of research.
You definitely need to count that. Even with pretty conservative assumptions, it massively changes the outcomes. For those numbers, and assuming 5% growth of investments after inflation, you can retire in 23.5 years (using https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=28... for convenience).
Speaking from experience, sanity depletes faster than one's retirement account increases with a draining job.
400k in SF is about 260k after taxes. Figuring saving 50% would give 130k/year in savings and an expense rate of 130k/year. At 8.0% returns, it would take 14 years to have enough to withdraw 4%/year match 130k.
Who says you need to match 130k? If you no longer have to work, you no longer need to live in the Bay Area. 70k would be luxurious in a less expensive place, if you take into account that you no longer have to work. Heck even 35k would be paradise. Many earn that while still working.
It's at the extreme end of the scale and will depend on your personality. Keep in mind that with 35K and no professional obligations you can do all of the following easily without any sacrifice in terms of leisure or family time or even energy levels:
- Shop around for healthy food at bargain prices
- Learn how to cook well and make the most of all that food
- Learn and have the time to fix 90% of maintenance issues
- Have the time and energy for sports and exercise
- Can dedicate more time to your family, kids need fewer toys because they have their father or mother back
- Travel for VERY cheap and you now have the time to actually do it at any time
- No longer a need to buy status or social class signaling goods because you no longer need to deal with professional expectations and setting a good impression in the minds of people you don't actually like
- Learn personal finance and your local legal system to maximize every drop
- No longer a need to buy things that make you cope with stress or long hours or even regular hours doing stuff you don't want to do
- As a corollary to the above, fewer risks of health issues, obesity, posture problems, alcoholism or self-medication, sleep disorders, psychological disorders, etc.
- Engage in creative pursuits
- Might no longer need a car in the traditional sense
To me that sounds like a better life than that of 99% of people who have ever lived. Now remember that we are talking about jobs and salaries for which a 4% rule at 70k or more is extremely doable. Which means you can not only have the life I just described but can also pay for your kid's education and the occasional health scare.
Rituals can be important. I recently worked on a mostly daily exercise routine and it's life changing. I'm now focusing on a monthly/weekly/daily planning. If I try to even do two habits, I have much lower results.
Counterintuitively, there's requirements to have more slack time. It's has to be dedicated and active. I need time to waste. I just need that time to be intentional, timed and shamefree. One trick, I use is to set a timer, get myself a glass of water, and then turn down the bed like a hotel before a Movie.
252 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadStructure is good and habit is key, but don't imprison yourself in it, in my opinion.
And in that spirit I'll say to the author of this post: It's okay to nap in the middle of the day, or not eat breakfast, or work first thing in the morning and not do a Morning Page or Meditation or whatever aspirational-you has decided is worthwhile. We are all doing our best in the circumstances we have.
In my life I've found that better is really a game of averages. Some days are going to be great. Some weeks have a severe downward trend with no real reason that I can tell. Well. Maybe it's due to bad sleep quality or lack of exercise. All I can do is try to be the person that makes the good decisions and accept the person that I am, and that keeps me pretty happy.
That said, I caution against too much routine. I used to get really into it but remember many days where I felt like the day was ruined because I couldn’t get a workout in, or someone scheduled an 8am meeting, or any other myriad of things I grew dependent on. Too much structure is basically a fragile crutch, in my experience.
My personal morning “routine” is a quick cup of coffee and a half mile walk, and then straight to work. I time block the day first thing based on whatever my weekly goals for the week were, and try to keep about two hours of buffer time to allow some shifting throughout the day.
I’ve done this about a year now and it’s helped me keep the benefits of structure, without the guilt of when something “optimal” doesn’t happen.
With a simple structure it really does feel like it brings order to chaos, if I have a really bad week and maybe don’t even get my runs in, it’s relatively easy to get my runs in the next week. Six different morning activities all at once? That’s just asking for failure.
Maybe start scheduling more of your commitments and obligations in your calendar?
Or alternatively,
Start by keeping a time diary of how you spend your days and how long tasks take you, then use that to inform your time blocks
So it might look like:
10: meeting
1030: bug fixing
11: bug fixing
1130: bug fixing
12: run
1230: run
1: lunch
130: feature work
2: feature work
230: meeting
3: feature work
330: feature work
4: plan next week
The above was my entry from last Friday, where I had a late start to the day.
