Why I eat alone and probably you should too

This is absolutely terrible advice. Lunch is the ideal opportunity to expand your social network, make connections, learn from others, etc. It is by definition a small-ish block of time and if you're not feeling particularly talkative you can just concentrate on your food.<p>Getting to know colleagues from different parts of the business will greatly expand future career opportunities. Lunch is the best way to do this, followed by happy hours and other after work activities.

<i>"We are social beings, and I think once in a while a lunch like above is healthy to keep us sane. But, doing this everyday for years at a stretch, is insanity !"</i><p>This is just bizarre to me. I'm not the worlds most extroverted person, but creating and maintaining social relationships at work has been the single most powerful thing I have ever done to: Learn new things, advance my career, form mentoring relationships (both as a mentor or mentee), try new foods (one of the great joys in my life)etc....<p>If you aren't getting anything valuable from lunch with other people, you are doing it wrong.

This guy must have boring coworkers. Seriously, because when I go to lunch with my colleagues we talk about work or related things and it's almost always productive. We either walk away with a more knowledge or a decision to a hard problem.

In a few years at HN, this is close to the worst advice I have ever read.<p>I don't want to question the author's honesty when he's saying he's not a anti-social geek who never talks to other people, even though sometimes we're all oblivious to how we look to the world.<p>But if you follow that advice, you're going to be in real danger of turning into one.

If the author wants to use his lunch break to work on his side projects, then, more power to him. Personally, I like to segment my free time by month, rather than hour, but I realize a lot of people do not have the freedom to do that. I would rather have an 8 month contract job during which I work 60 hours a week, and then I have 4 months to work on my own projects. It takes me days to get my mind into a new project, and I am my most productive when I spent all of yesterday on the project, and I know I will spend all of today and all of tomorrow on the project.<p>However, whatever project I'm working on, I prefer to use the meals as meetings. Since everyone has to stop for a meal at some point, they seem like useful points to gather people around and regroup.

Dear OP, it's not so much about what you know. It's about who you know. Had I spent half of my programming hours networking with people, I'd be richer, healthier, and happier today. And I say this as someone who really loves programming.

I feel like this article and others which mention Tim Ferris start with a premise that isn't true for all people. They assume that 100% of our time is our own and we are free to use it as we choose.<p>For myself, I find that large portions of my time belong to someone else; my family, my job, my church. And once I carve out that time for others I am often left with only a couple hours here or there. And it seems laborious to fill that time with what would otherwise be considered work.

a number of fair points. best point: agree with avoiding the big lunch groups as those conversations can get carried away.<p>on the other hand, i am a big proponent of setting up lunch meetings with one other individual. you can plan ahead what you want to discuss, and more than anything, you open yourself up to their entire network. think about how powerful that is!<p>i guarantee they know at least one person "you should meet..."<p>at the same time, don't force a lunch meeting when there's always plenty of quality videos to watch or reading to be done during a break.

OP brings up some good points, but even after I thought about it for a while, it's still not for me. Let me explain...<p>Breakfast alone, no problem. In fact I always have breakfast at my desk while I work. But my morning work is so intense that by 11 or 12, I <i>have</i> to get away from my computer. Lunch with someone else is the perfect break. We talk about all kinds of things: everything <i>except</i> work.<p>I can't imagine using my lunch break to do other work, no matter what it was.<p>My afternoon is usually another strong burst and by 4 or so, I'm ready for exercise and then dinner with SO. Whether we eat at home or at a restaurant, I can't imagine missing it. Then comes visit with family and another 3 or 4 hours after that.<p>Contrary to OP, I <i>need</i> meals with others to get away and recharge. My day (and my life) has many sprints, but it's the still a marathon that needs to be paced.

"How to hyper-optimize yourself into a lonely existence" - great title for a book, which you can presumably write during all of this time you've saved!

I'm guessing this is well and simple for a non-family life. Timing and managing personal activities like showering, shaving, getting ready, making breakfast and so on is quite hard when you have multiple extrinsic factors barraging your execution. For instance, if a family is a multi-process program and each one of the members is vying for the slice of the CPU( house ), then you're bound to hit some spinning locks and unforeseen timeouts. Just try schedule bathroom use time. Deadlock, my friend.<p>On the upside, this would've been an interesting personal experiment if I figured out how to apply to my sprint of a day.

I would think that anyone with the time constraint as the OP needs to evaluate overall time management. As devs, we spend most of the day alone inside your mind. Lunch/coffee/smoke breaks are the ones which gives you just enough time for the mind to take off in non related domain.<p>Nobody forces us to take these breaks. It is an intuitive feeling that we use to relax ourselves. For a week or two, this may seem to work else - this advice would be a disaster if attempted to turn this to a habit.<p>Lunch topics - the worldly events do matter. I for one don't follow mainstream news. I get an abridged snapshot of events during these breaks. Not knowing anything makes worse at being a people person. Not Everything is about hacking. It's about weighing wants vs needs.<p>Also to add, breaks are not only about eating/drinking/smoking/conversing.It may also be a sit alone time not doing work. I usually go out to the balcony and look at the trees or birds flying. It's my natural reset button to stuck problems.

