
I apparently got 50% better at my job last month - oskarth
http://www.benkuhn.net/50pct
======
jjuhl
286 hours in one month. That's just crazy and will lead straight to burn-out
if you ask me. Learn to relax man.

Where I live (Denmark) the work week is 37 hours (so roughly 150hrs/month) and
if i stretch that to even 40 I can feel the toll it takes.

Sure, when I was 25 I could work 200-300hr months, but that did eventually
land me in hospital due to stress and generally being burned out.

Take care of yourself and don't work too hard. It's not worth it.

~~~
dtech
It's somewhat different for working at startups and for founders, but it's a
Europe v.s. America culture difference. Americans are very proud to work 70
hours a week and take no or 2 weeks vacation a year, Europeans call them crazy
for doing it.

~~~
vidarh
Having worked 70 hour weeks myself, and having worked with Americans doing 70
hours weeks in startups:

Outside of _very_ short intervals, I've yet to meet a single person (myself
included) in mentally demanding jobs who actually increase their productivity
more than very marginally (in terms of work accomplished in a week) this way.
I'm sure exceptions exists, but in 20 years in development and operations work
I've yet to meet them.

In fact, I've had to order people to go home and sleep because they measurably
increased the defect rates for our code enough to become a net drain.

In other words: I don't just see it as crazy, I see it as inefficient and a
quick way to burn out without accomplishing much.

While there may be culture differences involved, the reason I think this is an
issue at all is a combination of lack of capturing and reviewing metrics of
productivity coupled with a lot of people being delusional about their own
work capacity (see the lack of metrics bit) and others being forced to keep up
or look lazy in comparison.

I way to often see people having problems getting "enough" work done while
being noticeable and obviously slowed down by lack of sleep, for example, only
for their response to be to work longer and slow down even more.

~~~
xorcist
What's especially bothersome is that the first cognitive function you lose
when you're tired and overworked is self-assessment.

"This is insane! I've never been so productive" has entered my mind many times
just as I looked up, understood that this hour-long work was actually six
hours and that meant it wasn't productive at all, and finally went home or to
bed.

It's only funny in retrospect...

~~~
vidarh
Yeah, I finally beat that by writing a fresh todo list each day with an
estimate of how much time I will put in towards each entry _today_ and when I
expect to start (rather than how much it will take to complete it). Then I
annotate it with when I actually start and stop and notes on why I didn't make
my projected start time....

It quickly becomes very sobering reading and quickly made my todo lists
drastically shorter to start with, and made me more careful about ensuring I
rested enough..

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nickbauman
Caution. Behind tools like Rescuetime is the idea that our work can be boiled
down to time and motion studies. In software, there isn't a strong
relationship between time spent and the value created. Much of our best work
is conceived or discovered when we're not writing code, often not even
thinking about code, but dreaming or distracting ourselves. It is a generally
highly creative field and where it isn't creative it is of low value.

------
aprdm
286h/month? crazy... you better work on how to work 50% less hours

~~~
VLM
Its a work/life balance thing. With a detailed read, op is accounting for
online shopping, bill paying, buying travel tickets. If your balance is toward
living at work, you're going to spend dozens of hours "doing living" while
physically at work.

The "productive" and "very productive" sectors only add up to a normal 40 hr
week.

Op makes op's manager look good because "butts in seats". I actually work more
than op but I do online bill pay and purchase train tickets for travel and do
social media mostly at home rather than at work, resulting in my boss looking
bad like I'm a slacker because I only put in a little more "butts in seats"
than 40 hours.

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Karunamon
More evidence on the already pretty massive pile that meetings are absolutely
terrible. Very, very few things are so important and intolerant to
asynchronous communication that they require forcing n people to drop whatever
they're doing and become unproductive for a quarter of the workday.

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collyw
Hours of work done as a measue of being "better at your job" sounds kind of
similar to lines of code.

