Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013)

https://waivek.github.io/website/tooltip.html

by cvwright • 3 years ago

196 130 3 years ago

waivek.github.io

threatofrain• 3 years ago

Going to the bathroom is productive. It is not “fucking” around.

This is just a blog post of a guy fawning over John Carmack and dealing with feelings of not measuring up.

gizmolo• 3 years ago

I think he strikes a chord with a common theme around programmers. We’re talented, and it’s easy for us to abuse that talent b/c what we’re doing is often hard to track for more functional folks. As such the burden of responsibility falls on our own internal mechanisms (i.e. self-discipline).

Early in my career I had an issue of not getting things done. I later learned about myself that I just have some needs to make sure my values are aligned to the work which required a pivot to another company. But everyone has their own reasons for not being “better”!

jonahx5• 3 years ago

This is uncharitable to the point of seeming like a deliberate misread.

The bathroom anecdote is just a memorable illustration of Carmack's mindset: only work counts as work. Neither Carmack nor the author thinks you should avoid the bathroom or feel bad about pissing.

This is a self-aware blog post of a guy who worked with John Carmack and was able to use that to honestly assess his own productivity, and the amount of time he wasn't focused.

paines• 3 years ago

Work count as work ?!? Soooo, anacdote time. I had this boss who walked into my office and saw me sitting in front of my computer, reading the screen and not typing. He asked me: "what are you doing?" I said: "thinking about how to solve problem X." he said: "okay, but why aren't you typing?!?!" For him it was working as a software engineer is only when you type.....

indigoabstract• 3 years ago

This was written by Brian Hook, who worked with John Carmack at id during the Quake 2 & 3 era.

itsacomment• 3 years ago

Calling bathroom visits 'productive' is exactly the kind of lie to yourself the article goes on about. So your product is time spent sitting around and shitting in a bowl? Then go ahead and optimize for number of bathroom breaks..

Breaks are necessary, and paid time, certainly - I'm not masochist enough to deduct every small break from my work time - but neither is John Carmack, nor is the author arguing for that.

Noumenon722• 3 years ago

Coming from a factory background, bathroom breaks are something you have to find time for. If you were to just take one during a changeover, you would see a lot of productivity go into the scrap box. So to me it makes sense to count them as part of the "paid 15-minute break" a factory employee gets. I mark my personal timesheet as not working then too.

juujian2• 3 years ago

I'm conflicted in this. Ok the one hand, a lot of things here ring true, and AIC (Ass In Chair time) is a relevant indicator for work except... When it's not. Quality is definitely a thing, and it's hard to measure. Sometimes you work for a couple hours on something, and your revisit it later and realize the quality just isn't there and you have to do it over. Then how much did those hours you put in really count.

Noumenon722• 3 years ago

Usually, this shows I needed the extra hours to fully understand the problem. Or that I needed to waste those hours to make myself realize when I can and cannot productively work extra hours. Sometimes, I'm sure surfing TikTok for those three hours would not have made me sit down and produce quality code on the first try. Other times, I do the surfing and am like, "I needed that."

juujian2• 3 years ago

Yeah, often a good idea not to be too hard on yourself, i think that's what the article is missing

courseofaction4• 3 years ago

I encounter daily young people who are so stricken by anxiety about productivity, because they can't explain how they will actually benefit from the outcomes. Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.

lll-o-lll7• 3 years ago

Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.

That’s called being an employee. Don’t like it? Start your own business.

I do not get this attitude at all. It just smacks of entitlement. How about this for an answer “when the company makes money, they can pay your salary?”. Now, there are many more reasons why an ambitious young person should be invested in their companies success, but any employee should be doing their best if they want to stay employed.

kcplate7• 3 years ago

Exactly, it’s an alien attitude to me too. I’ve worked really hard and help make some people wealthy, but looking back over that time I certainly haven’t suffered at all. I traded labor for a regular paycheck. They took a financial risk and spent quite a few years of no income from it for a bigger payoff later.

cjcenizal• 3 years ago

Instead of framing it subjectively (“People’s feelings are hurt by capitalism”), consider it objectively. What’s the effect on society when increasing your productivity doesn’t increase your wealth but instead is just a requisite for employment? Wealth accumulates with the wealthy, as the OP stated, and the rest of society grows poorer, sicker, less mobile, and less creative. Would you say that’s sustainable?

antisthenes• 3 years ago

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

After getting to a certain level, I only care enough to get my work done, well.

