> Rather than trying to complete your task in 20 minutes, take this time to write down your thoughts, and a step-by-step action plan of what you think you need to do to finish your task. Then go home. Rest. A feeling of incompleteness will motivate you to come back and finalize your work the next day. Only you will be full of energy, together with a settled plan. No doubt you’ll accomplish your task before lunch.
Next up: how to poop on company time.
Doubtful because the concept of clocking and clocking out is an artifact of the shift from mercantilism to capitalism and the Industrial Revolution where people sold their time in exchange for money.
Before that, in Elizabethan England, people were not free agents but subjects of British Empire. Merchants could control their destinies to some extent but did not exchange their labor so much as accumulated wealth through trade. They did not clock in and out.
So, there was not company time vs. personal time. There was just time and people conducted their bowel functions in outhouses and chamber pots befitting their stations.
Like I could entirely see Julius Caesar’s Gallic Campaign including a bit about punishing some soldier because he always managed to need to shit during the hardest parts of setting up camp, or something like that.
That's not why you poop on company time. Rather, because a) you get paid for it, b) the company pays for water and hygienic products you use up in the process.
Page 13 in my copy (I had trouble finding the passage in the scan I found on Internet Archive, I think it's a later printing that is somewhat abridged). He's writing of working for the state highway department, making road cuts and shoveling gravel:
> Some deliberately delayed the physical calls of nature in the morning until after they came to work. That give them the opportunity of taking ten minutes off. The nonshirkers applied blunt Anglo-Saxon terms to that particular trick.
Given his supplying the term "shirk" in that sentence and the characterization of their label for it as "Anglo-Saxon", I think what he's getting at is they called them "shit shirkers", which is pretty funny.
I do this all the time, quitting when I know what comes next, but noting it down so I don’t forget and become frustrated.
[0] https://bk2coady.medium.com/the-hemingway-method-fb56bf93836...
I have enlightened from many small details in articles, books and papers. While looks unimportant and irrelevant, these parts can knock down dominoes in one's subconscious, resulting in enlightenment or closure on another subject.
Even if that doesn't happen, I learn a couple of more things.
tl;dr: reading tl;drs only is akin to chewing caffeine powder instead of drinking coffee. bland, uninspiring and non-rewarding. What we assume as useless is generally is the spirit of the matter.
Which is how I drink coffee.
Coffee is bitter, awful, and irritates bowel, wasting your time on extra toilet visits (of the longer kind). Adding milk makes things even worse (lactose ain't particularly light to deal with in adulthood). I wouldn't even touch this stuff, if not for it being the universally approved (socially and legally), ubiquitous wakefulness promoter (aka stimulant drug), and better alternatives are much harder to get (even prescribed, they're not meant to serve as coffee replacements). Caffeine powder (in tablets or otherwise) is how you get to "the spirit of the matter" while skipping all the misery and unpleasant side effects.
I suppose it really is a good analogy to most of long-form writing that isn't pure fiction or explicitly for entertainment.
> Which is how I drink coffee.
You're not drinking coffee. You're using caffeine as a drug. Which is fine, but the similarity is akin to drinking Soylent and claiming you cooked and ate a particular dish for the lunch.
> Coffee is bitter, awful, and irritates bowel, wasting your time on extra toilet visits (of the longer kind).
Coffee is not awful, and not all coffee is bitter. Lighter roasts have a gentler taste profile (plus higher caffeine), and/or you can select less acidic beans. What I generally brew ends up pretty smooth. Either case, it doesn't irritate my bowels.
I'm not particularly critical of how coffee affects my bowel movements. It doesn't imprison me in a particular place in my home or office. Honestly, if you think spending 10 minutes for your body's needs as a waste of time, I think you have to review your lifestyle choices.
> Adding milk makes things even worse (lactose ain't particularly light to deal with in adulthood).
I'm drinking at least ~400ml milk (for the last 30+ years) and eat good amount of cheese every day. I don't believe this. Don't come with try and see, because I tried, and it changes nothing. My body doesn't care about it.
On the other hand, coffee's stimulant effects is secondary to why I drink coffee. I like its taste, it helps me to digest after lunch, and generally it's a good combination with a cookie or a bitter chocolate in the lunch break before starting the second half of the day. BTW, I drink a bit more than a single cup of coffee every day, because I regulate my intake amount and time, yet I get the benefits. Otherwise, I had periods which I drank 2L per day. So coffee tolerance can be tuned and can be kept in check.
The "spirit of the matter" is coffee as a whole, with all the taste, personal time and whatnot. Caffeine tablets capture a single aspect without any taste or finesse.
It's same for the long form writing. I'm in it not only for the tl;dr, but the story in itself. Funnily, I generally read these while drinking my coffee, so the enjoyment is squared.
We discussed the same thing for the last couple of days with colleagues. Distilling everything doesn't concentrate the contents. You have to lose something, and that something is not only filler for most of the time.
