Let me try to save you all a year of therapy sessions:
You do not have a time problem. You have an energy problem. We. Have an energy problem.
The reason you only get three hours of stuff done on Saturday and then you ‘waste’ the rest of the day is because you had three hours of energy. The rest of the day you’re just filling time. Not because you’re bad, or lazy, or selfish. Because you’re spent.
The difference between productive people and you is not time management. Their skill is in dealing with taxing experiences. They avoid it, delegate it, or confront it on their own terms at the time of their choosing. Some shift their perspective to make it less taxing (not everyone hates weeding). And when they run out of energy they engage in activities that recharge them instead of filling time or merely drain them slower (see also: me and video games or TV)
If you know where to look, we already know this subconsciously. A bunch of industry Best Practices are more time consuming but less energy intensive than the alternative. We balk at scheduling two difficult tasks in the same time interval even though they both “only” take less than half of your time. A task that takes four hours might leave you exhausted, and all you can do for the rest of the day is read email and code reviews and browse Hacker News. Nobody can rearrange your schedule or demean youbinto anything productive during that time. If you try you’ll just make mistakes. Which is why you’re trying to Do No Harm by “goofing off”. You already know this you just don’t have the words like “self-care” to express it.
Great advice. It's easy to get into a cycle of "I'm tired today -> I'm not getting anything done -> I'll stay up late and do some more -> I'm tired today..." where what you really need to get things done is a good sleep! But it's so hard to go to bed when there are things to be done...
Just want to piggy back off this and throw this out as a PSA: if you find you're constantly feeling tired even after making changes like improving sleep hygiene, exercising, etc, try getting a sleep study done.
I ended up being diagnosed with sleep apnea and once I started using a CPAP device and got used to sleeping with the mask on (took about 1-2 months), it was the difference between me being completely awake and having the energy to work on challenging things immediately after waking up vs feeling like a zombie for the first 3-4 hours every day.
I've never really had problems with "motivation" or discipline so I can't really speak on that, but getting this diagnosed and resolved has completely changed my attitude and capability for taking on new problems and not feeling "burnt out" all the time.
I have another problem related to sleep. Once in a while my eyes get "spicy"... as in I am unable to keep them open for long periods, and am forced to force close them and prevent myself from staring at the screen for any moderate periods... like touching chili with your fingers and then rubbing your eyes...
Anyone with tips would be appreciated. So far the only thing that works is sleep, but spicy eyes can resume immediately after waking from sleep.
I used to get something like this, except I described it more like a "burning" behind my eyes. My optometrist recommended reading glasses for computer use. During the day, I wear glasses for nearsightedness, and it turns out that using those while working on a computer was causing a lot of eye strain. I found that reading glasses are actually pretty great -- they force your eyes to focus at a very close range, letting your eyes relax. Since I started wearing them, the burning has gone away. Perhaps you could try something similar.
Speak to an optho about blepharitis and/or dry eye disease (dont google it; the results are always about the far end of the bell curve.) Warm compresses, eye drops during the day, eye gel at night, and daily warm compresses. Did I say that twice? Daily warm compresses.
Odds are good you’ll feel notably better in six weeks.
This isn’t personal medical advice, just an observation about an extremely common condition.
Don't do the hard problems in the evening when you are tired, you won't get much done. Take all the hard problems when you have the energy, and save the 'stupid' work for when you have low energy.
This is absolutely key. And likewise, don't feel like the time spent working (especially after hours) is any way to judge your effort. There's little point working each night until 2am if you're operating at 10% productivity. For many people, you'd likely get more done in 30-60 minutes before breakfast while you're fresh.
Sure, but the key here isn’t “don’t work late at night”; it’s “know yourself, be honest with yourself, and act accordingly”.
Personally? 90% of the time, if it isn’t done before lunch, it’s not getting done. So, I come in as early as I can and get my heavy lifting done from 7a-11a.
The problem is when you only have a sequential of hard problem and you're currently too tired to start and your boss expects a status report in 2 hours...
I'd like to add that walking around the office - even mindlessly - for a few minutes is amazingly more effective than sitting for some multiple as long doing a mindless diversion if you're already a desk worker. Just getting the blood flowing a bit and letting your mind focus on coordinating the balance and movement can really help clear away the fatigue. Doing it outside around the block is even better, and you annoy fewer colleagues.
