
Ask HN: What's the biggest time waste on your workday? - andriosr
I&#x27;ve been thinking about things I have to do regularly, but are not worth the time.<p>Examples for me:<p>- manual tasks I didn&#x27;t have time do automate yet (technical debt)
- writing boilerplate code
- unproductive meetings to discuss things that would be 1000x more efficient over text&#x2F;a document<p>These are things I do regularly and they don&#x27;t make me learn or improve at the rate of more interesting stuff.<p>Are these the same for you?<p>What are you doing that you wish you weren&#x27;t?
======
decafninja
Useless meetings.

The worst is where some middle manager or project manager or business analyst
calls in 20 different people into an hour long meeting. 5 people might
actually get some meaningful benefit from the meeting, let alone actually
utter a single word.

You try to skip it, but then said organizer pings you asking why you aren't
present.

The same meeting is scheduled daily, because reasons. Never mind that there
has been no meaningful progress or update to the project during the last 24
hours.

~~~
chrisaycock
Yep, and it's worse when someone I don't even report to demands regular status
updates. Rising-up in that firm meant demonstrating leadership by getting
people to report to you, even if in an unofficial capacity.

Or there was the company where we had four (!) hours of meetings per day: two
in the morning and two in the afternoon. All we ever discussed is what we
didn't get done during lunch time.

After I left all that, my one question when interviewing with a hiring manager
became: "How often do you have meetings?" A lot of people got very flustered
with that one.

~~~
Ididntdothis
This happens a lot in my company. When things fall behind, first you tell your
direct manager what’s going on. Then you tell the same thing in a meeting two
levels up. Then somebody really high comes and wants a meeting too. But he
doesn’t really understand the project so you have to spend a ton of time
explaining what this is really about. And this goes on and on. Everybody wants
to have their own meeting.

It always amazes me that we have this whole reporting structure and tracking
tools like Jira but somehow the critical information doesn’t really flow up.
In theory they all would look at Jira and some status reports and then be up
to date without wasting the time of the people who are doing the work.

~~~
DenisM
The straight jacket of a project management software is not always helpful,
but your manager must be able to effectively collect, analyze, and communicate
status in both directions. In fact that’s the only mandatory part of the job.

Your situation is highly dysfunctional. If you are not quitting just yet
consider taking charge - collate the status of your project (you and people
you coordinate with) into a tidy status update that your manager can take to
their manager. It’s a difficult skill, but you will earn undying gratitude.
And god help you if you can add a meaningful chart (as opposed to a bullshit
chart) to your stays update - you will instantly become the savior of the
team.

Fun story. I have once received a promotion based on a single ducking
spreadsheet of this sort. I was so mad about all my other “hardcore“
engineering work not meaning diddly squat by comparison, I asked if they can
take the promotion back (they refused). I came to terms with it eventually - I
started walking up the management chain asking what happened and eventually I
was told that hiring someone to write solid code is a question of throwing
money into the hiring pipeline, but hiring someone to provide meaningful
insight or direction is mostly a matter of luck.

------
codq
The general distractions of the web/news/life.

One thing I recently realized is the secondary effect of gmail being open in a
browser tab.

I like to be aware of my email in real-time so I can respond to pressing
situations, therefore I keep gmail open in my browser's first tab. However,
the secondary effect is that my _browser_ is always open, and the distractions
of the internet are just one new tab away.

I recently started using TwoBird as my gmail client, which now keeps my email
and my web browser separated. Yes, everyone who's been using a stand-alone
email application has known this for years, but it's new to me.

I'm happy that I can now live/work/breathe without having a web browser open
at all times.

~~~
ipnon
Try checking email 2 times a day, when you begin work and when you end work.
If the message requires an urgent response, the sender won't wait on an email
anyway.

~~~
itake
+1.

At my job, any high priority alerts are communicated via phone calls or Slack
messages. Emails secondary, but it is annoying if someone sends you a last min
event invite that you miss :-/

~~~
andriosr
I also check e-mail once a day.