At the start of my day I had kept the 12-2:30 block fairly empty (I knew some form of working out + lunch would show up, and I had wanted to do some feature work that day, but I didn’t know if any other meetings would pop up. They didn’t, so it worked great!)
I basically fill in meetings first, then work around them to put in the work I want to focus on for the day. The main caveat is I don’t focus on anything else for this blocks, and unless I’m in incredible flow and the task is definitely important, I always make sure I stop at the end of the block time (the whole “we will fill up whatever time we allot ourselves” theory).
It doesn’t help that advancing as a technical worker often removes that structure, or forces you to create it. I am given freedom as a perk of seniority, but for me it’s been a burden.
In the ADHD community, it’s called body doubling ( https://doubleapp.xyz/blog/how-to-body-double ), but it can absolutely extend to those outside of the ADHD sphere as well.
If someone has any suggestions on how to organize my life like a one big summer school, I'm listening. I guess joining a monastery would do it, but I don't really care for the other aspects of monastic life.
> how to organize my life like a one big summer school
It sounds like you don’t want to take on being an adult.
Responsibility gives you independence and power, you might want a therapist to help persuade and shortly guide you that.
I already have a therapist, but so far he hasn't been able to turn me into a proper adult. Oh, and by the way, I'm close to 40 now so I don't think anymore that this is just a passing phase.
I used to think like this, it's easy to dismiss, "I want power" sounds like something a maniac would say. I don't believe you truly don't want independence, maybe less, but that still sounds like a real issue.
> I think that in the past loads of people lived like this;
> servants lived almost like children
That's absolutely not true, I'm no history buff, but servants had all sorts of pressure and responsibility put on them. Their tasks may have been menial in skill, but they were damn well complicated. Imagine bringing the wrong drink or spilling a glass of wine in front of the king, off with your head. They seem like children to us because life is so much more complex, we didn't die at 30.
> already have a therapist, but so far he hasn't been able to turn me into a man
Maybe I've mistaken your casual wording, but it's not their job to turn you into anything, they're supposed to at the very least analyze. Depending on their practice, they might give concrete guidance.
If you want to be some wealthy old mans pet, that's fine by me, but I don't believe you don't want independence, no one doesn't. I think you're just overwhelmed by the mundane obstacles we all need to pass to earn it.
For example:
>I just want to focus on having fun and spending time with good people without managing every single minor aspect of my life and having responsibility over stuff I don't care about
That's the bare minimum of reality, we've all got those things, even Kim Kardashian.
Maybe your job is too complicated and demanding? There's a place you can reduce your responsibility, but it doesn't have to be so black and white.
Food had two broad strategies: (1) Repeated Deliveries of staples with one afternoon a week dedicated to cooking, portioning and freezing. Meals are labeled and microwaved as needed. (2) Ad-hoc Food Delivery, think Uber Eats or Doordash for most meals. I found 2 to be excessively expensive. 1 requires dish-washing but I can mitigate it with using disposables whenever possible.
1 also requires setting up repeated automated deliveries. I haven't quite figured out how to do this yet, but I'm sure there's an Instacart-type service for it.
Laundry: there are door-to-door laundry services, and/or using an in-house cleaning service mentioned below
Cleaning: there are maid services. If well-planned you could have them arrive to wash the dishes created in the above step, as well as retrieve/put-away laundry. A robot-vaccuum helps between cleanings.
As for activities with people with similar schedules, that's the difficult part. Adults are chaotic.
There's signing up for the military, which would also neatly handle your other items.
So far I've found that a co-worker-based activity group is reliable. You all get off about the same time, the people are relatively stable from week-to-week, and you all have similar work lives.
Second best was a regularly scheduled meetup group.
https://doubleapp.xyz/blog/how-to-body-double
Even if you prioritize flexibility, if your position is at the bottom of the totem pole, you will find it exceedingly difficult to get even minute changes in it. Those employees are increasingly monitored to the point I would not have accepted as a kid, but it seems a more and more common practice today.
I guess what I am saying is that what you do matters, but not nearly as much as you give it credit for. Some of it is just dumb luck.
Not having kids/pets is a huge choice to make to have flexibility. If you don't have dependents you don't need to spend time looking after them. You also don't need to make as much money so you can take a lower paying job. By being in the position to take a lower paying job, you can negotiate more flexibility etc.
Obviously that doesn't apply if you were forced to drop out of highschool to get a minimum wage job to take care of your sick parents/siblings.