If you're enough floors up: descending in an elevator then immediately ascending by the stairs works wonders for the sedentary body, and the mind. I also do this sometimes when hacking through lunch to trick my mind's context, then reverse the journey to start the afternoon.
I assume the benefit is partly the fact you're taking a break for an extended period of time away from the computer, so why wouldn't you just walk down the stairs and get the elevator up?
This is true, but there are certainly ways you can increase your energy capacity.
Eating healthy, exercise, getting enough sleep, relaxing activities like TV or video games. All of these can increase your energy levels and allow you to go longer before running out of steam.
>>You do not have a time problem. You have an energy problem. We. Have an energy problem.
You have none of these problems. You essentially have a 'purpose' problem.
The reason why we can't do more, is largely because most of it seems pointless. There is no real stake in the game, no sight of making anything in return in comparison to what we contribute, or worst we are working to add few more gold coins to some Scrooge McDuck's gold vault.
This is not necessarily true. I think purpose can give us energy, but it isn't fair to attribute lack of energy to a lack of purpose.
I myself have a lot of purpose in life, but absolutely need some downtime due to being tired. I can do about 35h - 45h of productive time a week, and that's it. Not due to lack of purpose, but due to mental health.
I think both are true to a degree. Introverts are often introverts because people or intense sensory situations wear them out. Over the last dozen years or so several people in my social circle found out they were introverts pretending to be extroverts. High social intelligence but no stamina for big gatherings.
I found a volunteer group that had a lot of ambition in an area I feel strongly about but hanging out with them too often wore me out. Amped up people amp me up. After some of their goals became reality the energy level dropped and the contact high wasn’t enough. So I show up at events and about a third of the meetings because the purpose is still there but it’s not enough.
I believe that a lot of mental fatigue is actually an evolved mental pattern to move people from "exploit mode" back towards "explore mode" in explore/exploit tradeoffs, and the negative affect is the prompt to doing so.
But I think — and my personal experience has borne this out — that the negative affect/boredom/unrest can be mentally overriden by recognizing what is going on. I don't believe there's anything like a "fixed" store of energy for mental tasks independent of things like sleep pressure, hormones, blood sugar, glucose, etc.
If it's physical/biochemical — sleep pressure and flagging concentration — that calls for a nap, sleeping, or at least a break. But if it's just boredom, I don't see that as an energy problem. With practice and training, it can be overriden safely and in a life-affirming and healthy sort of way. Profitably, too.
Don’t count out depression, especially in this group. Nobody will talk about it, which makes it more insidious.
There is nothing at all that I recall in the time management literature about being a friend to yourself. Finding ways to find the energy (and thus the time) for your priorities means stepping back and taking care of yourself first. When I started this I dreamed of getting three times as much stuff done as I do now. Someday I hope to do maybe twice as much, but I’m pretty happy with the idea of getting a little bit more done than now instead of many times as much. I’m giving myself permission to try to do things right instead of trying to do everything. I’m also, as you say, accepting that some things I think I should do simply bore me.
There’s a little bit about knowing your limitations and doing what you can, which is a start, but it’s grabbing the stick by the wrong end IME.
This may be great for some people, but simply isn't true for others. I've found no difference on focus from working out, even heavily. Not from getting up and walking a mile and going back to my task.
There are lots of different types of exercise. Cardio, weight lifting, stretching/yoga, tai chi/chi kung.. I wonder if different people respond differently to different types of exercise? Did you try them all?
I can relate to that.
When I exercise in the morning I cannot get anything done during the day.
On the other hand I find it relaxing to workout after work. My mind becomes more or less empty afterwards. When I then do things that require more complex thinking the effect wears off pretty quickly though.
My initial days of running had a dramatic positive effect on my productivity. However once my body got used to running I see no difference. I must admit I have stuck to the same pace and distance more or less. 5k in about 35 mins.
I wonder if some of it has to do with perception. When you begin a new habit, or change up your routine, time seems to go a bit slower than usual, and thus maybe you feel that you are more productive?
We do a lot of activities we think give us energy but either don't, don't anymore, or only do in some idealized situation that isn't really happening. Or maybe something else that happens along with an activity is what we really enjoy (I thought I enjoyed driving, when actually I just like listening to music uninterrupted).
