[HN Gopher] The "Reitoff principle": Why you should add "nothing...
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The "Reitoff principle": Why you should add "nothing" to your work-
life schedule
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 70 points
Date : 2024-03-23 15:43 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bigthink.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bigthink.com)
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Love it. Rest is essential. Making time to just STOP the constant
| Doing, to just Be.
| card_zero wrote:
| Isn't the idea more of a synergy between alternately doing and
| being? Do be do be do.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Sure - yes - but when the standard is go go go go go,
| introducing the break at all is the OP's main point.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _Do be do be do_ Solvers in the night
| Exchanging glances Wondering in the night
| What were the chances We'd be solving it
| Before the night was through
|
| (anachronistic, but)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnPy7DmMHgQ&t=140
| capitol_ wrote:
| An important aspect/variant of this is that it's better to do
| nothing than fill your time with low quality distractions.
|
| By scrolling low signal/noise content we block ourselves from
| this fenomena.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| To a point. I'm not a workaholic by any means, I skew towards
| working 20 hours weeks. When everything is good, the time off
| allows me to be incredibly productive. Breakthroughs happen by
| themselves.
|
| I am, however, prone to anxiety. When things start to become
| uncertain and I get anxious, I find it's much better for me to
| take the extra hours head-on and work however much is needed to
| dig myself out - 30,40, 50, or 60. Otherwise both work and rest
| become really low-quality as I can never truly procrastinate away
| from worry. Focused work is the only way through.
|
| Which is one reason why I try to avoid work where there are many
| emergencies and sudden operational problems. It throws me off my
| game completely.
|
| Edit: apologies for the typos, not used to posting from my phone
| :)
| vehementi wrote:
| > sig myself out
|
| What is meant by this?
| verisimi wrote:
| I think it's a typo. He's talking about how many cigs
| (ciggies, cigarettes) he needs to get joy back into his life
| - 30, 40, 50 or 60 :)
| cozzyd wrote:
| No, clearly means zig. Writing 30, 40, 50 or 60 zig
| programs to solve the problem.
| vehementi wrote:
| ??? that's not the zig they are referring to. They mean
| by firing 30, 40, 50, or 60 rockets in a relaxing match
| of Quake, they'll de-stress
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| This is the interpretation I'll choose. You win. Muh-muh-
| muh-muhltikill
| atherton33 wrote:
| Likely typo for "dig myself out"?
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I wish I could enforce this at my current company. Everyone is
| always "busy" and in meetings and fighting fires from earlier
| short-term-thinking projects
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Performative work is the most common type of work at all
| workspaces. As soon as promotions happen not on results but on
| subjective things which is basically all departments apart from
| sales, performative work becomes the norm.
| kderbyma wrote:
| I mean this principle is literally the Sabbath....it's very very
| old concept.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Is it though? I think most people brought up in the Christian
| tradition would associate the Sabbath with rules about church
| attendance and Sunday best, dutiful visits to great aunt
| Agatha, etc.
|
| Very much not doing nothing, just not doing financially
| productive work.
| brianpan wrote:
| Sabbath includes letting land rest every seven years and
| forgiving debts every seven years (literally a write-off) so,
| yes, I think this "write-off principle" with a cute name is
| the same as the old Sabbath concept.
|
| It does bring up the point that the long history shows us
| that in this case the spirit of the law is more important
| than the letter of the law because people push the boundaries
| of the rules.
| vehementi wrote:
| I actively treasure my shower thoughts time and have been
| thinking of doing more of that. One issue is that if I'm in a bad
| mood, stressed, annoyed at some stupid coworker, etc. my mind
| will wander in that useless area instead of in the direction of
| cool problems.
| sevagh wrote:
| I joked with a coworker the other day that if my shower
| thoughts are too dominated by workplace arguments, it's time to
| quit that job.
| albert_e wrote:
| I didnt know about this school of thought but came to this same
| realization after decades of beating myself up for not being
| productive all the waking hours.
|
| Now I am starting to let go -- of evenings, weeknd days, and even
| some work days. The world turns all the same even when I fail to
| send that email before "end-of-day" (12 midnight)
| drewg123 wrote:
| _'The real gauge of friendship is how clean your house needs to
| be before they can come over.'_
|
| Back when we were "just" best friends, I'd get offended that my
| fiance would clean her apartment when casual acquaintances would
| come over, but would never bother to clean up for me. She finally
| explained the above to me..
| jmathai wrote:
| I clean up thoroughly before any guests come. Not because I
| don't want them to see a mess. But rather because I feel a lot
| better when things are tidy and clean and being in a better
| mood means more enjoyment when friends or family come.
|
| My wife and I invite people over often because it helps us keep
| the house clean and benefits us overall :).
|
| I agree with the sentiment of this quote though.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| She keeps a cleaner house than ... some ...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| My most productive periods in life was before I moved in with my
| girlfriend.
|
| We'd live together on weekends, but not the weekdays. So I'd work
| on problems all week, and then go visit her, bringing no computer
| or anything like that.
|
| I _always_ came up with a bunch of solutions to hard problems I
| 'd been working on during those weekends away from the keyboard.
| They'd just appear in my head one by one, throughout the weekend.
| All of my most inspired ideas came out of that period. It's as
| though working activley on a problem spawns a bunch of threads
| that, without serious time away from the problem, continuously
| get interrupted and never resolve.
| packetlost wrote:
| How did you manage remembering or recording ideas and
| inspiration such that you could recall them sufficiently when
| getting back to work?
