Honestly, I do feel somewhat similar. I work a normal 8-hour day and I am not obsessed with productivity nor I am some kind of anti-work activist, but it just feels like such a waste of time. The only reason I go to work is for money. I don't care about the products we build for someone else (why should I?), nor the technologies used (each of which brings its own challenges and frustrations). If I didn't need to go to work, I could dedicate more time to reading, writing, learning new skills, working on my own side projects, getting enough sleep, exercising, cooking, etc. Work just sucks the very soul out of me, and at the end of the day, I don't really want to do anything. Only on weekends and holidays do I feel much more energetic and motivated to do the things I listed previously, which evaporates by Monday.
Dude, you are absolutely not being productive in the 12 hours of indentured servitude. You need to find a new job.<p>The people at your current job aren't your friends. They've let you arrange to give away a full 50% your life (most of what's left must be occupied by sleep, pissing, shitting, eating, and paying bills). Not a single person in your life has said anything or tried to get you out of the office earlier?<p>You should have at least one friend who cares about your wellbeing and doesn't view you as an object to be exploited without limit.<p>Good luck, my dude.
Work at work, enjoy life outside of work. Have real weekends and evenings and use them to reset your brain. Allowing your brain to reset is an essential part of being productive. Your short term memory gets in the way of solving problems sometimes. And your brain actually does useful things while you sleep. I've lost count of how solutions to seemingly tricky issues just pop in my head after a good night sleep or after a long weekend.<p>And you can learn on the job. No need to do that outside work hours. And trying to learn stuff when you are tired after a long day is hard. It makes you more tired, you learn slower, it's frustrating, and you are setting yourself up for being less productive the next day because of it.<p>Make time for learning stuff, demand time for it even and put it in your calendar or just sneak it in. Get your boss to support you.<p>Try working smarter, not harder. If it feels like monkey work automate it. It's more fun and you get more productive by doing less. Frees up some time to do more interesting things.<p>If your work is not interesting to you, you are in the wrong job anyway. But assuming it is, you should make the most of it in terms of making it rewarding (and not just in the money sense).
Yeah, just wait till you're in your fifties and feel like you're also running out of time to do things! For example: "how many more growing seasons do I have to try this or that tomato" or "should I learn Spanish?". On the plus side kids are out of your hair.
I'm the one who posted that post on bearblog and I want to make something clear. My working hours are from 7:30-17:30. But transportation takes an hour in the morning and an hour(at least) in the evening. So I added that two hours too because those two hours are no use to me. I can't do anything in those transportation hours.
I might not have made this part clear, sorry for that.<p>But yeah, I know that working time is still too much. But I don't live in a country where I can find a job whenever I want. I have to stick to it because I have not much choice.
I'm a hyper-productive person, but productivity for productivity sake is literally pointless.<p>All productivity is a means to an end. You are producing something, by definition. What is that and why?<p>While I do have an "emotional itch" to work on "something" most of the time, I don't leave work to go do more work just for the sake of it. There are specific things that I want to produce because it makes me happy. If I don't work on those things, then it's not that I feel guilty, it's that I feel a void in my life.<p>In the past I have had so many hobbies and not enough time to dedicate to them all. I would get bored of one and move to another. Some might view that as recreation, but they were always making and producing something. For the last couple of years my wife and I have been performing magic as semi-professionals and as I find myself feeling less and less enthusiastic about modern technology after 25 years in the industry, I'm starting to see a scenario where I retire from tech and we take a major risk and go all in professionally. That can't happen if we don't put the work into it today. Not that you or anyone else should, but there's purpose and motivation behind the decision to produce that.<p>I don't live for the sake of my employer and I'm not motivated by money (at least not at this stage in my career, I have enough). There are things I want in my life that I will never get if I don't work towards them. Sometimes I am too tired, and that's a good signal that I'm not resting enough. But every single "productive" thing that I do, be it for my employer or myself, has a motivation behind it. No one should feel pressured to produce something just for the sake of producing (unless they are living parasitically off of the efforts of others but that is a whole different conversation).
Next step: reading Charles Bukowski and just absolutely not giving a f*ck. I always seen him as the ultimate slacker and hoped some of that energy will trickle down to me when I was being workaholic.<p>On another note I really liked "How to Be Idle" by Tom Hodgkinson
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/623922.How_to_Be_Idle" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/623922.How_to_Be_Idle</a>
In case you get some guilt feelings.