In the case of games or a show they can stop being fun and be more like work pretty easily. They're like junk food. They fill you up for a little while but they're not fulfilling.
How does one effectively identify different activities' impact on one's energy levels? Relying on feelings and memory, I found, is hard and inefficient. Life logging/quantified self?
How did you realize you actually enjoyed listening to music uninterrupted rather than driving?
To be perfectly honest, I'm probably going to spend the rest of my life answering question #1.
What I think I know is that the answer changes over time, so you should get comfortable with the idea of always asking yourself the question anyway.
If I have a system that only works because of my tendency to problem solve. Imagine that a friend confided in you that they're having trouble and asked for help figuring it out. What would you ask them? What are your answers to those questions? How would you respond if your friend gave your answers? It's not a panacea, but if you avoid doing this experiment with subjects like employment and romance (we think everyone else should break up and quit their jobs immediately) it kind of works.
Just sharing some thoughts on your questions, not claiming I got conclusive answers:
Leisure time like listening to music or playing a video game can make you happier. Such happy events can re-energize not on that specific day necessarily, but e.g. the workweek (or beginning of workweek) afterwards. Neutral and unpleasant activity will not have such effect.
Anecdotal: overcoming a great challenge in gaming in a team had made me euphoric for a few days. I woke up and was literally right away excited. Gaming doesn't always have such effect though. One problem games (and TV etc) have is that it can feel like a choir. A mandatory riedel you gotta sing every X time together with person Y on time Z. Even when at times you really don't wanna. Then you can end up in a negative spiral, especially if the other factors are being difficult as well (e.g. your kid, work, etc). Because it isn't always static. Sometimes you want to skip. If you game in a team, play a team sport, or are a high performing athlete you might be hard on yourself. If you got on-demand TV, you can skip easier, but I suppose the monthly pay makes you wanna eat your cake as part of the all you can eat sub.
Sports can affect your brain by increasing your cognitive performance.
I suppose it can be proven with EEG/MRI scans. Probably rather costly, but if its done for academic purposes and reproduced by a TV show you got two birds (tho not with one stone): the scientific part background, and that being applied for the general population explained with simplicity.
> How did you realize you actually enjoyed listening to music uninterrupted rather than driving?
By testing the effect of driving without music, or listening to music without driving.
For me it's Chess - It's a flow state with a simply defined (incredibly complex to solve problem) and a few wins makes me feel energised (of course my W/L% is almost exactly 50/50), I don't draw much).
If I couldn't play Chess online I don't know what else I'd do to relax that wasn't vegging in front of the TV.
This year I'm going to my local club as well and play OTB for the social aspects.
I'm going to go out on a limb - learn to meditate. I suspect that for most people, once well learned, meditation will be a recharging activity. And it seems like an activity that will be a good baseline for helping figuring out the energy impact of other activities.
I cannot always find the discipline to meditate, but I've found that listening to lounge/chillout music without doing anything else and letting my thoughts wander help a great deal.
I agree with the comment at the top of this thread. In my own experience I can say that this helped me more than anything to get on the right track https://www.thefoundationsofwellbeing.com/
I know, the website looks a little cheesy but everything they talk about in the videos is legit. Meditate. Eat food that is actually nutritious, exercise, learn to be grateful and resilient. If you don't find Rick Hanson's way of talking about those topics to be helpful, just google the overall ideas of self-care and well being. Pretty much everyone says the same sort of things Rick Hanson says, but different people put slightly different spins on particular parts of the message. Find the message that speaks to you about this: how to take care of yourself.
Not just "how to happy" or "how to be productive".
I have been tracking my productivity with rescuetime on my work machine over the past year and paying particular attention to the value of exercising. I genuinely enjoy exercising, but in many stages of life, productivity is far more important than things I just enjoy doing. Also, I don’t care about losing weight. My productivity is critical these days so I wanted to know if exercising was contributing to that or taking from it.
Alternating 3 months on and 3 months off of jogging in the summer an elliptical in the winter, 4 days a week, with a steady program that took 45-55 minutes tops including changing clothes and a shower. My records do not support exercising for productivity gain; they support the opposite.
It was clear that exercising simply depleted my energy. It doesn’t take very long to do and it feels good, but it sucked my energy and my productive hours (mostly coding) were shortened by an average of 3-4 hours per day. Although I felt energetic, I didn’t “have more energy” as they say.