I voluntarily give up a portion of the added value I bring in order to reduce my risk of having to search for new clients every week. Ideally, this value isn't much higher than ~1/3 of whatever the revenue/employee the company currently has.

any employee should be doing their best if they want to stay employed.

The word "best" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I am definitely not at my best every day that I work for a company. But I will do my "best" given the constraints I am currently facing, which could be numerous (too many meetings, headache, personal issues, technical issues, etc.)

whateveracct8• 3 years ago

That’s called being an employee. Don’t like it? Start your own business.

It's called being a sucker. If you're salaried, you should be leaving productivity on the table. You get paid the same no matter what. Finding the line is key.

Years ago (around when I started working remote) I started quitting at 1pm every day. And then I started never working Fridays and even some Thursdays (I plan my week so I can push some "leftovers" those days to look like I worked).

I use the spare time to sleep, play with my pets, found businesses, learn new skills, enjoy my marriage to the fullest.

Also I don't have to give my best to stay employed. I have some factors working in my favor. It costs money to replace me. And it costs time to get someone to my level of onboarded. I've never given my best but they keep paying me 100s of Gs to do it - so I think you're off-base on that point ;)

waboremo2• 3 years ago

Your logic doesn't work because salaries are not attached to performance.

godelski8• 3 years ago

I think there's a difference in interpretation here that plays an important role. To put it simply, when you make $25k/yr, you care a lot about your CEO making $200m/yr, but if you are making $250k/yr I don't think anyone gives a shit.

The parent specified a critical qualifier that I think supports this interpretation and many may be missing. Let's make sure we're speaking the same language before we start fighting.

> Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and __ONLY__ goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.

The use of "only" differentiates this from "a job." It implies that they feel not just undervalued, but excessively so. It is the feeling of doing all or most of the work in a group project and only to have someone else take all or the majority of the credit. I believe most of us have been in that situation at some point. I would be shocked to find that a single person that was in that situation wasn't resentful of that person. Either you're lying (to us or to yourself) or you're the chillest person on the fucking planet.

I don't think anyone cares how big CEO compensation is when they're living a comfortable life themselves. The relationship between utility and monetary value does not increase linearly for essentially all metrics of utility. Most follow an S-like curve. When you don't have a lot, every fucking dollar matters and you'll be resentful of anyone stealing any credit from you (scarcity mindset) because the loss is very meaningful. When you're comfortable, then money is substantially less important to you and you probably won't care as much if credit is taken from you because the loss isn't as meaningful. It is actually quite difficult to spend a million dollars a year continuously (or some other Brewster's Millions like situation). You can even see this change in places like HN. When everyone was being let go comments about Pichai's bonuses and Google's stock prices increased. But go back 5 years when there was a bigger boom and all the free stuff and incentives were being given, no one really cared.

In this respect I think people focus on the wrong parts of economic inequality. Rather than focusing on the ceiling, focus on the floor. The floor is not the dual of the ceiling because these are not zero sum games (they are for instantaneous or local times, but not in general).

Courseofaction, correct me if I'm wrong.

lumb63• 3 years ago

Not to mention, a comment like this in a discussion about a profession where single people regularly make multiples more than the average household.

I’m so tired of the crowd of software engineers (or any profession of similar income) that pretend to be middle class and share the struggle of the “common man”. Sure, the productivity goes to lining the pockets of the wealthy; and you are the wealthy.

courseofaction4• 3 years ago

I absolutely feel I should be entitled to live in a society where the vast majority of the wealth isn't held by a small group of people and actively used to subvert democratic processes.

I feel entitled to enfranchisement, where the successes of the country are also my success, because I worked hard and paid my taxes.

I'll fight for my entitlement, and I'll fight for yours too.

But on a less philosophical level, motivated workers are productive workers. Enfranchised workers are motivated workers. Crushing workers' living standards isn't about productivity, it's about greed.

colordrops• 3 years ago

Everytime I see the word "entitlement" bandied about, it almost always smacks of entitlement. The user of the word ignores or is ignorant of the various layers of assumptions about the arbitrary nature of the system that is rigged against the average person by the ruling class.

You may be lucky enough to have found a way in the system, but it's not "entitled" to point out that the system is bullshit. You are entitled. As if "starting a business" is some fundamental law of nature like breathing or shelter. Most people don't have any other choice than to be an employee. It's like calling serfs entitled. Sheesh.

becquerel2• 3 years ago

Becoming the owner of your own business just means becoming an exploiter of other people. Not exactly inspiring for me :)

maxerickson• 3 years ago

It's not entitled to think your job is a 2 sided relationship with the employer. The employer isn't doing you a favor by granting you an opportunity, they are buying your time and attention.

