Maybe you should do less 'work'

There was a time during the first shut down when my company decided to reduce peoples hours and also reduce their salaries instead of laying off more employees. I end up working 20 hours a week (instead of my normal 35) with a reduced salary (and I was even able to collect partial California unemployment benefits for the remainder of the reduced hours under a special program called Workshare).<p>Honestly it was amazing - made me really want to find a job that was less pay but also that low in hours. Working less than 40 is nice but once you get down to 20 you have whole DAYS where you can do whatever you want. You sometimes start work at noon or end at noon and then have the remainder of your weekday to yourself or in the company of others. It was an odd experience seeing my neighbours and friends going through so much stress and pandemic related BS while I was (temporarily at least) having revelations about how much I wanted to work in life. Fortunately and unfortunately it was very short lived.

Getting my task completed at my own pace makes me feel good. Often that is fast and on time. In my heart, when I touch the keyboard, I feel like a greyhound dog with a little Bob Ross afro - it can be a race, a competition, but it is also an expression of my art.<p>This article makes me feel bad because in the authors world, people like me are relegated to worker bee monkies trying to please the bossman due to pathology or some such delusion. I work this way because it pleases me. Doing my tasks diligently and in a timely manner affords me more time to relax, review what I have created, and enjoy it rather than drag myself to the next task.<p>A bit off topic but as of late there is this creeping normalization of intentionally subpar or less optimized results I&#x27;m noticing in our industry but also general society.<p>When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort? It is as if everyone is so aloof that if you show any effort or appreciation of your craft that you&#x27;re societally acknowledging your own serfdom or that you&#x27;re serving &quot;the man&quot;.

Beyond those arguments, it&#x27;s also important to remind that we should work between 20 or 30 hours per week, not more.<p>It&#x27;s about health, being able to rest, do leisure, physical activity, see friends, date, etc.<p>There are things to learn about the antiwork mentality. Not saying everyone should quit their job, but still, it would be nice if everyone could be able to negotiate with their employees.<p>I have often been called a parasite, and honestly, it comforts me in realizing that I should not compete with people who turn work into a competition. Those people will generate enough taxes and labor for lazy people like me, and it&#x27;s okay.

Personal experience has taught me that there is a MAXIMUM amount of COMP that you will receive as an employee, no matter how much hard work you put into your company.<p>So basically what is happening, is that you are working hard for some achievements, that someone else is going to benefit off.

I&#x27;m glad they talk a good bit about perceptions. That&#x27;s really what it comes down to at the end of the day. Who cares if you&#x27;re doing a lot of work or a little work if nobody sees it.<p>I don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s expected of me, at least not in an objective way. They apparently want me to go faster. One thing they are looking at is if I&#x27;m finishing early and asking for more work. So they are using that as an indicator, which is contrary to this article&#x27;s advice.<p>I wish I had time to learn new skills. The work is so disjointed that you can never become an expert in one technology. Just constantly bouncing between systems, stacks, and languages. It&#x27;s a mess. I have no desire to learn a new technology right now just because I know I will never get the chance to use it or become good with it.

This is very solid advice. Once you become so productive that you don&#x27;t need all of your working hours to do your job, you should spend that time on skill acquisition - either learning about something adjacent that you don&#x27;t do daily or learn something that will be required for the next level (if that is your goal)<p>This is the only sane way I have found to progress in a tech career. The daily and weekly learning really adds up too - in my experience this is the difference someone who has 10 years of experience and someone who has &quot;2 years repeated 5 times&quot;

This reads a bit like deliberately aiming for Parkinson&#x27;s law. &quot;Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.&quot;<p>However, I agree to some extent. I&#x27;m especially opposed to the concept that there should be 8 productive hours in a day. I sincerely believe that this is for most people not possible in creative knowledge work, which includes software engineering. So, if you have 5 productive hours of engineering and finished your goal and are in line with expectations, there shouldn&#x27;t be a need to drain yourself to keep going, but rather spending your extra time on something else like job-related learning is a great way to prevent mental fatigue.<p>This is especially true as there can be very different &quot;energy distribution&quot; between people. One person can achieve in 4 productive hours what another can in 8. But one works in productive bursts and the other in sustained effort. The first can&#x27;t just sustain or expand that burst to 8 hours.