Unfortunately, in between there's sleep, which is the great feelings eraser / emotional cache flusher. So all that'll happen is that said "feeling of incompleteness" will distract me for the rest of the evening, then disappear at night. Come morning, it won't be there, so I'll have to read the plan to hopefully induce that feeling again.
When I return to the task, I get up to speed in ~10 minutes, and things way go smoother because a) I'll be rested, b) My brain would have processed the plan and came up with a refined version of it. When I read the plan I wrote, I automatically recall the refined version most of the time.
Then, I get to work and finish what I have started.
Interestingly, sleep doesn't erase my emotions, but pause them. I just continue from where I left.
as a non-morning person, it usually takes me about 4-6 hours to get up-to-speed. because there would be some unexpected twists and turns that will distract me from the task.
meanwhile, exact opposite. if i cannot "solve" an issue, if i just wait till the evening by going for a 100+km bicycle ride, i magically solve the problem in the evening (right about at dusk and after).
if you don't work in the evenings, which he explicitly mentioned he does
probably he does things easy tasks, things that can be done on autopilot, gradually moving on to initial attempts at harder tasks?
seems like they enjoy what they do and/or enjoy what they do, which is critical for non-morning people
I'm not a morning person either. Coffee doesn't really help. For me it not 4-6 hours, but 2 is common.
Sincerely, A true night owl.
If you are productive as a night owl, you will be even more productive this way.
I can easily sleep 10 hours, start at any time. It's not a problem of falling asleep, it's a problem of waking up :)
I lift weights, and I make sure to do big muscle groups. I wake up around the same time every day, ish. I do not drink coffee in the afternoon. I do not use blue light screens at night. And any number of other advice that people keep bringing up.
Like the comment above that says if you wake up at 06, you will be tired at 23. Yeah, sure, but you still won't be able to sleep. All that does is make you more tired permanently, but sleep still doesn't happen.
People just do not work the same, some people are really more active at night. And this advice is echoed constantly whenever this topic is brought up.
Just a few observations from one night owl to another; I can rarely go to sleep before 4 am.
Close to a decade of that lifestyle, and my body didn't adjust. In my case, there's no insomnia - I indeed start feeling tired around 21:00 - 23:00. Just that my performance curve didn't shift accordingly; only thing that's changed is that I had to give up my most productive parts of day (afternoon, late night), because I'm too tired to do anything at that point.
I'm open to suggestions on how to fix that.
I generally plan my next morning and half day before I go to bed. This allows me to create a routine with some flexibility for the morning.
While I can, and like to work, at nights, I do it less and less. Increasing the efficiency of my work routine is a more rewarding process for me. Also, I'm more conscious about my biorhythm now, so I want to give my bods enough time to detox itself, esp around 1-3pm, when your brain "takes the chemical trash out".
That is interesting for me. It's something I wish was the case for me, because I've been struggling with this a lot. I started referring to it as "lack of emotional continuity" or "emotional cache flush". It's like a context switch, but on emotional layer. I basically can't seem to hold on to my emotional state for extended duration, and in particular it gets reset at the day boundary (i.e. when I sleep). This affects both positive and negative emotional states.
Practical consequence of that is that I prefer "sprints" to "marathons" when dealing with tough problems, whether intellectual or emotional - it can take up to an hour for me to "work myself up" the right way to focus on a hard task, or to talk about some difficult personal topics, so I need to make the best of it.
I really, really wish there was a way to do the emotional equivalent of the "write down plans and thoughts at the end of day, read them again in the morning" trick.
I understand how your emotions/body work and how upsetting the current "configuration" is, but maybe it's the way because your body is trying to process or overcome something in the grand scale.
Did you try meditation, esp. not the canned ones from the apps, but a proper practice with a proper instructor and mentor? A good practice generally help you to understand what makes you tick, or live a more balanced inner life, which may help you reducing in this "work up" time, or change the things which you doesn't like about yourself.
(Back before that, in some previous night, my body would still take 8-10 hours of sleep if I let it, and the more I did, the more tired I felt throughout the entire day.)
The palest ink is better than the best memory.
How I obey this rule at the end of the day is to continue my code in the necessary points, interspersed with "blahs" if I am feeling verbose (and necessary means that nothing critical is left out, and nothing irrelevant is included in reminding tomorrow).
How I disobey this rule is to verbally say (out loud) the idea that comes to mind in odd moments, as they are prone, followed by "note this" (at which point everyone around you admires your incomprehensible spontaneous demeanor). This imposes a tag on the inspirational memory of perspective and involvement, and I find that I retain it until no longer needed.
This works for me.
I find that it can even ruin an evening. I'll find myself trying to solve a problem in my head rather than being present with my family.
The only thing that works for me is waiting for clean breaks that happen mid-late afternoon. As soon as I reach a happy stopping point, I must stop and switch to shallow work for the rest of the afternoon. Then it's easy to leave my computer at the end of the day.