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

I think you do understand this. If you own a business, do you charge the minimum possible price and deliver the maximum possible value, well above and beyond what is required to retain and attract customers, in order that your customers may maximally benefit and profit from your hard work? Or do you make every possible attempt to capture as much profit as possible for yourself?

Economic theory and empirical study would both seem to suggest this is entirely determined not by your personal work ethic and level of entitlement, but by the amount of competition you face. If you're in a competitive industry just about anyone can enter selling a commodity good, you skate by on the tiniest profit margin necessary to survive. If you have a huge moat, regulatory burdens on competition, significant IP protection, you squeeze everyone you can and get rich.

Why would employees behave differently?

sublinear4• 3 years ago

they can't explain how they will actually benefit from the outcomes

This is the only thing I agree with. Thinking about work tends to get in the way of actually working and prevents ever knowing the benefits.

People who think of work as a simple means to an end and live disjointed lives are basically unemployable. All of the value in everything, even beyond money, is the experience... which results in more money and experience. It compounds just the same.

TotalCrackpot3• 3 years ago

This system tries to put into your head that you either are exploited (worker) or are the exploiter (owner), while we could try to arrange our society in a more cooperative way, e.g. with worker cooperatives. Unfortunately the whole system is stuck against such cooperative structures, because elites don't want these type of arrangements to become legitimized on a big scale.

njarboe• 3 years ago

Startups at their best are worker cooperatives. Not everyone has an equal share or say in the company, but with each person having a meaningful amount of stock options you can look at it that way. It's not clear exactly what would be the best distribution of ownership but definitely the less stock held by people not working at the firm the better if one is trying to get out of the exploited and exploiter mentality. How big can this scale? Would like to read a good study on this.

Kon5ole• 3 years ago

Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.

Many people (young and old) don't realise that the value of increased productivity goes to themselves first, in the form of extra time. Being unproductive actually means they are wasting their own time, not their employers time.

Being productive is the difference between finishing at 5 with an hour of twitter and reddit scattered throughout the day versus finishing at 4 and spending an hour learning a new skill, for example.

That being said, if they are working for a place where they care so little about the work itself that they only see it as lining the pockets of the wealthy, they should of course change jobs. Being productive helps with that too.

throw109203• 3 years ago

This is a ridiculous comment devoid of any value whatsoever.

Productivity has nothing to do with working for a company. The linked article is valuable for me for my personal projects that will never make a dime or be seen by anyone else except for myself.

This statement:

any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy

...is both irrelevant to the article, and a fluffy "generic tangent" decried in the HN guidelines that is solely meant to start a political discussion.

TheAlchemist• 3 years ago

That resonates a lot with me.

Some silly takes, like the one about the bathroom, but overall this pretty much describes me during some periods of my work life - and I think the advice here is pretty good.

I also believe a lot of it has to do with the profession - there is a million ways to do something, it can be hard to evaluate if something is good enough or not, and there is usually no blueprint.

When you build a house, you can see the progress being made, and you also have a clear path on what steps need to be done. In software / research it's very different - you can spend hours or days working hard on something that's not moving the project forward in a meaningful way.

doitLP• 3 years ago

And if I'm really productive in the morning and afternoon and feel like I can go home at 4pm with a clean conscience, I do that too, so I don't burn out.

This is the part that is difficult for me. Clean conscience? Because your upbringing or your employer has instilled some limit where you have to push hard before you feel like you deserve a break?

For years I worked too hard, too long, and in my zeal, too often on the wrong things. I burned out hard and even now have to psyche myself up to do all but the most interesting tasks. Everything is hard these days, and so I can no longer rely on my inner Protestant to tell when I’ve done “a good days work”. I have to do the hard work and evaluate it against everything else on my never ending backlog before I feel like I can go home.

sublinear4• 3 years ago

I don't understand this perspective, but I hear it often.

The way I see it productivity should always be measured against the actual result and how long it took, not a mere impression based on how much of that time was spent in front of the keyboard.

I'm willing to bet John Carmack has thrown away the vast majority of the code he's ever written. Everything I've read about him seems to indicate he's a "hands on"/"external thinker" kinda guy which would be why he was so dedicated to keeping track of his time according to this story. Not everyone has that need. It actually sounds exhausting and pitiable.