Can confirm this will not get you promoted, it will just get you more work. You are more valuable as a peon than management if you are this good at your job. Always act dumber than your boss.

I work at a software consultancy, and here are my hot tips around this:<p>- Take breaks between tasks. Your flow should mostly allow 5-10 minute breaks often (like once an hour or so) without anything or anybody blowing up.<p>- It&#x27;s healthy that your client (or bosses) will always want more work, especially if you and your team do good work.<p>- Always instill in your client (or bosses) that work will get done when it&#x27;s done. They are paying you to know how long something _should_ take, and to identify obstacles that could make something take longer, as well as the time you need to plan&#x2F;prepare to keep you and your team sane.<p>- Your best working state is when you&#x27;re relaxed. People have told me they work best under pressure, and I really refuse this to ever be true. You can certainly work under pressure, and even work fast, but I honestly believe your best work is the work that you enjoy and care for, not just the work you spit out fast.<p>- You can have fun doing just about any task if it&#x27;s not stressful. Sure, there are a lot boring tasks in software, like waiting for compiles, or doing slow-moving dev-ops work, but if there is a clear path with no major obstacles, it really won&#x27;t be that bad.<p>The biggest thing for me is having me and my team take breaks often. It&#x27;s a good time to reflect on the work that&#x27;s been done, think about a problem, or just take your mind off a larger problem for a few minutes. Depending on the industry, your client, your boss, etc., your mileage is going to vary, but as a software consultant, it is your job to advise on what time you need to get something done right.<p>So I guess I agree with the article. Not that you shouldn&#x27;t regularly give 100%, but you should always be buffered so in high stress, high stakes, you and your team have capacity to go above and beyond the usual, but your average work load isn&#x27;t maxing you out all the time.

You are the boss of a company of one. Your company sells labor to the labor market, it makes investments in assets, it borrows funds, etc.<p>It’s your job to decide how that company is run. It’s your job to decide what investments that company needs to make to get good returns.<p>It’s also your job to interpret the contracts your company enters into and decide what is acceptable, and to appropriately risk-manage legal hazard, reputational hazard, etc.<p>There is nobody <i>else</i> to run this company. It does not have a <i>right</i> to a good outcome. A lot of companies fail. Your company of one WILL fail if you make poor decisions.<p>When you truly internalise that last fact is when you become an adult.<p>(Edit: clarified that the last paragraph refers to the previous one specifically)

I think most engineers who always search for tasks and work long hours are dealing with some form of anxiety or imposter syndrome.<p>If management hasn’t brought up any performance issues and you’re anxious about your job you need to talk to someone. You’re on the road to burnout.

This is quite correct. Never assume YOU KNOW what people expect of you WITHOUT EXPLICITLY ASKING for details.<p>For me, when I was a young buck, I assumed they wanted the perfection that I EXPECTED. Turns out 99% of the time, I was grossly overestimated what and how much others expected or wanted from my efforts. So I developed the habit of asking lots of questions about what would satisfy them (boss, customers, peers, employees, etc.) for just about any task, project, effort, etc. It also meant (often) that I had to work far less and with less stress.<p>NEVER ASSUME. Always ask what would be sufficient and then ONLY do what is sufficient. The advantage is they get what they want and you can get schedules, deliverables, etc. right and on-time which makes everyone happier than overdelivering and being late at the same time.

Maybe the most important reason: If you are a salaried employee, the more work you do only cheapens your labor. And it cheapens the labor f your fellow employees.

The short term reward of feeling good about completing a feature or fixing a bug is intoxicating. Even learning a new skill can quickly make you feel better about yourself. It&#x27;s easy to justify that spending excess time on things like this because it has a clear ROI - you become a better developer, you get paid more, you feel smarter.<p>Just be careful to also invest in things that have a more distant ROI. Family, kids, health, friends, community service, mental health, spirituality - whatever it is that you value.<p>If you are unfamiliar with what else there is out there that can bring happiness, I&#x27;d suggest reading &quot;How will you measure your life?&quot; by Clayton Christensen. He&#x27;s the same guy that wrote the &quot;Innovators Dilemma&quot;.