I will continue exercising when I can afford that, because keeping my body healthy is important long-term.
I am now curious about the wider justification of this common advice. I doubt it’s just a virtue signal. It’s hard to beat catching a morning run that moment before the sun comes over the horizon. Great way to start the day. But, my goal here was to be honest with myself. It does not make me feel better throughout the day. I wish it did, because I love feeling better, but it doesn’t do that. Not for me.
It seems those that benefit most from exercise from a productivity standpoint are those like myself. Exercise has been very helpful fighting depression, and thus, my productivity. I could imagine that those without depression would not get the mental benefit that easily overrides the effort of exercise.
I can actually sympathize with this. It was the reason I originally began exercising, and I know it helped with that. I don't know how much. I got more committed to meditating over the years and found the returns on meditating to be undeniable. I figure there are many sources and types of depression, and I think lower productivity undermined some of my efforts to fight it.
I reached the same conclusion for myself - that a ~40 minute cardio workout actually results in less productivity rather than more.
However, I switched to a 10 minute cycling workout with high intensity intervals (4-5 intervals 30 seconds in length). I have only done this for a few weeks, but I find that it boosts daily energy rather than depleting it.
I work in the morning from 0700/0800 to 1600/1700, I find that a mid-afternoon session perks up so I can crank out a few more hours. I could stay longer than that at work of course, but it would be of little benefit to anyone as I'd be effectively useless.
did you find that the timings of the work hours and workouts make no difference?
I.e. working out at 7am with workhours from 9-5 are suboptimal but workhours from 4am to 8am with an hour of workout between 8 and 9 gives you a boost for the rest of the day
I love that the first response to this starts "I've been tracking my productivity..."
Not getting immediately sucked into moralizing your attempts at self-care is almost alien to the American ethos. John Calvin, haunting America for 450 years...
> The difference between productive people and you is not time management.
> Some shift their perspective to make it less taxing (not everyone hates weeding).
It sounds like what you're actually saying is that some people are more productive because they get energy from what other people would consider "work"
It was a conscious act to stuff that example into the middle of that list. In part because while true, nobody who is suffering right now has the capacity to do it.
It’s less “don’t stress about it” and more “one day it might not stress you out”. If you do figure out how to shift something from column A to column B, try to hold onto the memory of the process. If you can pull it off more than a couple times then I think you’re in for a much more pleasant life.
Speaking from personal experience, exercising will definitely recharge you. I used to think procrastination was the only reason I couldn't get things done as quickly as I wanted to, until I realized that I had low energy levels (installing RescueTime didn't really help that much too). I started to going to the gym at lunchtime at work and there was a marked difference in my energy levels during the day. As a bonus, exercise also helps you sleep well and I can't stress enough how important that is.
Exercise is a very high hurdle for people. Even harder if they don't have a successful history with it (like me).
I didn't get unstuck on this until a few years ago when there was a research paper that refuted the 20 minutes of uninterrupted cardio advice. I know too many people who feel like they're gonna die around the 14 minute mark, and they just give up.
Turns out that 3 intervals of 7 minutes is enough to show progress. You can duck out of work for 8 minutes in the afternoon and take a walk without even getting sweaty. Do it again at lunch and after work and you've got your 20.
Doing 14 minutes is still better than 0 minutes. The difference between 0 and 10 minutes is likely higher than the difference between 10 and 20 minutes.
Start easy. Don't put the goal too high. Don't have a defeatist or perfectionist attitude (relapse is a natural part of changing a habit). If you have to stop earlier because your body tells you so, accept that, and retry the next day. Once you start doing it regularly you'll notice the difference. It will go easier. Especially in the start. Later on, you can increase your limit, aiming higher, until you meet your goal.
If you're doing it regularly and then end up skipping it once, the effect of that is negligible (unless you're pushing it but you're not an athlete, are you?). Just like if you're eating usually healthy and not too much the impact of that Christmas dinner is minimal. Just like with brushing your teeth if you brush them twice a day and end up skipping it once, it isn't a big deal but if you regularly skip and neglect your teeth there will be more of an impact.
Realizing that makes say losing weight, getting fit, and maintaining dental hygiene easier. Heck, it makes life in general easier as well since it is never too late to start compared to going on with the bad habit. I loved your GP comment as well, it makes so much sense, and has a similar soothing effect. Thank you for making that point.