Was it really productivity being witnessed, or just a man desperate to get back to his computer so he can play around with the code some more? Some of us do most of our problem solving when we're away from the computer living our lives. Sometimes I don't have an answer until the pressure is off and the clock says 5PM. A tide of relaxation often drags in the answer that was just past my reach 15 minutes earlier.

Writing code is not typing. It's thinking. We all do it differently. I prefer a beer and a nap. All that really matters is that you don't stop thinking about the problem.

jonahx5• 3 years ago

Your perspective isn't mutually exclusive with the one in the article.

I take the article, and the Carmack stories, as an argument to be scrupulously honest with yourself about when you're fucking around. If you do your best thinking taking a shower or a 20 minute walk in the sun, that's fine, because you're working, not fucking around.

But if you're browsing facebook, not thinking about the problem, and telling yourself it's part of your process, you might be in denial.

sublinear4• 3 years ago

No sorry I'm saying something else. Regardless of what you're doing, yes even browsing Facebook, what matters is that the code was delivered on time or faster and doesn't suck. The typing of the code is trivial.

kbenson• 3 years ago

If you do your best thinking taking a shower or a 20 minute walk in the sun, that's fine, because you're working, not fucking around.

This ignores all the evidence that stepping away and doing something entirely unrelated can lead to a breakthrough from a fresh perspective. Sometimes that's because you thought about the problem elsewhere, but sometimes that's because you've allowed the set of contextual assumptions you've made about the problem to unwind and be released but not thinking about it at all, which is what provides that fresh perspective.

I have literally spent ten hours on a problem and left for the day completely demoralized about it, only to come back in fresh the next morning after having not thought about it (literally having no chance to think about it in some case, given I have a family and obligations), only to sit down the next day, spend ten minutes reviewing where I was at, have a possible solution five minutes later, and an implementation that works 15-30 after that.

The belief that you need to be working on a problem to make progress in it is a trap. Now, avoiding it because you don't want to deal with it? Yes, that might be denial, but for anything that requires creativity, progress is often not linear, and expecting it to be is just ignoring the reality of how our minds work to chase an ideal that doesn't work.

godelski8• 3 years ago

I think a lot of people really struggle with metrics and evaluation. We've gotten used to algorithms and mathematical expressions but I don't think many have internalized meaning and the actual information that they convey. All metrics are guides, not absolute objective signals. People hear Goodhart's Law and think about how metrics can be abused, but the real lesson here is that metrics are only guides. The abuse only happens because they become absolute measures rather than only a part.

It may take one person all day to produce 50 lines of code and another 500, but we can't differentiate these people by the metric of time, number of lines, nor the number of commits. Even bug and error metrics don't complete the story. Those 50 lines could be more critical, more complex, and have higher impact.

Realistically, we need to embrace the chaos. Everything is fuzzy and messy, and that's actually okay. That's how life and the universe actually are. Metrics are good guides to this chaos and help us navigate these complex landscapes, but they all have a limitations, which if we aren't aware of can lead to disaster. You need to be aware of the uncertainty and limitations of your metrics. I see a lot of HN/STEM like people argue passionately for meritocracies, but have yet to see one of these people account for the limitations of the measures they so passionately advocate for. The irony of this being that this takes us further away from that meritocratic goal and actually increases the noise in the system. To make a system more meritocratic you have to embrace the noise in the system.

shove• 3 years ago

Tell me you don’t have family responsibilities without telling me …

dang• 3 years ago

Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16529481 - March 2018 (84 comments)

Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364908 - March 2014 (54 comments)

Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383650 - March 2013 (59 comments)

I'm guessing this ongoing thread is also loosely related:

John Carmack on shorter work weeks (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36360980 - June 2023 (284 comments)

jatins• 3 years ago

Is the GitHub link by the same author or someone is plagiarising their content?

dieulot• 3 years ago

Neither, it’s placeholder content used as part of a collection of web layout experiments, hence the weird URL. https://waivek.github.io/website/

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

If you're doing something that you absolutely love doing and are completely aligned with the overall goals of the thing you're engaged in, well, count yourself as extremely lucky. Maybe game designers, research project workers, etc. fall into this category, and they naturally adopt this kind of approach to work, because making progess towards the goal is just win, win, win on every front.

Most people end up doing jobs they are indifferent about because somebody wants to extract value from their labor. So they don't give a shit about the outcome, only the paycheck. Yet somehow their bosses think they're going to adopt the above work ethic! Hilarious.