100% hard agree.<p>One thing that I&#x27;d like to add as well. If you&#x27;re an employee, getting 120% of the same job done will 99% of the time NOT get you promoted faster.<p>The folks who get promoted typically do because they&#x27;re visible in several places.<p>Do 100% of your job, and then do 20% of something else. Blog, Mentor, do POCs, network, .... Find your own way.<p>It&#x27;s maybe unfair, I know, but I&#x27;ve seen so many frustrated folks seeing other get promoted while &quot;they were the ones going the extra mile for their project&quot;.<p>Plus, if you do things visible outside, you can sell that much easier to whoever employer comes next than &quot;I&#x27;ve pushed out more features than my colleagues&quot;.

I think the main point this article is missing is that having to work extremely hard (10-12 hrs+) usually implies there is something structurally wrong with the team. Your team is criminally understaffed, you aren&#x27;t getting enough time to fix tech debt, etc. While understaffed, there are times that you just have to work hard to keep things together, but if you don&#x27;t surface these issues up the chain then you will for sure burn out.

The key is doing visible work. This is why being a frontend dev is so rewarding at times. I can spend weeks cranking out some heavy algorithmic&#x2F;data structure code that does some incredibly important data manipulation that our app fundamentally relies on, but it won&#x27;t get as much kudos as a 10 line, 5 minute CSS fix that made someone&#x27;s workflow easier.

Lately I have been using the metaphor of &quot;keeping the temperature low&quot; at work to describe how I am approaching my work.<p>You see, in the past, I would work on all cylinders constantly worried about how I was performing and trying to get work done as fast as possible.<p>I would let the temperature rise and rise until I was boiling over.<p>And I would get a lot of work done! However:<p>1. This is unsustainable. It stressed me out and left no slack room for me to take on additional work.<p>2. It was annoying to work with me because I was constantly stressed out about nothing.<p>I was judging myself for not working hard enough, while working harder than anyone else around me. And what comes naturally from judging yourself is judging others. And it was a viscous cycle.<p>Any more my priority is to take regular breaks, meditate, create space for myself to find compassion and love for the people around me, and overall just try and be a positive calming force in the company.<p>And people love it! I am complemented for my maturity and sensitivity and leadership abilities.

I&#x27;d like to rewrite this as &quot;Why you should maybe not work so hard for someone else&quot;. Intrinsically motivated people (you&#x27;ll know what I mean is you are one too) know no bounds to the ecstasy of work. Struggling toward a self-defined end is like flying in the clouds. In &quot;flow&quot;, work is no longer work at all.<p>It is labour relations within a late-capitalist system of dehumanising exploitation, over-systematisation and rampant financialisation that turns life&#x27;s greatest joy of having skills and purpose into farcical performance art, into an inefficient, resentment-fuelled spectacle of self-harm.

I&#x27;ve been in jobs where was less was expected of me than I was capable of delivering and, more often than not, jobs where more was expected of me than I was capable of delivering, at least for any considerable length of time without burnout.<p>Both were difficult. I like to think that if I had one of the lower effort needed jobs now that I would find other useful things to do like the author mentioned. At the time I mostly read books or played video games with other staff when I was done with my work. It was nice but a bit frustrating because I would go home and feel like I had already read and&#x2F;or played video games so I didnt have fun things to do after work.<p>Absolutely a problem from the top of the hierarchy of needs but still a problem.

I cannot disagree with the author given that modern companies are little more than an aggregation of short-term individuals each with her own agenda many of whom would happily backstab you in order to advance it.