I'm incredibly lucky in that I live 5 minutes away from the office. I work 7.5 hours a day, Monday to Friday. Every day I got a ton of time to dedicate to things I like... and yet, many times I feel drained from crunching code every day... It's been like 8 months since I worked on a personal project... lately all I do is play Breath of the Wild... But I feel pretty good about it, I think I relate to this fuck-being-productive culture more and more every day... or maybe I'm just depressed... don't know.
This guy has everything backwards: he doesn't realize it's his insane long wageslave work hours that are the problem, not those extra 3 hours.
I think this is all a misconception about what "productive" really means. It means making progress towards some goal.<p>If you're some temporarily embarrassed billionaire, then the startup grindset is quite productive towards your goal.<p>If filling your life with momentary happiness is your goal, then playing videogames is quite productive towards your goal.<p>If you're a good little worker bee or someone at the Bureau of Labor Statistics is holding your family hostage, then clocking in 18 hours a day/7 days a week at $BIGTECH is quite productive towards your goal.<p>If you're religious, then going to church, improving your behavior/mindset, etc. are quite productive towards your goal.<p>It just all comes down to: What do you want out of life? What do you see as the purpose of life? The purpose of <i>your</i> life? Looking at this problem any other way is just deferring your personal philosophy, beliefs, and values to someone else—someone who probably doesn't care one bit about you and what you want.
Here's my free advice on the internet (aka worth nothing). Don't be productive, be accumulative.<p>If every day you do one thing that makes thing easier going forward, gives you another option, makes a job easier in the long term, adds a skill, gets you a reference or a connection, pay a dividend or royalty, etc.. in the long run you will be fine.
Whenever I feel like I don't have enough time to do things, I think about the comment from the developer of curl:<p>"On average, I spend about an hour a day on curl. It adds up over time."
* Fuck being productive with the aim of making someone else wealthier.<p>Downtime is productive. It recharges you, allows you to background-process your thoughts, fulfills your mind if you're doing something you love, makes you healthier if you're doing something active. Being productive in service to yourself is totally fine.
When I was younger, I tried to spend as much of my free time as possible learning things that would enhance my career. New programming languages, frameworks, etc, things like that.<p>Eventually I realised that doing what is basically your job in your free time is fucking exhausting.<p>Nowadays I try to spend that time learning things which <i>won’t</i> enhance my career. Gardening, cooking, woodwork, much less stressful and more fulfilling imo
If that's your thing, I'm totally cool with it - if you need to watch TV or play video games to decompress, that's fine. I personally get really anxious when I'm "wasting" time and would rather learn something (math, computers, music, something) or do something (housework, yardwork, something) with my "spare" time and I can't help but notice that me <i>not</i> spending time doing what other people consider "leisure" activities really irks a lot of people. Like, to each their own, you know?
Lately I've been booking meetings for quick walk with the dog or having a nap, or even watch 20 min episode of wherever, in the works hours,<p>I feel I'm more productive after having these small breaks and I feel way happier, anyone should try it
Makes so much sense. What do we even get after working like robot for 30 years? We don't have retirement benefits, we would've barely paid for a house if we could afford one. All this for making the CEOs and capital owners even more rich.<p>Also who decides the metrics of "Productivity"? If we listen to our bosses and CEOs we would ruin our mind, body and personal relationships while they generate intergenerational wealth.
I get the impression from others who have worked for Japanese companies that even tbt 12 hours at work aren't super productive; the long hours are a performance to show loyalty to the company.
I have a hard-pressed belief that long commutes are extremely detrimental. Even if you work long hours, if the commute is no more than 15 minutes, it ain't so bad when you get home and you still have plenty of time for everything else. The commute here is the problem, not the work. No shit you're tired. You're working an entire day and traveling 3 hours.<p>Not saying you should be doing anymore, just saying it's okay to not be productive after traveling that much on top of a full work day. If it makes you feel better I work from home and recently had to travel for a customer. 2 hours each way, and I only worked 7 hours at the customer and it was the most exhausted I had been in months.