Doing 14 minutes when you aren't in your optimal energy zone can be worse than zero. When you are fatigued, you create more work by being sloppy or in general doing things which require more work down the line (especially for programmers).
I go to a gym once a week. When I started 5 years ago, I was spending like 20 minutes doing high-intensity strength training. It was enough to make a steady progress and build muscles albeit slowly. After 4 years I hit a plateau. So now I spend like 50 minutes in a gym still once a week to continue the process.
I doubt that I can stick to anything that requires more frequent efforts. 15 years ago I begun to train karate, but training twice a week for 2 hours was too much so I eventually dropped out.
Maybe try different things. Some people "don't like exercise" because they don't enjoy the gym or running. But put them on a dancefloor / skateboard / ocean beach / roller-rink / climbing wall / mountain bike / zipline / parkour course / yoga studio .... etc, and it clicks. If your form of exercise requires "willpower" to do it, that's probably not a good indicator for long-term engagement. Personally, I hate gyms but I'd go surfing even if it made me fat.
I have a friend who recharges by baking. When he is stressed everyone in the vicinity eats a lot of cake. At times he comes in with 4 different cakes.. that's when you know it's been bad.
Exercise and in particular, weightlifting. I've always run a few times a week, but things really changed for me when I started lifting. This won't be "recharging" necessarily at first (though it will be eventually), but it will definitely increase the capacity of your reserves before you need a recharge.
I never thought about it this way. Thanks for putting that in a different perspective. I notice I'm becoming more and more conscious of time as I age. My thoughts have focused on being more efficient with time and spending it wisely, but I didn't make the connection to my energy.
Twice I have. Copy editing, quality control and pacing out a year's worth of new thoughts over a year become the challenge. The well runs dry after a bit, and once you get out of the habit, that becomes the new habit.
I haven't tried again since I made an effort to broaden my interests. I've been tempted but haven't acted on it yet.
I had a theory that the Hedonic Treadmill could be worked in reverse. We become acclimated to our status quo and any stress we feel is real at a biochemical level, even though we lack perspective on people who “really suffer”.
So I found the gentlest exercise program (if your joints are good, try yoga. If not try Tai chi. If not try qigong). It’s still a lot of work and sometimes you want to quit.
After six months I got into a volunteer group that involved manual labor outdoors. I got a little nature and to hang out with generous people.
Now I’ve added a hobby where I make things.
All of these have adversity in them. My thesis is that being able to deal with one type of adversity gives you callouses against the rest be they mental or physical. So far it seems to be true.
I also did very simple things like make myself take a real lunch. Even read. And when I sat down to do pass times like play a video game or watch a movie, my internal narrative was “I’m doing this to decompress or recharge”. Which also meant it was easier to time box and I would pick something I knew I would enjoy instead of feeling obligated to choose one over another.
Not necessarily. People have different skill sets and delegating something to someone who can do it better than you and with less effort is a win for both sides.
"You do not have a time problem. You have an energy problem."
May be, but I think we also have a trust problem.
That is: why in the world would anyone install a software (RescueTime in this case) that can produce this kind of results...
To get those results, obviously, it tracks everything you do.
Is that.. OK? Your logins, passwords, urls.
This article is a nice reminder that RescueTime keeps all your computer usage history (including site URLs) on their servers and can access it at any time.
But there are Selfspy[0], ManicTime[1] (Windows), and Qbserve[2] (Mac, my app) for private productivity tracking.
I'm always skeeved out by reports like this. I know they're PR bits for the companies, but to me they're just another constant reminder that I'm just a data-point for any app that collects my data and all my data is theirs forever to use to build their product.
I used to have a paid subscription with some IPTV service which is kinda popular in this region of the world. Of course I knew that with internet-based video streams, they could track what and when I watch, but I naively assumed they wouldn't really do much like that... I'm a paying customer already after all...?
At some point, I think it was after the last big football event, they sent a marketing email. In it they listed which games I had watched, with minute-accurate viewing time information. They probably thought it'd be a neat surprise which customers would enjoy reading. I was repelled to see they keep this information in such detail. The marketing e-mail had quite the opposite effect on me.