&quot;And that&#x27;s why money isn&#x27;t nearly as important as SLACK. You can print or burn money, but you can&#x27;t manufacture SLACK. It is The Final Commodity. So They want it _all_.&quot;<p>The Book p. 94

I really resonate with this post; I don&#x27;t want to say I there&#x27;s something I &quot;struggle&quot; with but I do feel the need to be able to balance my time a bit more.<p>I&#x27;m often a very productive member of my team, I love challenges, and I love digging into things and coming out the other side and feeling accomplished; My manager gets me onto things and asks when they might be done by, and I feel complied to deliver more in shorter time frames.<p>It&#x27;s not so much that I feel &quot;pressured&quot; by expectations; but more I feel &quot;involved&quot; - my failures are the teams failures, my success is the team&#x27;s success. and I want my team&#x2F;product&#x2F;company to succeed, so I spend my effort contributing to that.<p>However, this does swamp out time for my personal things that I want to do; I am wanting to learn lisp, and have some of my own personal projects that I want to play around with, in a multitude of technologies; I don&#x27;t have spare time outside of work, so it&#x27;s really on work time that I want to be able to experiment with these things. as the author puts it - &quot;it doesn&#x27;t offer any immediate value to me or the company, ... but I think generally made me fitter smarter and more productive&quot;..<p>So for me, the balancing act, is to assert time to reflect&#x2F;recharge in other spheres of technology, while also feeling the communal duty of our team to get the company going.

The point IMVHO should, must be: did you work to live or did you live to work? Work is needed, not just because of the actual society but because even with the most advanced automation we need countless of thing that demand manual&#x2F;brain work, that&#x27;s is. But we live to live, not to work.<p>So we should and must work to obtain what we need and want, a certain safety etc, more than that is illogical. Some might like their work so doing it is a pleasure and for them work hard means being satisfied and that&#x27;s perfectly fine, however there is still a need to craft a life, because while we live in a society we need a family, friends, kids etc not just colleagues and services.<p>The above, at philosophical level for the whole society have issues, for instance since we have evolved enough to reduce natural selection by a big extent we need to learn to regulate our reproduction to satisfy both individual desire and social needs in resources terms, like avoiding being too much to been able to live or too little to make the species on the brink of extinction but that&#x27;s an a bit loose thing for individuals, just well studied incentives or disincentives likely suffice leaving individuals with significant willingness free to decide. Family and friend however are still a need, arriving at 80 alone at home and then go to a old people&#x27;s home is not that nice for most, for instance. Being able to organize a party with people we like is part of our life, we are social animals and reduce themselves to &quot;make a neighbor party&quot; it&#x27;s not good either. The rest is life.

&gt;If you can meet these expectations in fewer hours than you are supposed to work, then you shouldn&#x27;t just find more to do. Instead you should do something different.<p>This one really struck home for me. I will often quickly finish a task like refactoring a class heirarchy, then I will spend another 3 hours looking at it and the surrounding code to check for any unoptimal usages. But it always turns out to be a waste of time, because we have much bigger things on the backlog. Thanks for reminding me.

From my read, the title doesn&#x27;t seem accurate at all.<p>&gt;You should try and spend your time in ways that will benefit you and your employer.<p>The title says to do less work, but in reality seems you&#x27;re still doing as much work but rather developing those other skills. Really just improving yourself.<p>My 2 previous jobs were MSP. Like all MSPs, you wont control your schedule. someone else decides that you only need 30 minutes of your time to work on ticket X. It doesn&#x27;t matter if that ticket requires you to drive 45 minutes away and then 45 minutes back. You will get chewed out for not completing the work in the allotted time.<p>You will be required to do all the self-improvement on your own time and own dime.<p>My current job though is awesome. I have been afforded the time during work to work on open source python projects that are beneficial to the team.<p>For example, I had recommended we get solarwinds. less than a year later the solarwinds supply chain thing dropped. we dropped solarwinds. I decided screw it. I rebuilt the functionality we wanted in django. Prior to this job I didnt know python. Now I have multiple useful python projects.<p>I can certainly confirm that this approach has been much better.

&gt; <i>Obviously I don&#x27;t practise any of what I talk about here, and diligently ensure that I spend all my time at work delivering business value.</i><p>Obviously!<p>;)

I&#x27;m convinced that the only people who actually make what they are worth (at least in my industry) are people who either contract or start their own business. During my grad school years, my PI contracted with other companies for a minimum of $300 an hour, but I&#x27;ve seen others in the industry with higher rates. The higher up you go in our company go from being able to reimburse a couple thousand dollars in travel, to capping out at over 8 figures. The way I see it, being self employed is the only way for most people to achieve these types of numbers. Now I don&#x27;t have aspirations to ever work at those levels, I&#x27;m more focused on being debt free in the next ten years so I don&#x27;t have to work such a high powered job, and I can retire early. But when I see compensation numbers like that, it certainly makes me think twice about picking up more than my fare share of work just to generate good will within the company.