I keep Apple Calendar open and hope any invites appear on it.

It happened once or twice not to, as it has a couple minutes delay from
receiving the invite in the e-mail.

------
laurentdc
All project management tools introduce enormous overhead for me. All of them,
they're clunky to use, either too general purpose or too specific, and when
you need that bit of info you never know where exactly your colleague put it.
Trello, Jira, Notion, even searching for something in Google Docs is a massive
context switch and just feels dreadful with those sluggish single page
applications that make laptop fans spin in five second bursts while they load.

So I have my own todo.txt with a plain old bullet list that I keep open in
tmux+vim, and at the end of the day if there's some time left I update all the
other tools.

~~~
bearer_token
> when you need that bit of info you never know where exactly your colleague
> put it

> So I have my own todo.txt ... if there's some time left I update all the
> other tools.

Do you see the irony?

Not saying this is wrong, just that you are a perfect example of how
incentives perpetuate this problem.

~~~
teeray
I think its more a sign that these tools are eventually consistent despite
their marketing copy claiming a total real-time awareness of your team’s
activities.

------
vbtemp
I would have a lot fewer distractions and get much more done if we could just
drop the pretext of "working" full time.

The "wasted" part of my day is simply being extremely inefficient and dicking
around simply because it's expected to be in the office or available online. I
would get _much_ more done if my job was to hit milestones and goals (perhaps
with some designated "office hours"). And then I have the rest of my time to
do what I need to. Fortunately the "dicking around" involves taking online
courses, personal "stretch" projects, etc.. but still.

I don't want to sound bitter. I have flexibility when I start/end my work day.
On any given day I can peace out at 1pm or show up at noon (so long as I'm not
blowing anyone off). But that's on _any given day_, not _every day_. And so
the repeated, iterated game that's going on between me and employer reaches a
nash equilibrium where I do just "enough" that I'm advancing my career in the
organization and little enough that I have enough lax time in the day to do
whatever I can online for my personal life (coursework, shopping, personal
tech projects/experiments, enrichment reading, etc).

~~~
freehunter
I used to be a security analyst which meant I spent a lot of my day waiting
for a security incident to either happen or be escalated to me. Now I’m a
consultant which means I spent a lot of time waiting on clients. I’ve come to
appreciate semi-mindless games like Rimworld, Cities: Skylines, Factorio, The
Sims, or clicker games on my phone. I can fill my waiting time with those
which I find fun, but they don’t require so much of my attention that I miss a
client email or Slack message come in and I can quickly switch back.

It’s still wasting time, but it’s less mentally exhausting than trying to
switch to something more “productive” for a few minutes.

~~~
thrower123
Project Highrise is a great one. Or so I've been told...

------
Frost1x
Contextual switches.

I work on a variety of development projects with sometimes entirely different
technology stacks, goals, people, etc. Sometimes there's overlap, often
there's not. It can be daunting jumping between entirely different sets of
technical challenges, goals, and conceptual framing of problems.

------
nicolas_
I'm working for a big aerospace company and a lot of it (tech-wise) feels
like/is a huge time waste, even more so the last four months where I've been
working remotely.

1) Turn-on the computer, log in Windows, enter the overcomplicated encryption
software password, launch IE6 to go to a webpage which will launch the VPN
native app. (at least 5 minutes)

2) Opening Microsoft Project takes ages since the Project Server is in Europe.
Then there's some kind of macro that has to run which in the end fails because
I'm not on-site. You pick a plan to open it, it takes another 30 seconds,
another macro/prompt/check fails. The whole process takes a good 3-5 minutes
until you can actually work on it and I have 18+ plans to manage.

3) You can run reports of said Project plans and export them in Excel format
but the formatting is all junky. You have unused columns, titles, hidden
columns. I had to create a macro to import the exported file, import all the
data, and creating a pivot table automatically instead of doing it manually X
times a day.