Some people are less lucky than others, but I'd be willing to bet that a large percentage of HN readers that finds themselves with no flexibility have made many choices to end up where they are.
I count myself as ridiculously lucky that I am where I am doing what I do. Here I am mid-day, discussing non-work related items in my down time. I have the flexibility ( and a pet and a kid although that is basically like having two kids ), but I am unable to dismiss the idea that it is not just me factor that got me to that point. Looking back, there were tons of things that could have gone wrong that would put me on the wrong track ( and as is often with life, some things did ).
Otoh, I am not that much smarter than my sister and yet we are in very different places despite having the same upbringing, access and so on. You could argue that she is not on HN, but I would say that is a self-selecting process..
I'm talking about choices like kids, prioritizing salary over flexibility etc. I am not arguing that people in tech are there purely based on merit and no luck.
I am saying people that are already in tech make choices that give them more or less flexibility. Chasing a job at FAANG to get a massive salary and then using the salary to get an expensive car and massive mortgage is the wrong choice if you want flexibility. But it probably is the right choice if you want an expensive car and expensive house.
I'm talking about not having kids/pets (which is applicable to everyone) as a choice to make for more flexibility where as you are talking about careers.
Also you're talking about good VS bad choices. I don't think having kids is necessarily bad or good, it just depends on what you want or priorities are.
In other words, though it's true that outcomes are linked to choices, just the ability to make real choices (flexibility vs. salary or family, to name one) is predicated on a large dose of prior luck.
Travel more. Follow your passion. Forget labels and work hard to get what you want. Work isn’t 9-5. It’s 24/7, who you work for changes.
Treat yourself like a friend who you are looking out for.
Asking genuinely, because I struggle with determining how much of what I don't get can be attributed to me:
What if I wanted to be healthy, but have $<any number of chronic, debilitating conditions with no clear identified cause, mechanism, and or cure>? I recently listened to a podcast where two people try to follow life-advice books and determine if it actually helped them, and one of the hosts had an extremely distressing time trying to attribute why her abnormal mammogram result wasn't being followed up on by her doctor, despite daily calls for two weeks, was something that was due to her decisions.
[How does this apply to being abused as a child? Being a domestic abuse survivor? Being the victim of a hate crime, displaced due to war or other disaster?]
Personally, I struggled with thinking about events in my life and my decisions leading to those events precisely because of seeing other people try to take that logic and apply it in good faith, resulting in horrible conclusions. That someone could've prevented their fibromyalgia and therefore they are at fault for getting sick. That someone's child abuse was something they need to take responsibility about.
Here's what I've been prone to tell people instead: you know how to always get what you want—always? It's by wanting what you're going to get.
Some people misunderstand this. It's not about settling or doing nothing. It's rather the opposite. It's to get people to go through the process of interrogating themselves about their wants in a way that engages the logical part of their brain—which is ultimately most likely to be the thing that leads to working out a path to whatever that want is, so long as it's reasonable to think that they can actually get it. In the extreme case you present: "Is it unreasonable for me to want to the abuse to stop?" The answer, of course, is an emphatic no. There's no need to stop wanting that.
In figuring out whether it is reasonable or unreasonable, the question becomes: what is required in order to actually get it?
1. Example <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25468799>
Sorry you feel this way. I genuinely tried to share advice that helped me. The negativity here is astounding. Time to leave.
> Sorry you feel this way.
Time for a new edict: set aside the impulse to hand out apology-shaped non-apologies.
> The negativity here is astounding.
Have you considered your decisions and how it's a result of them?
1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33072621>
> Edit - I went back and checked, it was $140k.
Wow, this person confabulated $100k of merit to themselves. If that's not self-love, I don't know what is.
If you don’t know what makes you happy that’s step one.
>What if I wanted to be healthy, but have $<any number of chronic, debilitating conditions with no clear identified cause, mechanism, and or cure>?
Then the person in the hypothetical would need to decide to define healthy realistically for their condition. While it may be something you want, wanting something impossible is a non-starter.
>one of the hosts had an extremely distressing time trying to attribute why her abnormal mammogram result wasn't being followed up on by her doctor, despite daily calls for two weeks
Great example, in this case the host can decide to call another doctor's office to get a second opinion. Or following up in person. Or escalating to that doctor's leadership/board.
I've found it incredibly important to remember the reasons that I choose to do what I do, and own that choice.
It helped me overcome serious depression and a victim mindset.