Um, because life is more important than work? Because your kids will only be young once and they don&#x27;t give a sh*t about your CV? Because you could be dead tomorrow? Because there is lots apart from work that gives you love, satisfaction and pleasure? Because you don&#x27;t need to be insanely wealthy? ...and a gazillion other reasons.

&gt; What do I mean by working as hard as possible? I mean someone who can finish all the work that is expected of them in less than the total time that they are meant to spend working and then asks for more, similar, work to do.<p>I was surprised the author didn&#x27;t use the term &#x27;workaholic&#x27; but I&#x27;m older so maybe it&#x27;s an older term. Google trends does show a steady decline in the use of the term [1]<p>Oxford defines a workaholic as &quot;a person who compulsively works hard and long hours.&quot; There are too many reasons for this compulsion to go into in a comment...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?date=all&amp;geo=US&amp;q=workaholic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?date=all&amp;geo=US&amp;q=w...</a>

100% this, but let me add the <i>why</i>:<p>Most people don&#x27;t want to do good work, they just want to get paid and fuck off. It is really hard to grok this because it is just so disappointing and demotivating.<p>Most people lie constantly, to appear as if they want to do work, as if they give a fuck - they are lying to your face.<p>Once you realize this much, once you come to terms with what most people <i>are</i> - the rest will fall into place.<p>Until you grok this, these sorts of posts will seem like cynical takes, like someone who doesn&#x27;t want to work hard, who wants to be a free loader. No, these sorts of posts are cautionary tales that society is <i>filled</i> with free loaders and liars, so you need to tread with caution and know how to deal with these &#x27;people&#x27;.

One should definitely not be working hard. You need to minimize work and maximize income. The more you work, the less you actually make per-hour invested, if the income does not grow proportionally to surpass the current ratio. Unless you&#x27;re in a good strategic position which ensures you will get huge benefits by working hard (think large stake in the company), working hard is a losing game.<p>A company will pay you the bare minimum it can get away with, taking into considerations all sort of parameters (such as risk of attrition) so naturally, your optimal behavior should be to work as little as possible to not get fired. Use the extra time to invest in yourself or just enjoy life.

&quot;You should try and spend your time in ways that will benefit you and your employer.&quot;<p>This doesn&#x27;t mean to work 4h a day on a 40h week contract and playing gets.the rest of it.<p>And I think people doing that, are blocking their own carriers.<p>I make double what I made 6 years ago and can cut back to 50% with a still good salary.<p>If I would not have used my te properly I would be stuck in a job I probably don&#x27;t like because I&#x27;m not really contributing or really feeling appreciated because for what?<p>Is my boss happy enough with me can&#x27;t feel good.<p>Getting kudos because your stuff makes it easier for others or adds value or runs smoothly gives confidence and pride.<p>At least I like my work and tx to my attitude and skills I have more freedom not less.

Leverage, as a principle, is so important. I always try to keep the 80&#x2F;20 rule in mind. But perhaps most simply put, if you&#x27;re working harder and harder and not seeing results, then you&#x27;re probably focusing on the wrong things. There&#x27;s a natural up-and-down to projects where you&#x27;ll feel like things are going great, then terrible, then ok... But then there&#x27;s times where it doesn&#x27;t matter how much effort you put in, that boulder just isn&#x27;t gonna budge. It&#x27;s vital to step back and figure out whether your efforts should be refocused. Otherwise, it&#x27;s a recipe for burnout.

I haven’t figured out how to not work all the time, but I’d like to. More likely though I’m just going to quit without a job lined up long enough to recover from burnout and go back to things I love, until I need to work again.

I think for people who don’t agree with the article, perhaps seeking jobs that are outcome based are ideal. For those that are output based, I think it’s totally reasonable to cut back strategically.