4) We're still using Office 2010 while working a lot with Excel. The
limitations of the 10 years old software is a real pain. Do you want to manage
two Excel files in two separate instances of Excel? You'll have to open a
separate instance first then open a file. You also can't use all the new
formulas or enjoy the improvement made on the ones that already exist. I get
that Office licences are not cheap and the "Fix What’s Broken, Don’t Break
What’s Working " motto but the time wasted on all this by everyone working for
the group worldwide must be way higher.

5) Enterprise network is slow on-site, it's even worse on a VPN. Opening up a
simple Excel/PPT file takes a good five minutes.

6) We're still using Lync, it's easier to send a screenshot/file via email
than using this nightmare of a software.

7) IE6 is the "default" browser for everything

8) With the COVID-19 situation, we're not allowed anymore to use conference
tools while being connected on the VPN. You have to save all the files you
need for the call locally, log off the VPN, join the call, and then re-upload
everything on the network.

~~~
Nextgrid
IE6 as a _default browser_ in _2020_? How does that even work, considering I
don't expect it to even be able to connect to any modern website?

~~~
nicolas_
We also have Chrome (with add-on blocked) if you need to browse any modern
website on the internet but don't expect any entreprise tools/intranet website
to properly work.

------
throwaway743
Constant/Regardless Of Lockdown:

\- Filling out timesheets and the stress behind the feeling of having to meet
a minimum number of hours each month.

Before the lockdown:

\- ~2-2.5hr daily total for commute. Includes 20min walk to and from subway,
and 40-60min to and from subway ride. Add on the stress of dealing with noise,
obnoxious people, putrid smells on the subway, etc and it's especially
mentally/emotionally draining.

\- Useless meetings that only add to the charade of an organizer trying prove
their value/that they are "working". 90% of the time it's a waste of
everyone's time.

\- Small talk disruptions. Tend to last at a minimum 20min and throw off flow.
Not always a negative, as sometimes the conversations can be fun.

\- Being targeted by petty politics. FYI, I keep to myself and get my shit
done. I don't like getting wrapped up in unnecessary things of the sort. Hard
to quantify in terms of time waste, nonetheless it's soul sucking and results
in lowering my productivity and me ruminating on ways to leave the
company/become self sufficient.

\- Office noise. Lowers productivity.

\- Indoor air quality/"sick building". Lowers productivity/cognition/health.

\- Using personal device for tethered internet access for personal laptop.
Slower connection, but is clear of employer's snooping on traffic and
communications. And with using my own laptop there's no dealing with
sudo/admin restrictions and having to place tickets to packages everytime a
package requires permissions.

\- Job hunting.

Post Lockdown (much more productive, at ease, and content with work life):

\- Giving attention to my overly social, going blind, much loving (though it
gets overwhelming lol) street cat.

\- Cooking home meals/meal prep

\- Checking in on family and loved ones.

\- Working on assignments/projects/research/building tools. Not a problem/time
waste though. I actually enjoy the work I do and the client projects. The
projects are 90% of the the time for the benefit of society. So imo, the work
has meaning and it doesn't weigh in my conscience.

------
canterburry
Poorly defined and incomplete functional requirements with mare hints of the
expected non functional requirement

Leads to: \- Frustrated developers who thought they were done and were doing
good \- Frustrated QA engineers who can't certify the feature as written \-
Frustrated product owners who were assured the feature was "done" \-
Frustrated management who is told it will take longer than promised

~~~
youeseh
Do you have a project manager / product owner on your team?

~~~
canterburry
We do, they are the ones writing the poor requirements.

~~~
youeseh
Do your PMs have a background in the type of engineering that you do?

It may be helpful to point out bad requirements whenever they're provided.
Keep a copy of the bad requirements and why they're bad, so when they repeat
their mistakes, you don't have to repeat yourself explaining why the
requirement is bad.

~~~
canterburry
I think driving towards the point of this thread, I could envision a JIRA
plugin which helps writing complete and well defined stories of manageable
size. It could simply be a template with appropriate sections, or a Q&A bot
which drills down to the requirements.