EdwardDiego• 3 years ago

I feel attacked. I also feel seen. Hmm.

faizshah• 3 years ago

This is an exhausting perspective on life. The guy who wrote 80% of the codebase is always going to be more productive than someone who wrote 2% of it, that doesn’t mean they are 10x smarter than you.

I noticed this hyper obsession with productivity in our industry from measuring yourself against how you perceive others productivity. But there’s much less focus put on how your peers became productive at their specialization. That’s the real secret sauce, is to become productive at some specialization in software engineering you need experience + a deep mental model of your codebase and a mental model of your dependencies.

The reason a task that should have been 4 hours takes 4 days is because you had to debug, read documentation and try things. If you immediately could predict why an issue was happening because you had a deep mental model of the OS, the runtime, your architecture etc. you would be able to solve any issue you run into in several orders less time. That’s how you actually become more productive as an engineer in your field.

This obsession with grinding and hyper productivity is out of hand, your physical and mental health are way more important.

raincole• 3 years ago

I noticed this hyper obsession with productivity in our industry from measuring yourself against how you perceive others productivity.

Carmack doesn't measure his productivity against someone else. He measures, with the "CD player trick", against himself.

A less productive person, like the author, measures against the top performers. But the top performers measure against themselves. This is the real insight of this article for me (maybe not even the author realized it).

deredede• 3 years ago

The less productive person would also benefit from measuring against themselves. On a day-to-day basis, there are no metrics that make more sense.

(Or not measure at all, which is fine -- but if you do measure something, that's what you should be measuring)

condortg• 3 years ago

A less productive person, like the author, measures against the top performers. But the top performers measure against themselves.

I think that is doing the author a disservice. My read is not that he measured his self against top performers per se, rather he happened to observe his performance relative to others and it was a wake up call that allowed for the self reflection that is necessary to improve.

Juliate• 3 years ago

That's not even productivity (output) that's measured, but the amount of time he is free to focus on his task.

And, having read many personal diaries entries of creative people, showing up, being at one's desk, all ready to work, and even working, definitely does not translate into productivity. If only, it is the first necessary step only. But it's not enough.

And the trick is to know that this is perfectly normal, not only for intellectual work, but also for manual work. People are not machines.

epolanski• 3 years ago

I noticed this hyper obsession with productivity in our industry

Maybe we are part of very different parts of that industry because I see very little obsession with productivity.

throw109203• 3 years ago

I have the same experience as you - there's very little obsession with productivity with anyone I knew.

Hacker News, the very forum this person is commenting, has far more comments complaining about an "obsession with productivity" than actually obsessing over it.

cvwright• 3 years ago

This is like going on a forum for athletes and complaining that people want to be like Jordan.

Maybe you just want to play pick-up games at the local Y. That’s totally cool. I’m not even that athletic.

But for the people who want to play competitively and win, it’s important to understand that even the super-talented people like Jordan and Carmack still have to work extremely hard. If you want to keep up with those guys, it’s not enough to skate along based on your raw talent.

This was a lesson that I wish I had learned sooner.

throw109203• 3 years ago

This obsession with grinding and hyper productivity is out of hand

This is ridiculous. There's far more overdramatic denouncements of an "obsession with productivity" than there actually is obsession, especially on HN where one regularly sees hyperbolic comments like the above.

nivertech• 3 years ago

because you finished in one hour what should have taken all day

How do you know that it should have taken all day?

Who said that it should've taken 1 day? Was it your own estimation, your manager's, or Scrum Master's ;) Maybe the same or similar task took 1 day in the past?

Even if you really got lucky on one task in the project by saving 7 hours, you might got bitten and stuck on another one, which will take weeks more than was estimated.

Software time estimation isn't an exact science, and it's more like statistics, i.e. you need lots of datapoints, and look at them in the aggregate (e.g. run Monte Carlo simulation).

_a_a_a_• 3 years ago

I've certainly run into the yak-shaving problem of having to chase a hundred things down to get one thing fixed (this current job of mine is full of that shite) but the real productivity killer when my path is clear is myself; the stupid ridiculous little bugs I introduced by accident that I can't see because they're my own they can cost me hours. And I generate very regrettably large number of them so I'm constantly tripping over myself.

I keep reading what I expect to see, not what is there. If anyone has some advice on how to be less stupid in this aspect, I greatly welcome it.

MrDresden2• 3 years ago

I stopped reading as soon as the author suggested it to be "hardcore" to think of bathroom breaks as slacking off.