Being in tech has the advantage of me being knowledgeable enough to pursue tools and languages of interest that will benefit both my business and day job.<p>That is what I did. I learned web development and used those skills to do projects at work and for my clients on weekends.<p>Later on, I learned project management. Used those skills at my day job and made a consultancy killing as a PM for hire.<p>I feel privleged to have been in this position. So, yes, I do advocate for spending time increasing your value at work. But that time should also work for you outside of that day job.

If you want to work hard because it’s some kind of virtue, pick up a second job in tech. Juggling two full time remote jobs will give you all the work you need for twice the income.

Ok. Great. You have established you&#x27;re exceptionally talented and can do it all. Now the question is whether you should do it all, and only you can answer that question. :)

(a) You should you whatever makes you happy. If that&#x27;s work then ok, but see (b)<p>(b) If doing &quot;work&quot; is what makes you happy, then when you are doing work on your own time, I&#x27;d suggest trying to stretch yourself. Try to do something which seems difficult, or radical. Allow yourself to fantasize that you&#x27;re going to become famous by doing this thing whatever it is.

Work addicts will have a hard time following this advice unless they get the same dopamine boost from other tasks like networking. Unlikely to happen until they accept they have a problem.

The problem is that this changes dynamically in function of opportunity and ambition, or its composed form: opportunity to expand ambition.

&quot;You didn&#x27;t tell him how long it would <i>really</i> take, did you?&quot; - Montgomery Scott

Most people work within some kind of incorporated structure, as employees or contractors on hourly wages or salaries. Unless they&#x27;re also invested in the corporate structure, i.e. they&#x27;re the providers of capital, they&#x27;ll see no real benefit from the success of the business other than avoiding losing their job when the business crashes.<p>The solution is pretty obvious, and is fairly common in Germany at least: employees and investors must be viewed as equivalent stakeholders. This means worker organizations should have as many voting seats on corporate boards as the investor organizations providing the capital do. It&#x27;s not one or the other - generally speaking, no workers means no business, and no capital also means no business. The result would be that profits get distributed equally to workers (as bonuses on top of wages&#x2F;salary) and investors.<p>Otherwise it&#x27;s the same problem as communist countries had: why work hard and be productive if you get the same reward for it as someone who sits around doing little or nothing? In response upper management will trot out lines like &#x27;we&#x27;re all a family here&#x27; and &#x27;you should enjoy the pride and satisfaction of a job well done&#x27; and similar nonsense.

i&#x27;ve always believed: avoid doing work on computers, use computers to do work instead.<p>my father&#x27;s generation called this: work smarter, not harder.<p>wise computer people call this: be lazy.<p>industrialization of software work runs counter to this, it&#x27;s your real job to defeat it.

<p><pre><code> &gt;&gt; *Obviously I don&#x27;t practise any of what I talk about here*</code></pre>

Don&#x27;t need to read the article just the headline I&#x27;m on it already !

One problem with this argument is of course that what is really expected of you, ultimately, is at least what the other guys are delivering, not just a certain amount of work a week.

There are times at which developers must give 110% effort in order to address critical business needs, unexpected outages, emergency pivots, etc… But in order for people to rise to such occasions, they must have some excess capacity from which to pull.<p>TL;DR - If you run the engine at redline all the time, you’re destined for a blowout.

I agree with the content of the article, but I don’t agree with the premise that these things aren’t also “work”.<p>Engineers tend to obsess over, “focused work” like it’s the only way to be productive, and anything that’s not “focused work” is wasted time. That is a surefire way to burn out.<p>Instead, finding ways to “riff” on your job by doing work with longer time horizons of payoff keeps your job fun.<p>It’s all “work”. Maybe the title ought to be, “Stop obsessing over focused work.”

Extra credit at school means something tangible. Extra credit at work rarely does.<p>I think this message applies especially to people working in big tech and&#x2F;or people working primarily on salary, not equity.<p>When you have equity in a startup though, each person doing more of their best work can actually make a massive difference to the trajectory of the business. And if you&#x27;re working on a promising business, working better and faster is the highest ROI thing that can be done.<p>So it all depends.

The problem is, the idiot who pushes himself to 100% sets a standard that the rest become expected to follow.

Except you like your work