It's hard but after years of struggling with this, I found a sustainable way to balance work and life.
I also track my consistency with doing this so that I notice myself slipping back and correct it before it becomes a problem.
a next fresh new 1M tokens context window.
And the "write down everything and go home" is:
a) extremely frustrating
b) cant get anywhere near to dumping the amount of context that's flying in my head while I code/build. Most of it evaporates if I don't get to the end.
So ... agree with the problem, really not sure I agree with the solution.
At my current job, things are messier and shall we say not sustainable - culture is simply toxic. I actually can not do a review...because the moment someone sees that i am still logged on, i get bothered...Mostly this is from folks in other time zones (who don't care that its my end of day...like i said, its toxic here). So, i started doing the review offline, but saw that i needed to be logged on to review stuff...i started jumping through too many hoops to still access info as inputs for review and next-day prep...but appear to be offline...so, instead, nowadays, at a very strict time, i log off, and have abandoned my formal end of day review...I mean i still review my thoughts...but its not as structured, and i don't write anything down...and, i see the difference (sadly)...but, mostly, i just don't like my current job. ;-)
Of course, we all keep some 'favourites' we do the odd favour for, but if you can't find 15 minutes to work interrupted (and your review is work) then you really need to think about how you're working as you're making the problems worse.
Being the superhero feels good for the first decade, eventually you realise you're Brent from the Phoenix Project and you're really part of the problem.
Not a personal attack, mxuribe, just some crap I worked out over the years. YMMV.
> ...I work in a place with teams on my project split across multiple time zones, and I reply to people when I'm able...
I've worked in other places where i did just as you noted! But, here, at my current dayjob, the culture is vastly different in some ways compared to all the other companies that i've worked for (over the quarter century that i've sent being part of digital/technical teams across many medium and large enterprises).
Further, i wouldn't say that i'm trying to be a superhero, its merely that there's political pressure here to be "on"/activated all the time. I've been on global teams before, and as you noted, unless there is some massive issue, availability of members of the team is assumed to be within a reasonable range of hours per one's timezone...But, here, many enterprise cultural norms are thrown out the window. I kinda would assume that maybe some unique startup that is so new to the world might behave like this, but this company has been around a long time...and they seem to have lots of churn of their digital/tech teams....and although no company is perfect, this firm's issues i believe stems mostly from its toxic culture. So, for now, i'm doing my time, putting up with the annoyance for the time being, until it suits me to jump ship. Just not worth it for my peace of mind.
IMO this feature should not be underestimated. Happens to me semi-regularly.
I actually find it very hard to do this, to walk away with some code that isn't compiling or a test that isn't passing. It feels like leaving something unfinished.
When you return it's an easy jumping off point, with a tangible goal and helps bring you back into the context.
I actually hate leaving something not compiling in the evening, it feels like things are unfinished, but it helps getting back into it. I tend to use this more when taking a break for an hour or two. But it is effective.
However leaving an intentionally broken comment sounds like a good way to get the sense of completion for the day, but have the compiler focus your attention on where you left off!
People often get new ideas or unblocked somehow after stopping the work. If this happens, don't open the laptop again. Write it down.
I feel personally attacked
You can tune Pomodoro's work lengths. 25 minute is the sweet spot for me, but you can go 20 or 30 depending on how your mind works and endures.
Also, don't forget to take your long, 15 minute breaks after every 4th pomodoro.
Cascades of timeouts and segmented sign-back-ins are almost a corporate ritual in ill-configured environments.
The OP proposes a valid and reasonable pattern.
Nonetheless, not all of us are so wise.
There are dozens of frustrating all-nighters and near all-nighters in my timeline.
And, dotted in and about, there are those several times when, half-asleep, you press the enter key, look up and gasp "OMG, it's working!"
When you come in the next morning you have a thread to pull on and pick up the work the next day.
Another reason, which may be obvious, is that the notes help ramp you back up that next day.
> take this time to write down your thoughts, and a step-by-step action plan of what you think you need to do to finish your task.
I suppose it varies by individual. Jot down helpful notes (maybe in the issue-tracking comments for the task) that are already easily in mind, but maybe don't think through the step-by-step so much that you get your brain further into that space. If your goal is indeed to have your evening free without being a zombie with your head still stuck in your work.
Yeah this is exactly it but I cannot relax or sleep or anything when I have a bad case of that "incomplete" feeling. So I try not to get too embedded in code at all these days (I'm old and dont work for crazy startups anymore). But got pretty coded up this week and was all grumpy last night in one of those "just 20 minutes more" situations (which yes kept me coding til about midnight).
poppobit•4mo ago
When I wrap things up too neatly, the next day feels like a cold start, and that makes it harder to dash into new work. But if I deliberately leave a task half-finished, then the next day I can just pick up where I left off and get moving much faster.
eszed•4mo ago