| navane wrote:
| For me just jotting down four words in any notes app or email
| draft contains enough information to pick it back up later.
|
| I eventually settled on a shortcut on my phone's home screen
| that opened up an email to my work email. So all I had to do
| was press that shortcut, write the note and send it. Then
| come Monday I would have a couple notes from my self waiting
| in my inbox.
| JadeNB wrote:
| I'm not the parent commenter, but no computer doesn't mean no
| access to writing implements, and writing something down
| physically can render it mentally 'sticky' in a way I've
| never been able to replicate in software.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I just write it down somewhere. Usually the solution is much
| smaller than the problem, so a 1-2 line note and a sketch
| goes a long way.
|
| In general I make a habit of writing down anything I think I
| should do. It's easy to think you'll remember, but those
| types of thoughts are extremely fleeting, and you almost
| never remember then when it's time to get to work. Such note-
| taking is pretty much the backlog for my life and a principal
| key to getting a lot of shit done.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I send myself a message on slack with a reminder usually
| hartator wrote:
| Most of the ideas that came to me in similar times as OPs are
| like "actually we don't need that new database at all, the
| data is already in the main db"-kind of ideas. So, notes are
| not really needed.
| navane wrote:
| Wake and sleep, workout and rest, prospers in balance. But this
| also means you can't just hang out in the showers and expect
| solutions. You have to work on it, then rest.
| toss1 wrote:
| YES, exactly this.
|
| My method in college ended up being explicit balance. Study,
| read, ingest as much knowledge on the topic as I could until
| I felt I was at either the point of diminishing returns or
| having sufficiently covered the subject, taking some, but not
| copious notes. Then just start doing idle things,
| specifically letting the "background processing" happen in my
| brain, things like running/hiking, going to dinner, etc.
| Mostly just waiting for the ideas to form and appear. At that
| point, I just started rapidly scribbling draft shards, in
| whatever order the ideas appeared. When that slowed down, it
| was time to wrangle the shards into a properly organized
| paper, which usually also included finding a smaller number
| of new connections among the shards.
|
| The whole key was first feeding selected info in, then
| allowing -- and trusting -- my unconscious brain the space to
| work on it.
| abathur wrote:
| FWIW, I tend to find that it doesn't have to be a full
| brain idle. Some active component seems to be helpful, but
| I think it needs to be easy to pause and that there's a
| sweet spot on the amount of engagement.
|
| Reading actual books or other longform documents is usually
| pretty fertile/generative. Watching youtube or a movie or
| listening to a podcast doesn't do the trick. Writing and
| editing are both also pretty good.
|
| Walks are good, but biking/running/swimming don't seem to
| be.
|
| Programming can be good in the sense that it regularly
| reveals missing tools/libraries, but I don't find the work
| itself all that generative.
| huytersd wrote:
| My most productive time was when I was alone in my mid
| twenties. I did so much cool stuff that I look back fondly on
| between 10p and 2a. Once I found a wife and had a kid I have
| almost no productivity outside of work but I honestly don't
| care. Life is good.
| lulznews wrote:
| Many such cases.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| "When action grows unprofitable, gather information. When
| information grows unprofitable, sleep."
| the_snooze wrote:
| Efficiency is brittleness. When you cram your time with this or
| that, you give up resiliency to random shocks, and you shut
| yourself off from random opportunities.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Somewhat similar to Rich Hickey's talk:
|
| Hammock Driven Development:
|
| https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc
| swingingFlyFish wrote:
| The answers to my problems come when I'm sitting on the throne.
| The amount of solutions I've come up with....
| apantel wrote:
| Well, if you're the King then you probably had a very enriched
| upbringing, so, I'm not surprised to hear you're doing good at
| your job!
| paweladamczuk wrote:
| I read this, took a shower and can now share my own shower
| thoughts.
|
| Imagine explaining all of this to a person asking you why you're
| unavailable on a Sunday. It's much easier to just say "my god
| says so". Depending on the person, it also often gives much
| higher chances of them respecting your way of life.
|
| I embrace the Christian concept of the seventh day of the week
| free from work, having arrived here in a completely non-religious
| way. It's one of the things that made me convinced that there is
| some value in religion, despite all the corruption and misguided
| dogmatism on the surface.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| > the Christian concept of the seventh day
|
| Jewish idea at its root.
| al_borland wrote:
| My most productive times at work were when I was bored. I worked
| a job that had a lot of downtime, and while most people spent all
| that time watching movies and browsing the internet (which I did
| a little of as well), it also gave me time to identify the
| problems that made the time I was working more painful. This led
| me to try to find solutions. I learned to write code to automate
| various repetitive tasks, wrote documentation to upskill others
| on the team, built tools that would allow everyone to work faster
| and easier... this kind of stuff eventually turned into my actual
| job once the boss saw the impact.
|
| At one point he just told me to think of stuff that would help
| the team and do it; he then didn't really talk to me again for 2
| years. For the first few months I was feeling lazy. I didn't
| really know wheat to do and felt like I was sitting around a lot.
| However, by the end of the first year I had more projects than I
| could handle. Eventually a whole team of 10 people was formed
| around me to help with all the stuff.
|
| Current management wants to overload everyone with more work than
| they can handle, after they read the cliff notes about OKRs.
| Productivity has gone down, the solutions are worse, and chaos is
| the new normal. I think some time for everyone to take a step
| back, assess where we're at, and put some practical plans in
| place on how to move forward, would do the whole organization a
| lot of good.
| dudinax wrote:
| On average, a programmer who's staring off into space is working.
|
| A programmer who's busy at the computer is goofing off.
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