I'm not sure most jobs work on a fixed amount of work to be done. If you're ridiculously productive in your 8 hours at work, never take coffee breaks, etc., a common result is that you'll just end up with more stuff to do, not that you'll get all your responsibilities out of the way earlier and free up time for side projects.

I have just recently given this up, it's a bad habit I've had for years. I wasn't enjoying my food, or doing good work. If I don't need a break at lunch I haven't been using my _other_ time effectively.<p>Eating alone with just my food and thoughts or socializing have both improved my work output and mood.

This might be good advise for somebody trying to go through a career transition where the role they currently have and the social network attached to it doesn't give them an opportunity to talk to people that can help them through a lunch conversation.<p>For people that have lunch access to talented resources they can learn more from that hour and can it be the best hour of your entire day.<p>To summarize, don't waste time on non-productive activities... everyone will agree with that... for all of the readers lunch has the opportunity to be more than just the latest office or industry gossip... find those good lunches and capitalize on them.

Perhaps he could spend some of this conserved time learning to write at least a 10th grade level. This piece is so mangled it's difficult to read. Our strategic reserve of commas is being single-handedly depleted by this man.

I'm not sure this is really good advice. Networking with your co-workers, getting to know them, and letting them know you is so important, and thats what happens during those lunch time discussions. Also, in my experience, lunch discussions often actually do become very technical and work related. If you aren't there to participate, your opinion won't be taken into consideration. Finally, even if lunch time is your own time, if you are doing work on your side project using computers, software, even office space at work, your employer may be able to claim ownership of your project.

The point of the article is not <i>only</i> about eating alone. It's about realizing that you probably have lots of small blocks of idle, wasted time during the day: Walking around and talking to co-workers, taking too long to get ready in the morning because you're distracted, etc.<p>To me, this emphasizes something that I realized at Startup School. This difference between those who find time to make something and those who don't is that the ones who really want it <i>find</i> the time, even if they have a day job, because they simply want it more.<p>Bravo, great post.

I don't really agree on the point about lunch. It really depends on who you have lunch with. I had lunch many times with really interesting people from who you can learn a lot and even share ideas and think about new startup projects. Sometimes, closing to yourself is not a good idea. Speaking to different people broadens your mind and that is absolutely necessary.<p>On the other side, i really like the experiment behind the shower ;)

It all depends on the conversation, some of the best ideas and discussions/learning come from random lunch topics.<p>But yeah if it's random fluff stuff it's not something I'd want to do every day, when I was interning I spent quiet a few of the sunny days going for walks alone in the surrounding parklands, was relaxing and put me in a better fram of mind than sitting around the office like most of the people I was working with did.

Personally I have found that if I relax and enjoy life when I can, I get a lot more done when I do decide to work on a personal (or work related) project.

To pickup on the don't waste time point, sometimes I think ambling along can produce a better results than just heads down pushing towards a goal.<p>Writing my thesis recently, I spend plenty of time going off on tangents, sometimes related, sometimes not. Or going for a walk or a ride just to let ideas sit in my unconscious mind.

I thought this was going to be a rebuttal to Never Eat Alone (<a href="http://www.keithferrazzi.com/products/never-eat-alone/" rel="nofollow">http://www.keithferrazzi.com/products/never-eat-alone/</a>) but it wasn't. However, the book would serve as a rebuttal to this post.

I respect this guy's idea, but some transactions and ideas happen when you eat lunch with awesome folks. Great ideas could be incepted by one person, but molded into better iterations by other contributors of the conversation.

if the topics are constrained to the examples the author presented, then it might be better to save the 30min. At the same time, a big part of innovation relates on communicating ideas and comes from day-to-day interactions especially with people from different background/experiences. That is a block the author is imposing on himself by isolating - if there are others great minds at his/her workplace. perhaps finding a different group of people to have lunch with would increase the learning process and also giving space for cross-pollination of ideas.

Even if it is more productive, I just don't feel like eating alone.

Lunch and Dinner with friends just keeps me sane. I work so hard and intense during the work day that meals with friends is a great change of pace and keeps me from burning out.

Some of my best ideas come to me when I am in the shower. The last thing I would do is to reduce that precious thinking time to gain 5 extra minutes in the morning.

Listening to podcasts or thinking about projects when eating seems rather opposed to being mindful of the moment and not multitasking.

So what do you do after 6pm (after work) if you have two young kids? :-)