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How I got to 200 productive hours a month

853 pointsby miqktover 7 years ago

40 comments

ulkeshover 7 years ago
&gt; Caution: The mentioned amount of hours is not advisable for people working on someone else&#x27;s business for illusory stock options, with no payment for overtime. There&#x27;s also no point in going beyond this number because working over 50 hours a week actually decreases productivity. Life should come first in the &quot;work-life balance.&quot;<p>Great disclaimer in the article. The only problem is that many employers will be quite happy with people working 50+ hours per week. It&#x27;s up to the employee to not let an employer take that much advantage of them (this includes having enough savings to be able to put in notice at the job at any point, assuming no contract or law would prevent it). The current landscape of the technology field, while lucrative for an employee, especially in the United States, is tremendously skewed toward the business where many employers see high turn-around as the rule, and no longer the exception, leading the employer to expect employees to work such high numbers of hours.<p>If a person likes working 200 hours per month, I wish them all the best and hope they are hourly-paid. Being salary-paid and having a family means I will continue to limit myself to 40 hours per week working for someone else. At a point where I work for myself, then, of course, that number may change.
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mbrockover 7 years ago
TL;DR: Basically getting up early and doing 4 hours of deep work has changed my life from really stressful and bad to really productive and nice.<p>One thing really fundamentally helped me, as someone who works from home on a large project in an asynchronous 100% remote organization.<p>I work on a fairly involved project that demands a lot of hard work. At the same time there are other things I want to get done: some administrative duties, some nonprofit work, etc etc.<p>That makes me stressed and anxious, and my natural response to that is to buckle down and try to &quot;finish&quot; the big projects, by overworking...<p>Except overworking doesn&#x27;t actually tend to mean getting a lot of work done, because I spend more mental energy being stressed about how much I have to do than I spend on actually doing it.<p>It&#x27;s a pretty vicious cycle and I guess it is a proximate cause of burnout.<p>It all changed when I realized I cannot sustainably do more than a few hours of hard work every day, and took that to heart.<p>Now I don&#x27;t try to get more done in a day than is sustainably possible.<p>I wake up pretty early, around 6, sometimes 7, sometimes 5. Then I make a cup of coffee, some small breakfast, and sit down in my comfortable coding environment, and do a sprint of serious working.<p>About 4 hours of that is usually enough to land a decent series of commits that definitely advance the project.<p>Then I do the mental magic that previous me never did. I think: &quot;Wow, that&#x27;s great work for one day! I&#x27;m definitely on track!&quot;<p>And at this point it&#x27;s like 11 AM. So I can happily go have lunch, another cup of coffee, listen to a podcast or something, and know that I have plenty of time in the afternoon for paying bills and whatnot.<p>I also like to take some time in the afternoon to improve my work life in some rewarding way. This includes Emacs tweaking, build server and CI setup, etc. Lately I&#x27;ve managed to get my business email into a form that I enjoy.<p>(Details: my maildir gets mined for all the important recurring PDFs which end up in monthly folders, and since yesterday I even have a shell script that uses &quot;pdftotext -layout&quot; to parse out due amounts and OCR&#x2F;reference numbers from the few recurring bills we need to pay manually. This eliminates a type of drudgery that I really loathe, so it&#x27;s a huge win in terms of mental energy.)
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syllogismover 7 years ago
When I read the article I was thinking there was actually something quite simple missing from it. I found that just <i>measuring</i> the number of productive hours per day was enough to be very helpful in breaking some bad habits, because it made me mindful of how I was spending my time.<p>I was going to suggest the Qbserve tracker for this --- then I saw that that&#x27;s actually your app! I guess you didn&#x27;t want to plug it more, but anyway -- it&#x27;s really good. I really missed it when I switched to Ubuntu.