~~~
kking50
Had a guy interviewing for an intern position once say, after my coworker
showed him a bit of code, "the biggest file I saw today was 500 lines, so I'm
pretty sure I can handle it. I'm used to working on PHP scripts with thousands
of lines. Now that's scary." He lost my vote in three sentences.

~~~
collyw
He didn't necceseraly choose the thousand line files but did have to keep them
running.

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leroy_masochist
> Slack people, are you listening? Stop re-coloring your plaid and fix your
> startup time!

I second this....

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vijayr
Anyone know of a software like Rescuetime, but installed locally and not send
data to a third party?

~~~
Karunamon
There's a laundry list here[1], but I'm seeing precisely none that are both
cross platform and self hosted. Rescuetime's big thing is that it's mostly
automatic (since it's tracking window titles), and that seems to be their
secret sauce.

[1]:
[http://alternativeto.net/software/rescuetime/](http://alternativeto.net/software/rescuetime/)

~~~
GFischer
Looking at your list, I tried both ManicTime and Toggl.

ManicTime does the window title tracking too, it's self hosted, but it's
Windows-only (I guess it kills it for many).

Toggl is not automatic.

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dogma1138
You can just as easily look at this and say you've gotten 50% worse at it.

That app can't evaluate what you actually accomplished in a given time period.

So one might also interpret the results as it took you twice as long to solve
engineering problems than in the previous month.

And considering that 280 hours is about 12 hours a day 5 days a week that
sounds about right.

I don't know of any one that is capable of doing thought intensive work for
more than 4-5 hours a day effectively, 12 hours sounds like pushing code lines
around while not solving any real problems.

------
applecore
Serious question: what's so crazy about having worked 268 hours in a month?
That's only about 50% more time spent working than a standard 40-hour
workweek, i.e., about 10 hours per day during the week (220 hours worked over
22 days, Mon–Fri) plus another 6 hours per day over the weekend (48 hours over
8 days, Sat/Sun).

~~~
yulaow
I am surprised you do not find crazy to spend 10h/day + 12 in the weekend at
work. It is normal for you or in your zone/country? Here in EU it would be
considered madness (and legally in some states you couldn't even do it)

~~~
cballard
If you do, do the police arrest you (I assume no)? What happens?

~~~
Signez
Your employer risks some (huge) fines, depending on where you live. Here in
France, we have "Work Inspectors" who verify sponteously those rules − they
can be called by employees themselves, too.

Of course, if you are self-employed, there is no way that those rules can be
enforced… but it will be frowned upon by your relatives, because we know that
it is wrong in the long term.

~~~
corin_
How do work inspectors do it? If they ask people and get told how many hours
are worked it could work, but it's not like they could count hours..

(I moved to work in Paris this year, so am rather interested... though I
believe my 'cadre' status exempts me from this anyway)

~~~
kawakiole
Usually they don't need to count. In general working hours are stipulated in
the contract, so if they find someone in the office outside the hours they
have stipulated in the contract the managers better have a good
explanation.... Then, if they consider the evidence is enough there's an
official investigation where they can search for emails/phone call
logs/documents that attest that the employees were working or asked to work
outside of "working hours" and a trial takes place. In my current workplace
there are no such strict rules, but if management finds someone working
noticeably more than 40h a week they'll want to know why that person needs
more time than the rest to do his job. I guess that's as weird for non
Europeans as working >40h a week is for them.

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cwyers
I'm not sure that I would consider communication "neutral" on the spectrum of
productive to non-productive.

~~~
Drdrdrq
Where would you put it?

I would say (nontechnical) comunicatio is mostly just a big waste of time,
with a few exceptions which are vital. Except it is difficult to get one
without the other.

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collyw
Maybe more time communicating and he could have cut out a lot of the
"engineering".

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draw_down
30 seconds for the Slack app, that's crazy. I use the webapp, but as far as I
know the desktop app is just a package for the webapp.

~~~
ben336
Thats a bit exaggerated unless he's working with really bad hardware/network
connection. I generally see ~10 seconds. Which is still painfully slow.

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blfr
Is there a similar software for time accounting for Linux?

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fleitz
Efficiency vs. effectiveness...

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a3voices
Why would he want to work 286 hours per month? I hope he's making a million
dollars a year.

~~~
Drdrdrq
I hope he survives.

Other than that, it is interesting to see other people have their creativity
time destroyed by unimportant stuff too... All the luck to OP!

