
How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time - JohnHammersley
http://jdlm.info/articles/2016/07/04/cto-time-minute-by-minute.html
======
bluetwo
The biggest thing I learned when analyzing my time, which I wish I had
recognized earlier, was that I can have two types of productive days:

I can have days where I do a million small things and hop quickly from task to
task.

Or, I can have days where I work on big issues and should not be interrupted
by small issues.

But, if I _think_ I'm going to have a day where I work on a big thing and it
turns out I get interrupted by a million little things, I end up doing nothing
well and end up very unproductive.

~~~
rm999
This is why I and most of my team work from home on Fridays (we never book
meetings either). It's tempting to dismiss working from home as a way of
skipping on work, but there's no other time I can get 4+ contiguous hours in
front of my computer with no interruptions or meetings. It's probably my most
productive dev time all week, largely because I can plan for it. I frequently
and vocally encourage work from home on Fridays to become a standard (but
optional) "perk" in tech.

~~~
spullara
I used to take the shuttle to Twitter for an hour each way. I think I wrote
most of the code I wrote there on the bus because of the reliable time in
front of the computer.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
Yep. Mirrors my experience with shuttles. I, too, have banged out some real
work on a shuttle with headphones on. I unexpectedly regretted moving closer
to the office because I lost this time, despite that making not a lick of
sense.

~~~
taurath
Offices are for managers to feel that people are productive, not for people to
be productive. Look around most offices and there is absolutely no space laid
out for concentration time, except social concentration time.

------
cup
The notion that a 130h work week is admirable, desirable, sustainable or
useful is ridiculous and should be criticised every time it's raised.

Unless you're working for yourself or working in a job where your contract
compensates you by the hour then investing such huge swathes of time I think
is destructive.

There is a reason workers united, fought and were martyred for the 8 hour work
week and the creeping clawback by industry is a problem.

That aside, very interesting to see such a consistent time keeping record.

~~~
wwalser
While I agree with your statement for the most part, I also understand that
there is some context to it. That specific context is Marissa Mayer and other
early Google employees. I find it hard to convince myself that those people
and especially Mayer, were not or are not compensated in some way that takes
those huge swathes of time into consideration.

She was paid $36MM in 2015 and raised the market cap of Yahoo! by 151% in four
years. Some of that compensation is based on success at Google, some of it may
be based on her success at Yahoo!, but some of it is absolutely based on her
brand. Her brand, in my own mind, is highly associated with her dedication to
working long hours.

I work long hours but I'm conscious of a few things: I don't celebrate it. I
don't plan to proselytize it like Mayer does. Part of those long hours are
dedicated to operationalizing time-sinks so that I don't have to do it
forever. I don't expect others around me, especially non-founders, to do the
same and like you I believe that for them to do so would likely be a net-
negative.

~~~
JamesBarney
I was under the impression the majority of the change in stock price for
Yahoo(if not all) was related to them owning a large share of Ali Baba stock
which has skyrocketed in value. And this purchase was made before Marissa
Mayer took over.

~~~
wwalser
This could be the case. I wasn't able to quickly find market cap information
for Ali Baba prior to it's US listing. Every since the Ali Baba IPO, Yahoo!'s
stock has closely tracked BABA.

------
beliu
Thanks for sharing this. Is the metime code publicly available? I'm the CTO of
another small tech company
([https://sourcegraph.com](https://sourcegraph.com)) and I'm also a bit
obsessive about time tracking.

I wrote a small open-source CLI that gives you a CPU-profile-like view of time
spent on your computer:
[https://github.com/sourcegraph/thyme](https://github.com/sourcegraph/thyme).
Thought I'd share since OP and others here might find it useful, and I'd love
to hear any feedback.

~~~
atcole
Instead of using metime, I actually use rescuetime which is a fairly similar
application if you also track your offline time.

------
jdleesmiller
(Author here.) It's great to see my write-up on HN, and I'm glad to see it
generating good discussion here.

Since several people have asked, I have now made my 'metime' tracking app open
source:
[https://github.com/jdleesmiller/metime](https://github.com/jdleesmiller/metime)

Being in London, I have just woken up, so I will now be more able to answer
any questions!

~~~
lusen
Hi author. Small nit: consider changing your title to "their" time rather than
"he" since you talk about " _a_ technical co-founder". There's no need to use
gendered language in the general case, and gendered language needlessly
encourages gendered based identification. Imagine if you included your race
and ethnicity and sexuality in the title - that'd feel silly, right? It would
limit the audience who found the piece relevant, and it could be read as
though those aspects were somehow relevant to being a technical co-founder. No
doubt gender and race and ethnicity do effect one's experience and
interactions, and that's a great piece to write, but that's not what you're
trying to talk about in this piece so why put it in the title?

~~~
jdleesmiller
Thanks for the feedback on the title. I've changed it to "their", which still
works fine for me.

For the avoidance of doubt, I do say in the article that:

> The CTO role is a very diverse one, and I don’t expect that the results here
> will be true in general. This is just my story. I hope it is an interesting
> one, and it is uniquely backed by data!

So, the subject is me, and I am a male. I did not intend to exclude anyone by
using "him".

(I can't change the title on HN myself, but if someone who can wants to do so,
please feel free.)

------
esalman
Off-topic: I really like Overleaf. It removes the barrier of installing all of
the compiler, editor and dependencies and allows anyone to jump right in and
and start typing manuscripts. That's why I always recommend Overleaf to
anybody looking to learn Latex initially.

------
fosk
It's interesting to note that the meetings time decreased as the management
time increased, because often the two are strongly correlated.

In my experience meetings and management time grow proportionally, since
meetings are a good way to talk with the team, set expectations and review the
results. Or, in other words, some meetings == management.