Eg, I'm not forced to work and support my family. I want to and choose to do so for a wide variety of reasons.
Technically they could quit it all and walk off and become homeless, but is that realistic? This idea of endless choice, especially that without any potentially dangerous consequences, it's reserved for a small number of people.
What chores take up 1-2 hours each and every day, considering lunch and dinner are taken care of at work?
Edit: didn't sound to me like you have kids from your comment, if you do then it makes sense.
Which country do you live in in which this is the case? Everywhere I've lived there have been jobs that are 9-5 and jobs that are less rigid, ranging all the way to self employment.
So like how I'm forced to commute two hours a day to work.
(if I get an in person job in a different town from the one I live in).
This is just daft.
Taking too broad a view of what "forced" means just nullifies the term. Of course nobody could then ever be "forced" to do anything when suicide is an option.
The narrative that people are forced to work a specific job is false and should not be reinforced.
Do you not know many people or are you 21? Those are two situations where your take wouldn't be confusing. It's not a narrative that people can't pick different jobs, it's a narrative that people can just get up and go work somewhere else. This can be true in any industry, unless you have a very scarce and in-demand set of skills and qualifications. Even then, your regional circumstances and any number of other things have a bearing on whether you can leverage that.
Sure, if you are single, young, and an extremely proficient software engineer with the paperwork to prove it and no dependents, and everything else in your life is totally arbitrary and can be rebuilt anywhere you are, then ya it's totes easy to just get a new that perfectly fits your lifestyle.
I have worked for years and made great efforts to get to a point in life where I have a say in what time I do my work. Most jobs I have had I did not have a choice. In the United States.
Obviously if you have kids or are a carer that probably does not apply.
This is the second most top comment.
Also really illustrates the whole “grass is always greener …” thing.
All else being equal, I think the vast majority of people would prefer self-direction and autonomy to rigorous top-down order. People's choice and actions throughout the ages seem to reinforce this. I wouldn't mistake someone's personal choice to temporarily self-impose some structure as an example of "grass is always greener".
When I was younger, I switched to a 4x10s schedule for this exact reason. The limited time left after commute (long at the time) and other obligations at the end of the day felt wasted.
Somewhat surprisingly, I felt better when I decided that my 4 work days per week would be solid work/chores/obligations from morning to night. It no longer felt like I was missing out on anything because I wasn't trying to squeeze some hobby or social activity into a tired 2-3 hour slot at the end of the day. My free time and my work time were as separate as they could possibly get.
Even intra-day flexibility doesn't really solve the problem of having too much to do. My solution was to squish all of the to-dos together and leave my off days 100% flexible.
Even now, I try to finish errands and chores on weekdays for this same reason: Keeping weekends open is extremely valuable.
How is this possible? Are you counting exercise as a chore? I probably do 2 hours of chores in a week and that includes a lot of things related to cooking which you don’t do
The things I used to be able to do once a week are a daily "quick go" now.
Somebody is always hungry. There's a trail of food and mess they leave behind. There's frequent spills. There's constant laundry and accidents.
* what should I be doing with my time?
* what is important to think about?
As a software dev with a flexible schedule, my life feels arbitrary. I pick up hobbies because I need stuff to do, I try to eat better to take care of myself, I save money and live frugally for a rainy day. But there's no common thread to all these. It's just stuff I picked.
Burn out is not easy to climb out of, so I would rather be less than ideally productive than be disciplined to an extent that ignores my humanity and that damages me severely.
That's because you didn't have a subjugated population of helots taking care of everything that isn't your core competency ;)
[1] https://fcw.com/defense/2022/05/space-force-bring-data-scien...
[2] https://www.spaceforce.com/military-careers/cyberspace-opera...
He actually decided to get a job as an Amazon warehouse worker for 6 weeks for exactly the reason OP is struggling with: to get structure.
> In November, I suddenly thought, "I should at least get some sort of job somewhere just to have some regularity to my schedule, to enforce some daily practices". My number one priority was just to have structured work that would force me to get up every day—work that was very different from white collar jobs, in that I did not want to be asked to make a lot of decisions everyday.
> I didn't want the stress of managing people and teams. I didn't want the politics of subjective decisions being debated amongst team members. I wanted literally to be told what to do every day and I wanted that structure to be rigorous. I strongly felt that would help me get out of my depression.
https://www.jasonshen.com/120/
Update: posted this on HN since it seems to resonate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33072083
Once you got good at it you could zoom through your day on auto pilot. Drive to aisle X, pick up N boxes at rack Y, rinse and repeat.
