I use this concept of a "billable nap" ... it gets to the midafternoon and I'm deep in a programming problem, and my thought process gets far too fuzzy. So I can either spend a couple of hours or more struggling through, or I can shut my eyes for a bit 20 minutes idelally, and then nail the problem down in a much shorter time than without the nap.
Yeah, my work pays me the same whether I work 40 or 60 hours, so I cut my day short whenever I know I'm not gonna be productive. Usually it saves me a few hour of struggling and the solution comes to me first thing in the morning. I'm also the top 5% committer in my company even though I almost never touch 35h/week (caveat: I don't advertise this behavior at work and I work from home). Companies would really do themselves a favor cutting the day short, 40h of coding/meetings/etc a week is way too much for a lot of people.
Can also relate--I've been writing software for 15 years, and for probably the first 5 years I produced more raw lines of code than the last 10. At some point we (hopefully) all learn that slogging more code at a problem has a vanishingly small chance of solving it well.
The act of sleeping on a problem is almost mystical in that solutions seem to come out of thin air. The reality is that you're allowing your experience time to apply itself.
yeah totally. I'll rage against the 40 hour work week any time anyone will let me. Personally I think I've got around 5 good coding hours in me in a day - ideally around 7:30 to 12:30. Schedule meetings for when I'm useless after that please.
well I mostly work remotely, and I have a reputation as someone who can get stuff done reliably.
When I was last in an office full time, commuting on the train a few years ago I'd usually be the first in my team to arrive, and then first to leave - basically trying to do 7:30 to 4 but I'd generally be pretty useless for the last couple of hours of the day.
pro-tip: loop your legs and arms through the handles or straps of the bags you're traveling with to prevent people from stealing them while you sleep
e.g. put your backpack on your lap against your chest and cross your arms through the straps, stick your leg through the loop of a duffel bag handle, etc
What could be dangerous with sleeping on a train? I always sleep on trains and buses, I even change when I go to sleep, so I'm tired when on the train, so I can fall asleep.
M5x7wI3CmbEem10, I first thought you were worried about sleeping too long, getting off at the wrong station
I suppose it's getting robbed? And that you live in a quite different part of the world than me :-/
Just get your work done and don't broadcast loudly how/when you did it. I've worked fewer and fewer hours every year of my current job and my performance reviews all focus on the high velocity with which I work. I've never been asked nor told anyone how many hours a week I log in front of the screen.
(wfh definitely helps with this but even before that, I kept odd/hard to track hours and no one ever questioned me)
sorry, can you detail this a bit more or give an example? if you get a week’s worth of work done in a day and send a pull request, surely they would see that you completed the task much faster.
I hope you work somewhere that code review exists. If you put a week's worth of work into a single pull request, you're probably making it too hard on your reviewer. So I break up my patches into smaller chunks (too small can easily be annoying as well, but I digress). These chunks and the conversations surrounding them can spread out over the rest of the week even though the focused time required to shepherd them along is <<8 hrs a day.
"billable walks" are the same - nothing helps focus like walking around around downtown with noise cancelling headphones on and letting life buzz all around you.
That can be a pretty hard sell if you work in an office for a company that doesn't have dedicated nap pods. I've never really felt comfortable taking a nap at the office, myself.
yeah it's much easier to achieve as a remote worker in a different time zone. In my time zone, my nap time tends to coincide with things winding up for the day at the mothership.
Even in the same time zone, it would be relatively easy for me to disappear for 30 minutes after lunch. All I'd have to do is block it off on my calendar as "busy," and nobody would ever say anything, which is how it should be when you're an adult working with other adults.