~~~
DiabloD3
"The meetings will continue until moral improves."

~~~
douche
AKA the project productivity death spiral

------
ones_and_zeros
In the 5 seconds of thinking what I'd wish I'd seen before I clicked the link:

Pre MVP: 80% dev, 20% biz dev

Pre Revenue: 20% dev, 80% biz dev

Pre Profit: 80% hiring, 20% dev

Profitable: 100% biz dev

~~~
mooreds
Interesting. Would love to hear more about your thoughts around this.

------
lloydde
> My app had some simple charting built in but no real analysis. It’s only
> now, six months later, that I’ve had a chance to really get into the dataset

I'm interested to find out if the data influenced the OP from week to week
(month-to-month) during the collection phase? Did it influence his keeping up
his development by shifting it to weekends? Or was there other catalysts to
that? What were they? Were there planned development milestones? were they
sized?

Fascinating article.

~~~
jdleesmiller
(Author here.) The shift to developing on the weekends wasn't really evident
in the simple charts that I had --- I only found out about that after doing
the detailed analysis, and it required doing some statistics to really pick
out the trend from the noise.

I have now open sourced the app, if you'd like to dig deeper into what I was
looking at during the (latter part of the) experiment:
[https://github.com/jdleesmiller/metime](https://github.com/jdleesmiller/metime)

We did have some large projects to complete on tight timescales that spilled
into the weekend. We didn't really have a good system for sizing / pointing
tasks (and we still don't) --- probably an area where we could improve.

------
djhn
Awesome project! I'm a big fan of using econometric methods in Quantified Self
-type analysis.

A couple of thoughts on your regressions:

Keeping holidays in the data seems counterintuitive. I'm fairly sure just from
eyeing the graphs that the increase in your work week might reach statistical
significance if you were to use a regression method more resistant to
outliers, like Least Trimmed Squares.

Another idea - in microeconometrics it's standard to use some type of Poisson
regression four count data, which this could potentially qualify as.

And furthermore, I would have loved to see some sort of distributed lag model
of the timeseries (or at least a scatterplot of all activities against each
other) to see which ones tend to co-occur.

~~~
jdleesmiller
(Author here.) I'm very pleased to finally receive some feedback on the
technical side!

I will have to check out Least Trimmed Squares (and maybe other robust
regression techniques). For this dataset, I did try to exclude holidays, but
it was difficult to define this exactly, so a more robust technique might
indeed work better.

And yes, it would be interesting to see what tags co-occur. Good ideas for a
future post. Thanks!

------
syntex
I work as a freelancer (Europe) and I think I work reasonably hard. But is
really difficult for me to honestly log more than 10-15 dev-billable hours
during the week. The rest of the time is spent in chat and learning / playing
with a new things.

~~~
karmelapple
10-15 hours per week is your max?

Do your clients understand that playing / trying out new things leads directly
to you building the finished product? Or is your playing truly separate from
any of your client work?

~~~
syntex
My max was 48 hours/week ( but this is an exception )

For living I build e-commerce solutions and backend stuff. And in free time I
play more with a frontend. Recently with react/redux and in the long run with
every possible new technology on the horizon. I guess I waste a lot of time
doing this as most of these things isn't immediately related to client work. (
but over time It helps me to sell to them a few ideas for improvements )

Also, I track my time and habits in detail ( using rescuetime ). Probably
without such careful loging I would overestimate how much time I am spending
on actual coding.

~~~
AznHisoka
But do you bill considerably more than the 10-15 hours you actually work? If
so I would find that unethical

~~~
syntex
I don't need to.

I live in Warsaw and live here is a lot cheaper than in Western Part of
Europe. My clients are Canada / UK based and I charge between $50-$70/h so
even 10-15 hours a week is enough to make living over here.

------
patrickgordon
Interesting article, pretty remarkable to be that committed to the time
tracking -- I can barely stick with using the pomodoro technique for longer
than a few days in a row...

I hope OP continues to grow the dataset. Will be interested in a follow up
later on!

~~~
DiabloD3
According to the HN front page, it takes 60 days for most people to form a
habit.

------
z3t4
I recommend not only track your time, but also write down what you do, and
have project-names. Using this I can give very accurate estimates by going
back and see how long time things took. And it makes it easier to plan things.
Also if you are in an early startup it's good to have this so your co-founders
know how much you work and on what. And if you are employed you can use it to
tell your boss exactly what you did (and why it took so long). There's a
saying though, that you'll spend 50% of your time documenting what you do.

------
dewitt
*Or her time.

~~~
rckclmbr
It's literally written by an individual that is male. Let's hope he knows what
gender he is.

~~~
empressplay
Then they should have used "How THIS technical co-founder spends HIS time" \--
by using "a" instead of "this" he implies a generality.

~~~
Retra
It doesn't imply anything, it's just an ambiguous construction.