> Working hours are 07:30-17:30<p>That's 10 hours a day! That's too much. You can't be productive for such a long time. Well, the occasional day you can, when inspiration hits and you're really in the flow, but on days that you aren't, sometimes you just need to go home early.<p>One of the great things about working from home is that you don't have to pretend to be working 8+ hours per day anymore. It's more about the stuff you get done than about looking the part. When I feel burned out, I can actually play a game during the day. When inspiration hits, I can work in the evening. It does blur the lines between private life and work, and that's certainly a risk, but being able to use my time more effectively makes up for that. My productivity has gone up.<p>Anyway, 10 hours a day is too much. 8 hours per day is too much. 5 days a week is too much. I think 32 hour work weeks or less should become normalised. According to Keynes, we should have been working 15 hour weeks by now. And apparently hunter-gatherers also working only 15 hours a week. The problem is that we don't enjoy the benefits of our increased productivity anymore, and all the profits go to the people at the top.<p>And expecting to also be productive on private projects after such long work hours? Yeah, that's not going to work. I agree with that part of the article. But I wish people did have more time and energy after work to spend on private projects.
We need 4DWW - <i>Four Day Work Week</i>. This would give all of us the much-needed day to catch up on administrative stuff, so we can have our weekends back for relaxing. We will have time for side projects again.<p><i>Fight for 4DWW</i> !!!
If doing cool stuff at home is what drives you, there is only so much time you’ll spend aimlessly binge watching Netflix or playing games, before this drive wakes up and brings you back to do interesting things again.
Absolutely, indeed frak being productive. It's a Ponzi scheme, you have to keep grinding so you can land your next job that might be slightly better (and often is not). And we're talking in your free time, not even during the work hours.<p>How about some new propaganda?<p>"Work maximum 5h a day and the other 3h you will donate to your employer if they are kind and give you good atmosphere and money"?<p>How about that one, eh?
I am increasingly hostile to the cult of productivity. I understand that a competitive environment calls for these sorts of sacrifices, but we should at least stop fetishizing it.<p>Live a simple life, make enough money, then focus on other things. You've met your weekly quota, your bills are paid. Now go play.<p>When you're on your death bed, you won't be thinking "I wish I spent more time at work, closing tickets".
Your week has 112 hours of waking time.<p>If you spend 50% of that at work, you have spent 50% of it at work. Probably the most productive 50%.<p>The entire point of working for someone else is to attain enough money that you don't need to any more and you can treat it as more of an optional thing. If you're not doing that then unless you really enjoy your job burnout is inevitable.
Sure - it sucks doing self-learning and working in your own time but when else are you supposed to polish your skills beyond what work projects give you latitude to do?<p>For example I was in a tech company where XMPP was the core of every one of our products. There were almost no REST based APIs in the company and we had our own protocols and APIs which made much of what I did very specific and non transferable. Day in and out I worked with XML, asynchronous messaging and increasingly niche tooling as XMPP became less and less relevant and HTTP based APIs like REST-JSON and WebSockets displaced it.<p>It wasn’t hard to move jobs but it wasn’t easy either. I had to spend a month or so in my own time learning REST, JSON, WebSockets and Spring MVC in order to pass interviews.<p>I think constant productivity culture leads to burnout but there’s got to be a middle ground between doing nothing after hours and hustling non-stop.
Interestingly, lately, I find myself totally unable to do "nothing" -- to be unproductive by the description given in the article.<p>The perspective of spending 1 or 2 hours playing videogames or watching entertainment (movies, series) became terribly boring to me. I can only think of that as a loss of time: I wouldn't be a better person at the end of it.<p>Being able to better smash buttons, faster, at the right timing -- watching a story unfold on screen -- these used to be a great source of joy "before". But today, it seems all so dull; my intellect or my body doesn't get any better by doing that. Instead, reading whatever book on ML or even on an obscure programming language or technique, or spending time at the gym, or listening to a lecture on math or physics, sound so much more appealing to me.<p>I cannot spend time anymore just sitting, it literally upsets me. Anybody feeling the same?
I got laid off and told myself i would hustle to get something be or start a business.<p>Instead i surf every day and go hiking and cook meals for my gf. Couldn't be happier. The hustle part will have to wait until i get through this phase.
I'm at a cross roads because I'm trying to sort out an intern program.<p>On one end, I don't want to work too hard now that I'm old. However, I don't have to work too hard as I worked crazy hard for a long decade with massive growth and discipline saving.<p>When I reflect on interns, I want to hire people that are willing to suffer for the craft. I feel it is morally wrong to encourage a low key lifestyle in the young as it wastes potential.<p>At core, the question I'm asking is how to find people that desire greatness in life.