A while after this, I cancelled my subscription with them. I was happy with their service otherwise - but I paid them to watch things, not to be watched myself.
It's a weird constant feeling that no matter what I do on my computer or my phone that someone else knows what it is, is watching, recording, analyzing my activity. No stopping it now, but it takes away from the magic.
This is why I don't use 99% of online products. The thought of a chunk of my life becoming someone else's data just makes me feel icky. Last time I tried to go back to stock Android I lasted about a month before the convenience of Google Play Services and everything relying on it was outweighed by the creepy feeling that my phone was watching me.
Qbserve looks awesome! I'm having a problem though, since I'm using a work Mac and a home Mac, I won't be able to sync. As far as I read from the website:
> For the same reason, there is no sync. Sorry, multiple Mac owners! We wish we could do that some day, but it's a tricky task because Qbserve doesn't use any server at all.
I use Qbserve, can vouch for it being a very nice tracking system. Can't vouch about its privacy guarantees, but only because I haven't double-checked them. (I use Qbserve only on my work computer on which I don't plan on doing anything I wouldn't my employer to know). It does have some kind of database in which URLs/programs have a crowdsourced taxonomy. For example, I think news.ycombinator.com is by default flagged as "Distracting" activity. For sites/programs that haven't been classified as "Productive" or "Distracting", things are put into a "Neutral/Uncategorized" bucket. And you can go into the details panel and manually classify the content for yourself.
When doing the classification, there is a checkbox for "Send to developers to improve Qbserve": https://imgur.com/a/Rei0e
I have no reason to assume that that checkbox is obeyed, or that info isn't leaked in other ways -- but just saying I haven't tried to verify it FWIW.
Yes and no – I doubt that we will have enough resources to build a real sync because it's really hard to implement but only a small number of people will use it. It could be possible by making a "team edition" and recovering costs by selling the app to companies but I really don't like the idea of managers spying on their teams by using Qbserve.
But I was contemplating an idea of merging scheduled exports from multiple Macs with a simple web app.
Maybe make a multi-computer db selector? That way you don't have to merge databases with a sync algo, just give a drop-down to view your other computers dbs in a read only fashion from some dropbox drive or similar.
According to the feedback we've got, the usual goal is to see combined stats from multiple sources. I also have a suspicion that having a DB with multiple connections in a cloud storage wouldn't end well.
It depends if those cloud sync folders do atomic swaps of the files once they do a sync update or if they update in place as your reading the file. The key is making the 'other computers' dbs readonly from the perspective of the client view rendering app.
Shameless plug for my own tracker, in case anyone is interested: I built https://agh.io/about for productivity/time tracking. The advantage is that it's completely passive, but still can accurately classify time spent away from your computer (e.g. driving), zoning out in a puddle of drool with emacs open, talking to a coworker about a project while leaving your browser on HN. Things that most time trackers fail at.
There's some potentially interesting data here but I found it disappointing that this article was mainly showing averages. I'd love to learn what distinguishes the most productive folks from the average. Are they more consistent? Do they check email a lot less? Do they tend to work more in the morning?
To this point, I'd like to know what distinguishes the least productive from the average. Or more plainly stated: what are the traps everyone should avoid to maintain reasonable levels of productivity.
How could you differentiate between people who use their computers least as being the most productive (they get everything done in the shortest time and then do something else), or the least productive (they do the least work)? Or the people who use their computers most as the most productive (they get the most done), or least productive (they spend more time on work activities but still fail to complete things).
Only measuring how much time you spend on something isn't enough to measure your productivity.
A good report would be what websites/apps are common among the least productive and what websites/apps are common among the most productive.
BTW, I love RescueTime! It has helped me wean myself off of my news addiction, especially during business hours. I wish the trending view would show longer time spans though! Can't they build cubes for different time spans to make the reports go fast over longer timescales?
The least productive people I knew simply did not worked much. They did spend time in work, sometimes a lot of time, but ultimately most of that time was slacking around and then pretending that 10 minutes task actually was difficult and took whole day.
They might have been burned out. At the stage before your body prevents you from getting physically to work your work output takes a very serious nose dive.
How do you know? Sometimes it can be difficult for others to tell if somebody is burned out or not besides that their productivity, motivation etc tank.
Burned out people have history of producing a lot in the past or working on high pressure projects. Also, they don't keep doing nothing long term, they tend to seek solution.
