[HN Gopher] How I was failing to find time for life while workin...
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How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely
Author : somebody32
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-01-10 13:02 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (timeawareness.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (timeawareness.substack.com)
| mikeymz wrote:
| Without trying to trivialise this - it's a problem I have had and
| its an easy rut to fall into. Work can be a nice place to hide.
| However the solution is quite straightforward - stop. Work is not
| crack, it's actually pretty easy to not do when you try. Just
| don't do it. 5.30pm and you think about the next thing? Stop. 8pm
| and you think about opening your laptop? Stop. 6am and you think
| about getting up and looking at some code? Stop. If you are
| trying to hide in work it's probably not work that is the issue.
| violetgarden wrote:
| Yup! I have a notebook for thoughts that pop up when I'm not
| working where I can jot down ideas or things I need to do.
| Otherwise, I find I feel like "I better do this real quick
| before I forget."
| jedberg wrote:
| I've been working from home for five years, and on and off before
| that. I'm certainly no role model for it, but there are two
| things that have helped a lot:
|
| - Start at a consistent time. Right now my daughter is in school
| so I have to get up and get her going on remote school. This
| usually gets me started around 9am.
|
| - End at a consistent time. I have a hard stop every day at 7pm,
| because that's when Jeopardy! comes on, and when we have family
| dinner. I even went so far as to create a voice announcement
| through the whole house that it is time for dinner and Jeopardy!
| so my family keeps me accountable.
|
| This ostensibly means I work for 10 hours a day, but I allow
| myself to not feel bad if I need to take a two hour break to go
| shopping or fold some laundry or just take a break to watch some
| TV, since I know that my default is 50 hours a week. A two hour
| break every day would get me to 40 hours and I don't take a two
| hour break every day.
| mech422 wrote:
| I've worked remotely for 20 years on both salary and hourly
| (consulting). I found it especially hard to 'unplug' when working
| hourly, as you always feel like you could be making money. Doing
| laundry? You can get an hour billable while waiting. Watching a
| movie? Is the movie good enough you want to give up 2 hours
| billable? Also, this can be a lot worse when you're younger, just
| starting out, and money is generally tighter...Kids, mortgage,
| school loans can all make extra money from overtime very
| attractive.
|
| On salary, I find its easy to lose track of time on an
| interesting problem. You get 'in the zone' and time just flies
| by...
|
| As I've gotten older the first problem has sort of naturally
| resolved itself, as I start to value leisure over bill rate.
| Getting older - not only does your income tend to go up, but
| expenses can come down. Things like school loans, car notes and
| mortgages may be paid off. Kids grow up and become established in
| their own careers, requiring less support.
|
| I still have the second problem though. In this case, I generally
| find having other _people_ ping me to be much more effective then
| alarms and to-do lists. Its too easy to turn off an alarm or
| ignore a list. Interacting with an actual person is much harder
| to ignore :-P
| notretarded wrote:
| > Watching a movie? Is the movie good enough you want to give
| up 2 hours billable?
|
| Lie?
| ghaff wrote:
| Please don't go into hourly-billed consulting if your default
| assumption is to just lie about your hours.
| andrei08 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, great read! I was working remotely pre-
| pandemic, but back then I went to a co-working space on a daily
| basis with the exact goal of separating work and personal life.
| This obviously changed when the pandemic started, so I had to
| adjust to working from home (which is a small apartment with no
| dedicated work space).
|
| I tried multiple technics over the past months to create a
| healthy work-life balance, and a here're a few things that helped
| me: - Building routines for meaningful breaks: a short walk,
| quick workout, calling your family/friends - something to pull
| you aside from the screen (scrolling twitter is not a meaningful
| break for me) - Blocking time for those routines by adding them
| to the calendar - Making the most of my work hours: stop all
| distractions and create triggers for deep work. My trigger is
| putting on noise cancelling earphones. And my family knows that I
| shouldn't be distracted during that time. - When possible,
| scheduling calls in batches, almost back to back - Bonus:
| external accountability. My wife and I agree on a time when we go
| for a walk, have dinner, etc.
|
| Generally, I feel good about my day when I have 2-3 hours of deep
| meaningful work and I followed through on my scheduled routines.
| Currently I'm trying to schedule pretty much my whole day, though
| it's tough because often times I get unexpected meetings and
| things to work on. Another thing I struggle with is time
| estimations for certain tasks, because a lot of the work I do is
| open ended and doesn't have clear boundaries (I can always do
| more).
| Akcium wrote:
| Currently I'm in a big problem with time because of the mix of
| psychological problems including perfectionism.
|
| What I mean is: I spent almost all my time thinking how to plan
| my life. When I think about what I should do every day, I always
| find excuses why it won't work.
|
| So it turns out that everyday is spent by thinking instead of
| doing.
|
| Also I understand what the author meant when talking about the
| difficulty of maintaining work-life balance. But this happened
| for me all the time, not only when there was a lockdown, but
| really all the time.
|
| I'm not working on hourly basis, but I'm working on my side-
| product. And the thoughts in my head are "Okay, we can spend a
| few evenings coding and we'll have that feature. Probably it'd be
| enough to breakthrough and we will become millionaires!" :D I'm
| exaggerating but still.
|
| Then, after I spent all the time thinkings, I accuse myself that
| I haven't been working.
|
| This is a vicious circle.
|
| And after that, the "trigger" in the behaviour formula is
| something I'm waiting for all my life: the secret sign to start
| planning.
| baby wrote:
| I have the same issue and two things:
|
| - go take a walk alone for one hour. No headphones, no device.