I had similar thoughts for a while. What helped me was instead of aiming to make all of the time outside work productive (3-4 hours) just aim for under an hour. For me, 40 min of producitivity per day outside of work makes me feel accomplished. You can actually get a lot done in that span of time like do some exercise, practice an instrument, read an article... (pick one per day and cycle through the week). Not much immediate gratification, but over the years it adds up to a tonn of personal development. Plus with a 40-min window you don't feel guilt about abandoning your other family duties etc.
Reminded me of Bartebly the Scrivener and “I would prefer not to”, but also Byul-Chun Han and “Burnout Society”. A very short summary of the latter is that in our day and age we exploit ourselves on behalf of people who would in previous decades exploit us. But of course the author explores both reasons and consequences of this phenomena.
Amen. This also subtly highlights a huge negative to being forced to work in an office, commute times. I was in the same boat, 2.5hrs or so of commuting per day made my 8hr day a 10.5hr day and made my blood boil. Started working from home and my blood pressure went down and I got happier AND had more time to myself.
I worked on a hay farm for several years before going back to school and majoring in psychology and then abandoning that and becoming a software engineer. Never found my passion. I don't give it a shit about any of the work I do. But anything is better than working on a hay farm.
I am working full time , then try to preparing for senior software engineer interviews in evenings for a new job plus side projects. It is really exhausting. There is just so much peer pressure to create something amazing, be at a great job with top pay.
You have working hours and you have non-working hours. I don't see the upside in punishing yourself for not working during non-working hours. Those hours are for you. The proper way to look at this is 'be productive during the time you've allotted.'
I have a different understanding of being productive - and it's not about working harder.<p>It's more about being smart at work and life (find the best tools for you, discover how your own brain works and find lifehacks - including food - to exploit the best from it).
If you feel this way and you have the option, an easy solution is to make less money and/or take a job you like that involves learning and self-improvement.<p>I realize not everyone has the opportunity, but I think a lot of people would be much happier earning less.
What everyone is feeling is their wealth is being stolen by inflation. Ideally, the time you trade during working hours, in exchange for money, should make you wealthy but due to the insane inflation it doesn't.
We all need a reason to be productive. We have placed these jobs above our own well being. That doesn't sound very healthy at all. I would suggest finding something you are passionate about. It may take a while.
Very few of us in society do work that truly matters. Work is like a colouring book: A complete waste of your time (though work might be less fun, YMMV).<p>It would be lovely to give up the charade of the importance of work.
You're saying we shouldn't spend literally all of our waking hours like productive robots and actually spend some time enjoying life? I'm just hearing this now for the first time.
For some people the work gives them energy, or work itself is what motivates them. If you can find a job like that, you won't feel the need to fill gaps with needless productivity.
Another way to look at this is that this person spends 45% of his free time on a commute. That is insane, yet a reality for many. Is 'the office' realy worth that much?
If you are having the energy to still be productive after work, why aren't you capitalizing on that with something you completely own?<p>You will not have that levels of energy forever.
More so if you have a family and are the primary provider. You need to take time out for yourself. No, that’s not selfish. It’s the oxygen mask rule on all airplanes - before taking care of others, you need to look after yourself. Be responsible to the degree you can maintain a sustainable (read healthy) balance.<p>It took me 20 years and a pandemic to realize that corporations (especially public corporations) are one tracked. They are non-living entities fuelled by the insatiable greed of some. Remember the old adage, I’d rather be poor and happy than rich and miserable? Thanks to the increasing rich/poor divide - now everybody is miserable.<p>It’s the non-stop work culture, and for what? To sell more new phones and laptops to people, when the old ones work just fine?<p>But there is hope - with the increasing popularity of self-repair friendly legislations and the promotion of manufacturing jobs (the one thing I appreciate Trump for), we just might be able to save ourselves. As imperfect as Unions are, this was the reason for their existence - to keep the other side in check.<p>Sorry for going all over the place today. Just some things that have been on my mind lately. YOU mean something. YOUR life and well-being matters. Don’t do it for your loyalty - it means shit in most cases. To your boss it may matter a bit, but to the “company” - a made up non-living entity? Zilch. It is heartless and will show no emotion when making “hard” decisions.<p>/rant<p>PS: This is not the entire story. I did not get into the rabbit hole of influencers and online/social click-bait marketing that is thriving on FOMO.