------
nso95
The biggest time waste for me is the distraction caused by working in a
cubicle without a door.

~~~
ludamad
Reminds me of: [https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-
interrupt...](https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-a-
programmer/) I think 'do not disturb' mechanisms are vital for serious
programming work. There's a huge chasm between work that you've essentially
done all the parts of before, and are just combining, and brand new ground
(which can be a tricky bug). We might condition people around us to believe
that the stakes aren't high, which unfortunately when problems require us to
load them entirely in brain cache to efficiently manipulate them, our
frustration is hard to communicate

------
ivan_ah
Slack semi-async back-and-forth exchanges for hours about things that could be
solved in 5 mins with a sync voice call.

------
dudul
The build time for my app, if I run all the unit tests and checks is really
long. In the order of 5 minutes I think. This is a real pain, so usually I try
to tackle a quick TODO (like an easy code review) while the build is running,
but...

... context switching is also a real pain. Slack is a killer for that because
I obsessed over seeing the little dot on the icon. "What if it's really
important? What if someone needs support to get unblocked now?", so I always
check incoming messages. This one is probably mostly on me having some mild
OCD or something.

~~~
andriosr
I disabled everything possible in Slack, but still feel the same. Can't go for
more than 1 hour without checking it, pretty unproductive, but needed in order
to help friends get things done.

------
DenisM
I follow the “ski-rental problem” rule on automation - if it takes 12 hours to
automate something I will wait till I have wasted 12 hours of manual labor
doing it, and the automate the beejezus out of it.

It’s not an exact rule but it removes anxiety and doubt which are a lot more
damaging than the manual labor itself, freeing up the mental cycles for what
really matters.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ski_rental_problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ski_rental_problem)

------
thrower123
The biggest one is repeated meetings to go over things with people who are not
capable of written communication. It's particularly egregious now, when
everyone is 100% remote.

It's not that much extra work to grab a few screenshots and write a paragraph
or two. Then it also becomes permanent, and not ephemeral. Bonus points if you
can take the extra minute to mark up a screenshot or draw a sketch.

~~~
andriosr
Feel the same, it looks like people used to stop by your desk at the office
can't move to async/written communication, despite it being much more helpful
for the company.

I'm trying to evangelize coworkers as much as I can, sharing content on the
topic, asking for things to be written, but it's something slow to change.

~~~
DenisM
Some people who are not good at writing are good at producing short 3-minute
videos. Might be worth a try?

Writing well is a very difficult skill to acquire.

------
MithrilTuxedo
Next to no unit or local testing.

It's a Java monolith multiple teams work on at once and someone several steps
removed from our team decided to set maven-surefire-plugin to fork for every
test and not reuse forks in the POM all our projects inherit from in 2014.
That causes a ~1s delay per test (even @Ignore'd ones) where they used to take
less close to a millisecond, and I've tracked down the "business exception"
commits in our projects that came in the months after that disabled the test
phase entirely, in order to overcome the build time delay. The rest is
history. Now we've got projects where 98% of the tests laying about in the
repo are dysfunctional lies.