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shooverover 7 years ago
I read this as a single article distillation of the principles in Deep Work by Cal Newport, very well done. It&#x27;s been a while since I read Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt, but the article feels familiar with that, as well (I recall a helpful section on meditation). The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry is another great resource.<p>Newport&#x27;s sources showed that most people are capable of about four hours of deep work per day. If you hit that level, add in 2-3 hours of shallower tasks, and do it <i>every</i> day, you reach 200 &quot;productive hours&quot; in a month. I&#x27;m not sure how many people are willing or able to carve out two 3-hour blocks more than five days a week, but it seems highly worthwhile to step back once a month or quarter, with one&#x27;s s.o. or family, if present, and think about what is possible and what makes sense in support of mutual goals. From there, in light of the goals and constraints, the article&#x27;s breakdown for cultivating the environment, body, and mind are clarifying. Ok, I&#x27;m sitting down with my wife and doing this this weekend.<p>The gist of the article is what I try to practice, and I find the strategy refresher motivating. I have had good success with removing push notifications, removing the phone from the workspace, sleeping at the same time, regular breaks to stay limber, targeted muscle work (rowing during winter until it gets too boring, the Roam Strong workout plan currently), and reducing junk calories intake. I&#x27;ve had less success building deep work persistence by making streaks and subdividing tasks. I think it&#x27;s time to force the break to a separate device for leisure.<p>How much is it worth spending on a CO2 monitor? As a remote worker, I&#x27;m in the same air space almost all day every day, so if there is a low grade problem, I&#x27;m cooked.
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kobeyaover 7 years ago
&gt; Two years ago I could spend a week not working because I was avoiding some task.<p>This is a great article and there’s plenty to talk about in organizational systems, even if this seems to be subtly pitching his own products in places. But if anyone reading this identifies with this sort of chronic procrastination, consider seeking psychiatric help. This is a giant red flag for adult ADHD, which is a serious and often misunderstood issue, and one of the few psychiatric diagnoses for which there is solid treatments (stimulants) with near universal efficacy and very few side effects. Getting on Adderall, then Vyvanse changed my life for the better, and basically solved this issue overnight, as well as a bunch of other benefits.
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wellyover 7 years ago
Who works 200 hours a month? That&#x27;s either five 10 hour days a week or roughly seven 7 hour days a week. My time off work is far, far too important to me to be working either of those options.<p>It seems I value working less than other people. I&#x27;m fine with that.
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scandoxover 7 years ago
&gt; The next step is taming your pocket monster.<p>This really meant something quite different to me. I think sex (in whatever form) is an issue that needs to be taken semi-seriously within this context.<p>Professors Mitchell and Webb have good advice: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk</a>
dispo001over 7 years ago
These type of articles are always shit, I expected it to be shit but clicked the link anyway. Imagine my surprise when it wasn&#x27;t shit.<p>Now if only implementation didn&#x27;t terrify me.... hah...<p>The big &quot;trick&quot; described seems to be an instance of: You are the product of your environment if you like it or not. There is very little you can do to fight its influences. The environment is there and you are becoming it. The only conscious remedy is to make the environment into what you want to be.<p>I think the article provides the means to do a check list that could convince companies to allow remote work.
wingerlangover 7 years ago
EDIT: Not that sneaky, just me completely blanking on the sentence after the actual link! Original comment below.<p>----<p>Sneaky. I clicked around on the links he had on his tools and found one that looked interesting (Qbserve) and it turns out it&#x27;s one of his products which I felt would have been nice to have as a note. The only indication of this is the bottom footer header which also says Qbserve.
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gazarullzover 7 years ago
For those people that manage to get up pretty early, 4-5 in the morning, how do they cope with the weekend and what kind of weekend schedule do they have ?<p>What time do they usually go to sleep and what is their noon daily pattern (weekday and weekends).<p>Most importantly how do they spend their time after 7pm during workdays and weekends ?