A hybrid 3-4 in office / 1-2 out of office per week seems to be prime for my personal and social values at work.
For home office I shut off the work PC and turn on the gaming PC where I am not logged in on work accounts. Work phone on disturb mode.
Or go take a walk.
Its not "impossible to shut it all out"
I think this highly depends on the person. For me, it wasn't just about enforcing separation of equipment.
For a time, I was using the same desk for work during the day and then switching inputs on my screen to use my personal gaming PC in the evenings. I still shut off notifications, never had notifications on my phone, etc.
This wasn't enough.
So I set up a small desk in another part of the apartment and made that the work desk. It was better than using the same desk.
This wasn't enough.
I've realized that a lot of my emotional states and memory recall are very anchored to where I am physically. Just being in the same physical space after a stressful workday was the problem. Glancing at the plant in the corner that I was staring at while contemplating a challenging problem earlier in the day immediately made me start thinking about work again.
> Or go take a walk.
Walking is one of the best ways I've coped. But I also live in a four seasons climate, and this isn't always possible.
As much as I dislike the idea of going back to a physical office space, I think this is one of the hidden costs of WFH.
It's not insurmountable, but neither is it easy.
I mean yea I have this too but I don't actively look at notifications. I'm constantly "on" and nervous but Ive just been that most of my life.
And now I'm in office. I do not know if its gonna get better.
Kind of curious what season it’s impossible to walk in, and how it’s related to 4 seasons?
I’ve lived in 4 season climates my whole live, and the only time I can think of it would be inadvisable to take a walk (though not impossible) is in the middle of a thunderstorm/typhoon.
Sure, you can walk in a snowstorm, when it's -15F, when it's downpouring, when it's 100F, but these are hardly a refuge from the inside environment in many cases.
Don't get me wrong. I've spent plenty of time doing exactly this, but my underlying point is that it's not a consistent or low friction option.
Commutes can be terrible but they do serve an important role in decompressing and separating spaces in our brains through a repeated ritual.
Someone I knew told me I could work in his warehouse. It's too bad that it was so low pay. If the pay wasn't the issue, I wonder if staying at that kind of job would actually be really good for me. I would be physically healthy, my mind would be clear and refreshed all the time, and I would feel good about having worked hard every day. Would the positive effect still last if I did that work for years, or was the positive effect only temporary because it was a novel experience to me at the time (and I didn't care about the low pay at the time)? Interesting to consider.
I didn't stay in that one past one day, far too boring.
Let's not romanticise these jobs. I think you're confusing the endorphins from exercise, which most warehouse jobs don't need, with the job.
Most warehouse jobs completely suck.
These sort of people can always go back to what they were doing after they got fit from the gym work, and of course they can always do another gym work sort of job at will.
This is far different than somebody working these jobs to put food on the table.
It was almost therapeutic.
I don't know, I feel like this is just a retread of "Office Space" and office employees yearning to do construction work.
An ideal world would be one where someone was able to do focused creative work for a few months and then mindless manual labor for a few months and trade back and forth as desired. That will never happen but I would love it.
If anything it’s amazing that he stuck it out for 1.5 months without a financial incentive to do so.
It's a free country (the U.S. is at least) and by working in one job you are always implicity creating an opening in whatever other jobs you have opted not to take. I do understand your argument, and theoretically you are right: he perhaps took a job from someone who needed it more. But I can make the same argument about the service economy: if I mow my own lawn, am I taking money away from landscapers? If I cook at home, if I learn to fix my own bike, etc. etc. That kind of think is deeply disturbing to me. We each have to live our own lives at the end of the day.
Working manual labour jobs is deeply humbling and in my opinion actually builds solidarity with the working class in ways you simply can't by intellectualizing from afar. If more people in privileged positions did this, I believe the world might be better.
Your judgement doesn't feel helpful.
Some time ago, John Stewart made the observation to Bezos that people would not want to just spend their working lives doing errands for the wealthy and would rebel. I suppose it's mindset like that of Bezos or the person in the post that made me react with disgust. I am failing to propose a solution, but the problem seems to be in part a lack of awareness from the well-to-do of this world that has dangerous consequences for the rest. After reading the post, I can't even think of something to suggest to the interviewee because the mental and class distance to be bridged seems so vast.