Couple that with using Spring across multiple independently built modules
multiple teams commit to and you're looking at one or more hours between
committing a change and finding out whether or not the latest build deployed
to an environment successfully starts so you can test your change.

~~~
tikkabhuna
I've worked on a project that forked for each test. We were working around the
abuse of static singletons. I had a very small look at a tool that could start
JVMs in a pool that you use later on.

We ended up splitting our tests using annotations to only create separate JVMs
for tests that needed it. You could also look at class data sharing.

Not a fun state of affairs, good luck!

------
blahbhthrow3748
Underspecified tasks. Companies like to pretend that devs should "own the
solution" but in reality there's a lot of coordination involved and you can't
just make things up. Trying to find a way to get feedback from everyone just
to get started is a huge waste that someone like a product owner should handle

------
youeseh
To limit meetings, and unnecessary, distracting conversations, one way that
I've found that individual contributors (engineers, artists, writers etc.) can
segment their day is by splitting it between hours where they'll work on their
individual tasks, and hours where they'll assist others.

For example, in practice this would look like: If your team has a project
manager, then explain the situation to them... tell them that you won't take
meetings after 12pm unless it is for some kind of an major emergency.
Similarly, tell your teammates that you won't go to meetings after 12pm unless
they are stuck on a problem. Ask everyone to schedule time on your calendar if
they want to talk to you - and it'll have to be before 12pm.

If you don't control your own time, then other people will.

------
ipnon
Fuzzy interfaces with my product team

No one can agree on the definitions for the following regarding features and
bugs: in production, ready for development, ready for QA, blocked, cannot
reproduce. Jira simply exacerbates this problem by giving the appearance of
the opposite.

At the end of the day, progress is only made when engineers turn ideas into
applications, so the buck ultimately lands with us each and every time.
However, we are not experts on product development so any criticism we may
have regarding the process is not only misinformed but detrimental to our team
spirit ...

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends
on his not understanding it."

------
Ididntdothis
In work in medical devices so we have to do a lot of documentation. In order
to stay “lean” we have only a few tech writers so at every project the
engineers have to figure what docs to produce and then push them through
various review processes. This takes a lot of time so the most senior
engineers are spending way more time on the documentation process than they do
thinking about technology. The tech almost feels like a side effect.

And in every project there is a ton of discussion about what regulatory
process to use. Instead of figuring this out beforehand usually it holds up
the whole development process for a long time. It can be really frustrating.

~~~
DenisM
Do you think this is wrong? I’m not jesting, I want to discuss this.

I often times find that making functionality takes me barely 30% there. Making
even a short stand up status update that drives the point to the whole team is
very valuable - it energizes everyone seeing that good progress is being made,
it makes sales (they also do customer development) know to push new things or
inquire about adjacent needs, informs support of what’s possible and worth
asking about.

Then there are more detailed feature lay downs, for the same reason. Then
there is the interface itself. And fumbling through often imprecise and
sometimes angry customer requests. It’s all non-feature work, and it takes
huge amount of time, but it seems very valuable in the end, however non-fun it
seems.

So I’m wondering if I’m a regulated work like yours there is similar benefit
to non-feature work?

~~~
Ididntdothis
Writing docs and stuff is fine but the whole submission and review process is
very convoluted and arcane. If we had some people who do this all the time
they would get proficient at this. Right now a lot of the docs have a ton of
errors that easily could be avoid that way. So it eats up a lot of engineering
time plus the output is low quality.

------
AgentOrange1234
Our checkin process is abysmal. 2 hour regression that you can’t avoid.
Several additional test suites that you have to run manually which, if you
break them, you will hear about. Perforce version control is terrible compared
to Git and makes branches difficult.

Tons of time wasted reverse engineering what the developers did, because they
don’t document decisions and protocols between modules in any precise way.

Project planning is big show for management and ends up very disconnected from
reality. So many status updates. Sigh.

------
xiphias2
Creating a complex, but exciting solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
Sometimes I waste half year or more in a bad research direction that I
shouldn't have taken.

------
DenisM
If you are struggling with distractions consider this advice from Paul Graham:

I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer
a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of
the room that I use to check mail or browse the web.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html)

------
freefriedrice
Responding to customer sales inquiries. I'm a hacker, not a salesperson, but
working for startup means I have to switch hats and give a pitch 30% of my
week. Why is it a waste? Because I suck at it. My company doesn't have real
salespeople so we all pick up the slack. I realize it translates into putting
food on my table, but I'm so bad at it that I consider it a waste.

------
adapiz
First, I must admit, I'm reading some RSS feeds. At least the headlines.
Sometimes it's unrelated to work, but mostly it's about tech somehow educating
and inspiring. Personally I would say, it helped me to keep track of what is
going on, what is trending and the best thing: Sometimes I find a nice piece
of software that I haven't known about.

Back to things that I consider waste of time:

1\. Bikeshedding Have you ever had a discussion about timezones with a
solution designer? It's everytime the same: "We need localtime because system
x is doing it and it's confusing to compare it" (no, you don't! You need to
store them with timezone information and solve the human problem in
presentation)

2\. Discussing the need for bigger changes Yep. Your agile-developed system is
running for some time and you see how it's being used and notice: It works,
but it could be much better.

So you start a meeting others here describe as waste of time, because the
result is "no" and the lasting result is, that somebody might keep the idea
for later because there is potential (so not completely wasted).

But anyway, the time to prepare what you want to express in a way even
managers can understand is annoying.

Coworkers often tell me, my ideas are inspiring and they would want to see
them implemented. I feel it shatters because they are too big and sometimes
cause efforts for other times because they have to change something so
coordination is needed etc.

3\. Finding workarounds for technical restrictions given by the company or
project Development workspace is virtual and has a proxy with whitelisting for
internet access. Things like Python's pip are useless. So you setup a proxy on
your local machine and build up a reverse tunnel.

More common: Doing things on machines without root access. You have to figure
out how you get information why something is not working but logs are not
accessible. Nope. You have to ask someone with at maximum your understanding
of the problem to assist you.

Closing: I consider myself as maybe 50% productive, but compared to results of
others, I'm feeling much more effective, when I'm doing something. Not
mentioning when I'm motivated and very concentrated. These are the moments
where it feels like I'm getting the work for a whole week done in one day.

Thanks for reading

------
potta_coffee
Slack is the most counterproductive tool ever for me. I cant turn it off or
ignore it because my manager will be upset. Im spammed constantly with
notifications from all the channels Im supposed to monitor and most the
traffic isnpointless chatter. I really wonder if anyone at my company is even
getting any work done.