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rdudekulover 7 years ago
&quot;Some people report success with Pomodoro, but I find it too short to make a deep dive into work.&quot;<p>Pomodoro technique has been working for me very well. I started with 25 minute Pomodoros, gradually increased the duration to now 50 minutes per Pomodoro. I am able to do deep work (per my needs) consistently for about 4 Pomodoros per day.
zerrover 7 years ago
Interesting. Yet another &quot;Mac&quot; time tracker and todo management app. Do all these apps make some ramen income (at least)? An article on this would&#x27;ve been more useful ;)
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McMiniover 7 years ago
Reading this while procrastinating feels good
dahartover 7 years ago
There is too much good advice in this article. ;) By that I mean all the advice is great, but it&#x27;s very difficult to change multiple habits at the same time, especially core habits like eating and sleeping and entertainment and work. Whenever I do that I revert pretty quickly. Changing one thing at a time and figuring out how to remove the friction from that one thing has been my path to success.<p>For work hours, a simple work timer is what does the trick for me. I use Toggl - I have no affiliation, I dont know if it&#x27;s the best, and I don&#x27;t necessarily recommend it, but it does make it easy to keep track of how many minutes a day I&#x27;m sitting at my desk, and to assign those minutes to various tasks. Just having a metric for work hours is a big change and has helped me stay more focused.
treehau5over 7 years ago
I found a lot of this advice, coincidentally, in the book &quot;Respawn&quot; over at game quitters (I had a horrible video game addiction that I decided I needed to break) -- that is the advice to apply the same psychological principles that get people hooked to video games to other things in life. This is the ultimate life hack for me and something I am still working on.
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dsenkusover 7 years ago
Thanks for great article, I found some good ideas how to optimise my workflow. I think everyone should spend some time adopting these techniques, instead of relying on &quot;autopilot&quot; mode.<p>Here&#x27;s my mindmap of this article if anyone is interested: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;RnRgV" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;RnRgV</a>
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notMickover 7 years ago
Great advice for clearing the distractions. Another technique to use is to set 15 minute timers. You can try and get something completed in that time (ie race the clock challenge), or just a &quot;wake up&quot; event to alert you that you&#x27;ve been staring at a poster for the last 10 mins.....
emodendroketover 7 years ago
I don&#x27;t believe anybody is really productive 200 hours in a month. Focus on fewer things if you feel you need to work 50 hours a week, every week.
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freshhawkover 7 years ago
Besides the larger issues of whether or not this is something you <i>should</i> be doing, this seems a decent overview.<p>Except for one part, the amount of exercise is terribly low. A swim a couple times a week and 30 minute walks every day is not good enough for your health <i>or</i> if you are chasing peak performance. First of all, this isn&#x27;t even enough to offset the damage this much inactivity will cause.<p>If you want peak mental performance and endurance then you want to be very active and very fit. Doesn&#x27;t really matter what it is, although it should favour cardio over muscle mass at least a little.
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JetSpiegelover 7 years ago
I was expecting the answer to be &quot;hired a employee&quot;, not &quot;worked 50h work weeks&quot;.
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empath75over 7 years ago
&gt;Such news don&#x27;t actually inform us but spread sensationalism, negative emotions, and outright lies to capture attention. What do you gain from following the latest political crisis or some scandal? You can&#x27;t do anything meaningful about these events. They only depress you and occupy space in your mind. It&#x27;s better to direct your focus toward things that we can actually impact and improve.<p>This is a depressing point of view to have and dangerous to the future of democratic system.
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fidrajover 7 years ago
One of my coworkers is doing this: wake up early at about 6am, work till 4pm = 9 hours with a lunch break and commute.<p>After he comes back home, he spends time with his gf watching tv but still coding for another 2 hours at least.<p>This way he can work 220 hours a month not counting his side projects he works on weekends&#x2F;free time.<p>He is easily pulling about 250-260 hours a month.<p>Yes, he&#x27;s a workaholic.
shade23over 7 years ago
While I love the advice, my qualm are with the measurement of productivity,I use qbserve too,checking my logs I see 307 hours as an average for the past 4 months.(this includes office and my personal projects and also my studies(distance masters).But not every moment you spend on an IDE,terminal,&lt;insert other tools associated with productivity&gt; .. productive.I know that I spend 20% of time yak shaving.Trying to figure out why something simple is broken.This is not the time I would count as productivity.<p>Measuring productivity as the completion of goals&#x2F;output generated per hour spent seems to be a more viable quantity, however goals get modified too.Plus this is a much more time consuming process than just measuring hours.<p>I find measuring time spent on productive apps to be analogous to measuring productivity using LOC, both are opaque and do not convey the actual meaning of what they are measuring.
unfamiliarover 7 years ago
Are there any MyFitnessPal alternatives that don&#x27;t force you to log in so that they can monetise my eating habits?