How far has corporate brainwashing taken people that they actually start believing this is a normal way of thinking about time management.

archerx• 3 years ago

I can understand a little bit this mentality if you're working for yourself as a one person start up with your runway quickly drying up but to sacrifice your life for a soulless corporation who couldn't care less if you died the next day is very puzzling.

MrDresden2• 3 years ago

I wrote that as someone who is currently bootstrapping a company while working a part-time job alongside.

In the situation of a single person startup then you need to be smart about where to put the time and effort, rather than burning yourself out by overworking.

Since who will sustain the effort in the long run if you wont be able to?

coffeebeqn• 3 years ago

Very true and Carmack very much was working on his own startup on a passion project

Claude_Shannon• 3 years ago

But they are technically slacking off, aren't they?

It doesn't matter what the reason is, but you're not getting anything done in that time. Why should you consider that as a time you worked during?

ughOk• 3 years ago

I do something similar to the CD trick: I'll set a timer and tell myself I have to do focused work for that amount of time. I pause the timer for any interruption (including bathroom breaks).

I'll often just do an hour. At the end of the hour I can check Slack messages, look at Twitter, etc. I'll only do this once or twice a day. Otherwise, I just work "normally".

For me, it's less about hardcore grinding and more about making sure I'm holding myself to a reasonable standard. It's an hour - is that too much to ask?

I've found 3 big benefits: 1. Personally, I focus better with the timer. I don't know why. But I'm less distractible. I'm an order of magnitude more productive in that hour.

2. I'm the type of person that feels guilty when I'm not productive. I find that, because I've met a productivity goal (and have been genuinely productive), I don't feel that guilt. I'm both more productive and less burnt out.

3. You'd be shocked at how long it takes to get through that hour sometimes. That's probably the biggest benefit: it teaches you how you're managing your focus time. Everyone thinks they're good at time (and focus) management but nobody measures it.

autonomousErwin• 3 years ago

I think it's important to make the differentiation between hyper-productive and context-hyper-productive, I suspect most devs fall into the latter category.

The context-hyper-productive dev is an individual who seems 10x more productive compared to everyone around them but it's often the case it's the CTO/single-dev of a startup who's entire tech they've built from the ground-up and know every nook and cranny of the codebase so can seemingly solve bugs magically by just knowing where to look immediately, thereby leap-frogging a logic chain most standard devs would have to take.

ivan_ah• 3 years ago

Commit to getting something done every day. [...] Stay as late as you have to in order to finish.

This is a really good tip. I find external commitment works better for this. If I commit to self, there is a chance I might flake out at the end of the day (due to being tired or lazy after lunch/dinner), but if I make the promise to an external "authority" I don't seem to "get tired" after dinner and I'll push through until the day's task get shipped. You would think the next day you'll be tired because I worked until late, but I noticed the opposite—I'm feeling more energized because of the momentum of having shipped something.

For the last couple of months, my friend and I have been exchanging progress reports on our work (we're both writing) and it seems to help with productivity. Once in a while I'll flake out and be like "sorry, I've failed and I will miss this deadline" but most of the time it works.

But it's a fine line between "pushing yourself" through the difficult uphills once in a while, and pushing yourself all the time getting burned out... I've been writing/coding for many years, and I still can't quite tell the difference.

skeeter20203• 3 years ago

It seems funny that, in an article where the holy grail is promoted as "measure productivity on your own scale", much of the conversation is about how your actions will be interpreted by an external audience.

Pahiro• 3 years ago

I'm not clear on why one needs to be hyper-productive. If you've been in the industry for long enough, you start to realize that everything functions in a cycle and they're just slapping a new fancy name and methodology on a problem that's existed for decades. My approach is to slowly shift my career into a direction that aligns with my interests. My latest KPIs, for example, include "Practical AI use-cases in the developer space". Gotta love getting paid to mess around with LLMs and see if I can get consistent real world applications out of it.

My point is, do what you love and pressure your boss to pay for training that aligns with your interests. Also, if you really want to be hyper-productive then start contributing to open source projects. Corporates don't reward working yourself to the bone. Corporates only reward assertive behavior. That's why you get idiots in managerial positions, because they're assertive and they take the lead. I can't tell you how many times I've been made recommendations as an SME and been over-ridden by a manager that doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.

mkl95• 3 years ago

instead of banking the surplus (i.e. moving on immediately to your next task), you spend it relaxing and screwing off because, whew, you just earned a small vacation by busting shit out in an hour that you thought would take all day.

I'm perfectly OK with this. In fact at many countries you will be entitled to some paid time off after you log some overtime.

Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013)

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