~~~
dest
Turn off notifications for periods of 30/60 min? Still acceptable, and you
could focus more.

------
ta17711771
Begging people to follow through on things they've committed to do.

I can't wait until I can afford better, reliable help.

------
Crazyontap
Taking a 10 minute break to make coffee or see what my daughter is doing which
inadvertently turns to 30 mins to 1 hour since she won't let me go back, and
if I just happen to watch tv during that time I end up wasting nearly my whole
day.

It's the reason why I work very late nights now.

~~~
dgrant
Sounds exactly like me. I work very late at night as well to make up for the
day where I have to check on the kids a lot as my wife works away from home.

------
FlyMoreRockets
Checking Hacker News>New multiple times a day and following all the
interesting links.

~~~
nicolas_
You should use the RSS feed of HN, it'll be easier than just checking the site
each X hours/minutes.

------
sys_64738
As a developer, it's waiting to receive customer specs from management.
Sometimes I think we should just get the specs directly.

------
hellofunk
Clicking "yes i accept the cookies" on average 150 times per day.

~~~
yesenadam
I use this Kill Element bookmarklet which mostly gets rid of such static
unwanteds. Not quicker but is more satisfying.

    
    
        javascript:for(var i=0; i<(document.getElementsByTagName('a')).length; i++) {(document.getElementsByTagName('a')[i]).style.pointerEvents = 'none';}function handler(e) {e = e || window.event;var target = e.target || e.srcElement;target.style.display = 'none';document.removeEventListener('click', handler, false);cursor('default');for(var i=0; i<(document.getElementsByTagName('a')).length; i++) {(document.getElementsByTagName('a')[i]).style.pointerEvents = 'initial';}}document.addEventListener('click', handler, false);cursor('crosshair');function cursor(cur) { document.body.style.cursor = cur; }

------
purplezooey
I'll take dealing with toxic, aggressive blowhards for $300, Alex.

------
medymed
Electronic medical record post-click data load time

------
apple4ever
Stand ups. (We are an SRE department)

------
11235813213455
Deploying my tests apps to heroku

------
bobbydreamer
Actually filling up workday.

------
peter-m80
Jira tickets beureucracy

------
rado
Meetings, duh.