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SubiculumCodeover 7 years ago
The author mentions that George R.R. Martin uses a similar set-up to separate work from leisure.<p>Then I think: George RR Martin is a notoriously slow writer. Many are legitimately worried he will not finish GoT before heart disease takes the beloved author.
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ivanhoeover 7 years ago
So he basically works effectively 6 hours a day, every day of the week? If he wouldn&#x27;t work for weekends that would be 30 something hours a week, which is for the most people a pretty relaxed work week. Plus he works on his own project from home (no clients to talk to, no deadlines, no distractions by co-workers, full control of the environment). Not to say that advices author gives are bad in any way, all of them are great and worth reading, just that the whole thing isn&#x27;t as epic as the title suggests.
hobos_delightover 7 years ago
I just finished this[1] book with tips about how to get back into that deep work routine, and whilst I&#x27;m not there yet - there have been some immediately tangible benefits.<p>Like turning off work email push notifications, developing a routine (for my study after work - MSCS) and scheduling all parts of my day and sticking to them.<p>It&#x27;s not a long book, but I highly recommend it.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calnewport.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;deep-work&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calnewport.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;deep-work&#x2F;</a>
chiefofgxbxlover 7 years ago
&gt; Walk for at least 30 minutes daily in a green place to relax your mind.<p>If you have this resource available at your workplace (or even from home), consider yourself lucky. I imagine most software developers, including myself, don&#x27;t have access to green space to be able to take a 30min walk!<p>Maybe its time our zoning codes require preserving some green space around work places...<p>Whether I&#x27;m at work or even at my apartment, I&#x27;m surrounded by sprawl - highways, roads, parking lots. I am trapped no matter where I am.
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leksakover 7 years ago
Am I the only one trying to do less?
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c3534lover 7 years ago
Oh, the irony of reading this when I was supposed to be working.
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sevensorover 7 years ago
Work from home, sleep more than seven hours, take naps, work in uninterrupted 3-hour bursts? I&#x27;m going to go out on a limb here and guess the author has no children.
patwallsover 7 years ago
&gt; Get a separate device for leisure and use it far from your workplace to cultivate location-based behaviors.<p>Can someone explain this more? Curious to how others approach this as well.
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agumonkeyover 7 years ago
&gt; The core principle of a productive environment is increasing the friction required to slip into distracting activities, so that it takes a significant effort to get distracted<p>I somehow believe that subconsciously, that&#x27;s why we &quot;go to&quot; work. Staying at home doesn&#x27;t disengage the leisure part of our brains enough for most.<p>Being far makes it easy deep down to care about something else.
phasnoxover 7 years ago
&quot;Procrastination itself can have different causes — maybe the task is too complex or too boring, fear of failure or simple laziness. Even a slight presence of these negative factors can make us go for instant rewards&quot;<p>My entire life described in 2 sentences.
sciroccoover 7 years ago
There are very few applications I allow to send notifications.
PikelEmiover 7 years ago
How many was reading this article while on work?
mezuziover 7 years ago
I was enjoying the article until the first occurrence of the word &quot;meditation&quot;. How about telepathy or neuro-linguistic programming??
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saikatsgover 7 years ago
Turn off notifications...now!
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jlebrechover 7 years ago
I found when I freelanced I would only work on direct requests that needed immediate action for the first half of the day and count that as me time, and work post office hours on the stuff that needed my focus.
throwawagrrmover 7 years ago
questionable choice on the grrm citation