"I took a warehouse job at Amazon". Then 1 year later they wrote a fascinating tale of the subcultures that develop within an Amazon warehouses, the stories and aspirations of people who arrived at that job, and how this quiet army of faceless people enable a service that even kings 100 years ago would have killed for.
Would that not be equally as bad since at the end of the day they took a job from someone that needed it?
I dream of a future of tech work that is more similar to the gym, rather than sitting at a desk. Some kind of augmented reality work space where you intentionally add physical friction (reaching, pulling, pushing), physical objects, human interactions, etc and lots of standing. I imagine the mental rewards of this approach would be really interesting, and you might finish the work day feeling physically energized.
If something bridged those two, like Minority report but with even more movement, it would be gold.
Someone ITT mentioned warehouse jobs and workout endorphins coloring our view, but I think its more missing just moving things around with your hands.
Walking meetings, some type of AR technology so we can perform email responses/research while moving, and physical interaction with digital systems is the future I want.
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
Anyhow, I say embrace your chores. Don't pay somebody to do them for you.
Cooking is another one I really leaned into during COVID. I think it's important to scratch a creative itch in these activities since many of my hobbies are consumption-oriented e.g. video games.
The thing in my life that most rigidly enforces a schedule on me is definitely not my job. It's my dog. No weekends off there, and I haven't slept past 6:30am in years.
That or you‘ll simply disintegrate into the void.
Pick life though and just do it (Atomic habits is probably a good start, check durmonski.com for an efficient write up).
Remote work has pressed the need for me to improve here since I think I benefited by being in the same room as coworkers and being alone in my home the whole workday has pressed my ability to stay focused.
I struggled with ADHD , but because of past health issues, medication is off the table. Even though Vyvanse was a miracle for focus it caused some serious other problems. And the more I read about psychiatry and psychology the more I’ve gotten excited by lifestyle changes.
One thing I feel strongly about is that productivity tools need to be descriptive, not prescriptive . I’m not a robot, I need to work on what my gut is telling me to work on rather than what some reminder is telling me to work on. But I also need to do work and not scroll Reddit for hours so a tool helps with accountability for that.
I can’t over emphasize how enamored I am with Andrew Huberman Youtube video on the topic. He’s a Stanford neuroscientist with all sorts of suggestions on managing our dopamine levels with techniques like cold water therapy and intermittent fasting.
Social media, including hacker news and excessive email checking, can destroy your motivation if you don’t keep it in check. If you’re struggling with focus you simply have to monitor and moderate these things.
Please email me, username at gmail if this topic is of interest to you.
I'm grateful you are working on the app, however, as that sounds very helpful.
There are many counterarguments regarding work or maybe wanting to buy expensive things and whatnot but the choice is there and any highly paid person can figure out the planning part with maybe less than a week of research.
400k in SF is about 260k after taxes. Figuring saving 50% would give 130k/year in savings and an expense rate of 130k/year. At 8.0% returns, it would take 14 years to have enough to withdraw 4%/year match 130k.
Maybe..if you are single and we have extremely different views of "paradise"
- Shop around for healthy food at bargain prices
- Learn how to cook well and make the most of all that food
- Learn and have the time to fix 90% of maintenance issues
- Have the time and energy for sports and exercise
- Can dedicate more time to your family, kids need fewer toys because they have their father or mother back
- Travel for VERY cheap and you now have the time to actually do it at any time
- No longer a need to buy status or social class signaling goods because you no longer need to deal with professional expectations and setting a good impression in the minds of people you don't actually like
- Learn personal finance and your local legal system to maximize every drop
- No longer a need to buy things that make you cope with stress or long hours or even regular hours doing stuff you don't want to do
- As a corollary to the above, fewer risks of health issues, obesity, posture problems, alcoholism or self-medication, sleep disorders, psychological disorders, etc.
- Engage in creative pursuits
- Might no longer need a car in the traditional sense
To me that sounds like a better life than that of 99% of people who have ever lived. Now remember that we are talking about jobs and salaries for which a 4% rule at 70k or more is extremely doable. Which means you can not only have the life I just described but can also pay for your kid's education and the occasional health scare.
Counterintuitively, there's requirements to have more slack time. It's has to be dedicated and active. I need time to waste. I just need that time to be intentional, timed and shamefree. One trick, I use is to set a timer, get myself a glass of water, and then turn down the bed like a hotel before a Movie.
"He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living things."