Lastly, not sure how them being burned out would changed all that much. The impact on team would be all the same.
Regarding your second point, sure, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome much, but most people have more sympathy for someone who is burnt out than for someone who is just lazy. Also, a burnt out person can be helped to recover while a lazy person probably should just be fired.
I agree with helping people, especially those burned out because your own management pressured on them. And it is also true that a lot of demotivation happen when management is bad and those people start working good once they are in better environment or more suitable position (it positions are not made equal and one can excel in one and fail in different one).
But sometimes, laziness is the thing.
My original point was meant to be that as long as you think about out productivity, have somewhere back in your mind that something should be produced today, you are fine and not in that worst performer category. Because you are trying and that will keep you away from such fall. It was meant to be reassuring in some way.
Absolutely, I didn’t mean to imply that they weren’t lazy in this particular case, I just wanted to make sure because I often hear people dismiss actual problems (eg recently I heard someone say that most people with anxiety are making it up...). Obviously that isn’t the case here, but I sometimes feel compelled to defend people who might suffer from burnout/anxiety/depression/etc, so I wanted to be sure.
"But the bottom line is that the productivity score doesn’t tell you anything about what you actually produce. It’s simply a number that can give you an interesting baseline of where your attention is, but doesn’t tell 100% of the story. It’s a way to understand your patterns, and not a prescription for how you should be spending your time."
So, this is basically an indicator of how much time you spend on an activity and not how "productive" you are. Like they say, productivity is a charged word. I wish there was a way to tag productivity and efficiency together.
> It’s not only time spent that’s the issue, however. On average, we check in on social media sites 14 times per workday, or nearly 3 times an hour during our 5-hour digital day.
We're checking this stuff 3x an hour while we're supposed to be working!
I can't help but see the parallel to the incessant cigarette breaks of the previous generation. Social media might turn out to be just as bad for health/productivity.
I like RescueTime, although I think it’s good to use for a few months, get a baseline, and then move on.
More to the point, and taking out my axe to grind, all of this focus on productivity and being a “success!” is helpful, but also amusing and adisheartening. Please stick with me here, but if you look into sociology written over the last 20 years, it’s tragic (but also inspiring) how Americans tried and tried to work harder, even though the cost of everything went up 3x and the amount of work needed to attain that same stuff also went up 3x, thus meaning everything required 9x more effort.
I love people working hard, but it’s shocking when you learn that adjusted to BOTH population growth and inflation, an apartment in New York City should rent for about $900 today.
If linear trends continue (they won’t fortunately, some kind of large crisis will reset them) we’ll be talking about preparing kids to be a “CEO!” at 14 or earlier, maybe even there will be “CEO Camps”. What a delight...
> If linear trends continue (they won’t fortunately, some kind of large crisis will reset them) we’ll be talking about preparing kids to be a “CEO!” at 14 or earlier, maybe even there will be “CEO Camps”. What a delight...
In England, those are called boarding schools. My understanding is that the good ones exist to teach their students how to talk all proper-like, and to have a healthy disdain for the proles.
"Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."
(I watched this again three nights ago. Brilliance never dies.)
I would love to see an analysis of the productivity an hour before meetings. My guess is that it’s generally much lower than the baseline. And especially half an hour before
Definitely true for me. If I have something looming, I am completely distracted and struggle to start anything knowing it will just be interrupted. Then you have those situations where you avoid starting anything 15 minutes out from a client arriving, then they run late and you've thrown away 30+ minutes.
Not sure how much it correlates with IT. I'm sure it does on higher levels. But on lower/mid levels, lot of meetings are just regular work stuff. Inter/intra team communication, talks with clients, etc.
“The biggest piece of advice we can pull from all this data is to be aware of the limited time you have each day for meaningful work, and spend it wisely.
Our days are filled with distractions, and it’s up to us to protect what time we have.”
To my mind it represents a failure of imagination to present this conclusion as if it might be an unavoidable reality.
I prefer to take it as a diagnosis of a solvable problem.
I’ve always been curious how much work the average person does per day. It would be a very valuable metric to have for setting expectations - of course we’re all different and listen to yourself, but just to have a ballpark...