| I'm not kidding
|
| - make a list of tasks that you must accomplish. See it like a
| queue that you'll pop from and get a task to focus on. Now take
| your days one at a time focusing on the task in front of you.
| Do this until you depleted the queue. For this to work the
| queue should not be vague, and have items that you really want
| to implement now (otherwise you'll start thinking about re-
| ordering the queue)
| kuhzaam wrote:
| What kind of benefits have you felt from long walks with no
| devices? I was on a good routine doing that earlier in
| quarantine, and kind of fell off the wagon. Could use some
| inspiration to get re-started :)
| Akcium wrote:
| Thank you
|
| By queue you mean a set of tasks? Or a big goals or what?
|
| I have a to-do list, a backlog in my project. The number of
| tasks just grow up, all I got power to do is to endlessly
| fill this list.
|
| So we're talking about "small set of tasks", or a queue per
| project, or... could you clarify here?
|
| And yeah, walking alone might help. Indeed. Will do
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| One thing I'd add to this: Get used to the idea that removing
| one item from the list is acceptable. For me, the only way I
| could trick my brain into that is set the the start date for
| all but one task that doesn't need to be done today for
| tomorrow at the start of the day. Thus when I finished the
| items for today, the task list is empty and I feel "done". I
| can still look at future tasks if I'm feeling productive, but
| knowing I finished my to-do list for today is refreshing.
|
| I know it's an illusion, but it works surprisingly well for
| me.
| MaKey wrote:
| It sounds like you are controlled by your thoughts. I'm looking
| into the concept of "Mindfulness" to get more control back and
| find more happiness. I also found that doing one workout every
| morning greatly improves my well-being and reduces thoughts
| that limit me.
|
| I, too, struggled with wanting to to everything as best as
| possible but found that it really limits me. I eventually just
| started with very small iterations and even though I didn't
| write a lot of code yet the process itself already taught me
| quite a few things. The great thing with code is that you can
| come back later and improve it, so it doesn't have to be
| perfect on the first try!
| throwarayes wrote:
| Here's what I do:
|
| - never install slack or email on your phone
|
| - use a separate laptop for personal stuff. I don't/can't log in
| to work stuff here.
|
| - put your work laptop away and out of sight when done work
|
| - (optionally) give a few trusted people your phone number if
| they absolutely must reach you
|
| The last point help alleviate the stress of "I absolutely must
| always check slack to deal with the latest crisis"
| hiimtroymclure wrote:
| Ive been working remote long before the pandemic and cant
| stress these points enough. They might seem silly at first but
| they really work. At the bare minimum, no slack or work email
| on your phone.
|
| I've also learned to over communicate. Usually when I step away
| I leave a pretty detailed overview of where things are and the
| feeling of "leaving the team high and dry" diminishes.
| nend wrote:
| That's fine it works for you but it just shifts the burden off
| yourself by putting it on your coworkers. Unless it's
| specifically discussed and agreed upon for your role, that's
| rather unfair to the rest of the team.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| The coworkers should all be doing the same thing. Only the
| oncall and their official escalation paths should be expected
| to be available off-hours.
| MereInterest wrote:
| I would say that it shifts the burden off of yourself by
| putting it onto management. Management then has the option to
| hire more people, to offset schedules to maintain better
| coverage, to establish more accurate goals and timelines,
| etc. These are things that are inherent to the role of a
| manager. There's no sense in me burning myself out to poorly
| work around a problem that exists at a different level.
|
| The default assumption is that time outside of work hours is
| my time, and is not to be interrupted. Unless it's
| specifically discussed and agreed upon for my role, having
| anything else is extremely unfair and manipulative.
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| Hiring more people means less money at the end of the year
| for that annual bonus. So you're kinda making that choice,
| even if you shift the problem to management.
| [deleted]
| redisman wrote:
| Great I'll take the work life balance over an imaginary
| bonus then. And if you can't keep up in compensation then
| I'll look for another job
| esoterica wrote:
| Bonuses aren't imaginary. In some industries like finance
| they are like 90% of your comp.
| frongpik wrote:
| Less money for the manager's bonus. For line workers, the
| bonus is more or less fixed.
| esoterica wrote:
| Not true in finance.
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| That's just not true in many cases.
| legulere wrote:
| Incompetent management are even worse for the bottom line
| of the company.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Wow, so the solution is for workers to do as much work as
| possible to "help" management hiring less employees? Do
| you think that when they save money, they set it aside
| for employees bonus? Or may be employee compensation is
| driven by supply and demand and has nothing to do with
| you working overtime all year long...
| esoterica wrote:
| A lot of finance firms have a "you eat what you kill"
| model where the compensation pool is a direct function of
| how much money the desk makes. So if you hire more people
| to do the same amount of work then yeah, the bonus pool
| gets divided more ways and each person makes less money.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Sure, but finance is the exact last place we want to look
| for sustainable, value-producing business models.
| esoterica wrote:
| There is no such thing as a default assumption. Every role
| has different expectations and none of them are canonical.
| digitalsushi wrote:
| Without having the insight into another's mind that we have
| with our own, how could anyone make the claim that their
| coworker's burdens are as important to address than those of
| self?
| throwarayes wrote:
| I think the opposite is true: unless it's agreed upon I work
| outside work hours, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to
| stop everything at a vacation with my kids to solve a bug.
| And I would not work anyplace that wanted that.
| DocG wrote:
| How?
|
| Keeping work and private life sperate is normal.
| codyogden wrote:
| > give a few trusted people your phone number if they
| absolutely must reach you
|
| My last team sent me a desktop IP phone they could call me
| whenever. I should have realized then it wasn't a great fit.
| heh.
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