I burned myself out at my last gig trying to be nearly 100% productive all the time since expectations are opaque. Sure, “nobody cares how much you work as long as your work gets done” but what about when the work is estimated poorly (and everything is always late...). Too nebulous of a statement.
The 12.5 hours number from the article seems pretty rough given that it’s based only on time spent in app, but it’s something.
I wrote https://betterself.io (open-sourced) to figure this out for myself. After analyzing a year's worth of supplements and habits -- meditation at the start of my day had the highest correlation of productivity beating out any supplement I bought (I tried about 70+ supplements last year).
Any other useful correlations? Also a note on the page linked: it's not clear to me whether I need another app collecting the data or if I will need to directly enter it in your app.
>I’ve always been curious how much work the average person does per day. It would be a very valuable metric to have for setting expectations - of course we’re all different and listen to yourself, but just to have a ballpark...
I work in sessions of 45 minutes, then I take a 15 minute break. I use MagicWorkCyclce [1] to time this. I usually get 6 blocks of 45 minutes in on a good day. That corresponds to 4.5 hours of "real" work (deep work, focused mode work, whatever). I'm an academic, if that matters.
Usually stand up, stretch my legs, talk to some people if I'm at the office. Most of the times I always get a cup of tea as well (or coffee if its before 1pm)
I can't strictly speak on my productivity for these times, but I spend an average of 24 out of 40 hours per week focused in on my IDE, text editor, testing application, CI server, etc. My per day time fluctuates between 4 hours and 6 hours. These times include both developing and administrative tasks like managing tickets.
Note that I don't have the plugin running in my shell. Ay Git actions or fiddling with the shell does not get counted.
> Sure, “nobody cares how much you work as long as your work gets done” but what about when the work is estimated poorly (and everything is always late...).
Estimates are just that, they are guides. They are often wrong.
One trick I discovered last year is that whenever I feel like procrastinating I reach for my Kindle Oasis. It sucks much less energy than HN or browsing or aimless computer work.
My pet peeve with all these time trackers is that... It's just a wrong metric, unless what you're doing is an assembly line equivalent, where you just need to put in the hours.
And don't get me started on such trackers having 'leaderboards' where you're 'competing' with colleagues.
"if you’re a writer, time spent in Microsoft Word or Google Docs is categorized as very productive while social media is very distracting."
Just wondering how about those people whose job is to actually monitor social media sites, or are the social media personnel for some companies? Their time obviously should not fall under the distracted category.
And also, even for writers, there would be occasions where you'd need a peek at social media sites to gather some inspiration. Or if you are writing about a topic, and social media becomes your source for relevant information, then that as well should not be construed as wasted time.
Will there be a way to have an objective measurement of every person's productivity? Collect all data based on outcomes desired for each task? At the moment, there's just too many variables at play to even consider measuring productivity.
As someone who briefly used RescueTime, you can flag every website (and app) on a scale from "highly unproductive" to "highly productive." They can also be neutral or "in between" (as in, (un)productive, but not highly (un)productive). So in this situation, you would tag social media as being productive and move on with your work.
The stats are a bit misleading maybe for software devolopers because we spend a lot of time reading specs on features and reading about solutions to possible problems on Google before we can implement them.
You do not have a time problem. You have an energy problem. We. Have an energy problem.
The reason you only get three hours of stuff done on Saturday and then you ‘waste’ the rest of the day is because you had three hours of energy. The rest of the day you’re just filling time. Not because you’re bad, or lazy, or selfish. Because you’re spent.
The difference between productive people and you is not time management. Their skill is in dealing with taxing experiences. They avoid it, delegate it, or confront it on their own terms at the time of their choosing. Some shift their perspective to make it less taxing (not everyone hates weeding). And when they run out of energy they engage in activities that recharge them instead of filling time or merely drain them slower (see also: me and video games or TV)
If you know where to look, we already know this subconsciously. A bunch of industry Best Practices are more time consuming but less energy intensive than the alternative. We balk at scheduling two difficult tasks in the same time interval even though they both “only” take less than half of your time. A task that takes four hours might leave you exhausted, and all you can do for the rest of the day is read email and code reviews and browse Hacker News. Nobody can rearrange your schedule or demean youbinto anything productive during that time. If you try you’ll just make mistakes. Which is why you’re trying to Do No Harm by “goofing off”. You already know this you just don’t have the words like “self-care” to express it.