Daily Routine of a 4 Hour Programmer. A slightly different approach to a similar problem as what I wrote about a while back. Creating habits that lead to predictable productivity is my biggest goal for 2012. Relatedly, I might try a more adjustable desk setup.
Tag: work
Rebooting my work schedule
One of the fantastic things about working for Automattic is that I determine a lot of how I work. The schedule, location, and surroundings are all up to me. My co-workers are night owls, early risers, home office, and café types. Most importantly, we all work in the way that suits us.
Until October of this year I worked solely from my home office. In October Daniel and I started working mostly out of PIE, which is a great location. Over the course of 2011 my location changed but my overall schedule did not.
For a while now my schedule has looked something like this:
- Wake up around 7:00am
- Start working around 8:00am
- Work solidly through till about 4:00pm with the occasional break
The problem is that I have been growing less and less effective at working this way. My efficiency, focus, and happiness have been slipping. So, I’m going to change it up.
While I’ve been thinking of changing my schedule for a while a chat with a co-worker a couple days ago and two serendipitous articles convinced me to try it now. I’m going to see how I get on working in 90 minute increments with 30 minute gaps.
This fits with how I naturally work when I work weekends. Those days I frequently do more in 3 hours than I do in an entire workday during the week. Granted, part of that is because fewer people are around. Still, I think it’s worth considering.
My plan for those 30 minute gap times is to do one of the following: read fiction, cook delicious food, go for a run, write something longhand to post here later.
My goal is to get back to where I was in early October, a time when I was far more productive. Hopefully this schedule and those breaks keep me sane while increasing what I do. After all, it’s what you actually make that matters.
And it works…
So why did you make this?
Because I’m a programmer, and this is what I do.
Some people jog away from their house every day, only to jog back. Others walk on a treadmill, expending energy to get nowhere. In both cases, it may appear to others that they’ve accomplished nothing, but they’ve chosen to do these seemingly redundant activities on a regular basis to incrementally improve themselves. And it works.
Marco Arment – secondcrack on GitHub.
Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities
This is why I say priorities can only be observed. In my book, a priority is not simply a good idea; it’s a condition of reality that, when observed, causes you to reject every other thing in the universe — real, imagined, or prospective — in order to ensure that things related to the priority stay alive.
Merlin Mann – Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities.
Startups: Stress and Depression
What matters is that you get back to the basics — as my friend so eloquently stated — and focus on relieving stress. The hour away from work can greatly increase your productivity when you come back to the office more relaxed and fresh.
Use that hour to escape. For me, the only time I can disconnect my mind from my startup is when I go to the gym to play squash and to relax after the match in the steam room. Even when I’m sleeping, I dream of my startup, but thankfully I was able to find my escape, and know that I can go there when I need to.
Spencer Fry – Startups: Stress and Depression.
The challenges of working remotely. Sage advice from Sam Brown about how to make working remotely a success. Much of what he writes holds true to my experience of the last two years.
Some thoughts about the future of work
All I know is that anyone living anywhere theoretically has the ability to do what I do, for any company based anywhere in the world — just like anyone can be a journalist, or write software or develop apps or design products, or edit books or movies or music, or do a thousand other things that only require a PC and an Internet connection.
That can cause problems for governments, obviously, since they are used to seeing jobs as things that can be contained by national borders and put in discrete little boxes for neat categorization, so that the visas can be issues (and taxes can be assessed). But the reality is that many of us don’t live in such a neat and tidy world any more, and while that may look like a threat to some, it’s also a huge opportunity — and that’s part of what we mean when we talk about the future of work.
Matthew Ingram – Detained by U.S. Customs: Some thoughts about the future of work.
buckshot vs. rifle approaches
Many people try to do too much because they’re worried they might miss doing something that matters. They want to do everything possible, in case some of those things turn out to be important.
This is the buckshot approach. Buckshot spreads into many little pellets when it leaves the shotgun — most will miss the target, but that’s OK, because only some of the pellets need to hit. That’s fine for hunting, but for living, I’d recommend the rifle approach.
The rifle shoots a much more targeted bullet, with much more powerful impact. You aim at a specific target, and you don’t waste as much energy.
Leo Babauta – buckshot vs. rifle approaches.
Amazon and customer service
How in the world can these two paragraphs actually exist in the same article?
The company’s customer service—which Mr. Bezos later called “the cornerstone of Amazon.com”—started with the founder himself answering emails. By 1999 it was manned by 500 representatives packed into cubicles and answering customers’ questions.
The people handling these emails were generally overqualified and underpaid, with no experience in bookselling. Disaffected academics were popular because they were well-read and could supposedly help find books on a huge variety of topics. They were paid about $10 to $13 an hour, but with the possibility of promotions and stock options dangled before their glazed eyes. The best of them could answer a dozen emails a minute. Those who dropped below seven were often fired.
Absolutely nothing about that second paragraph says “cornerstone of Amazon.com.” If that’s how the cornerstone of the company is treated I’d hate to see what the other teams at Amazon have to put up with.
The quote is from Jeff Bezos of Amazon: Birth of a Salesman by Richard L. Brandt in the Wall Street Journal. Also, it’s atrocious that a writer can put those paragraphs next to each other without calling Bezos on what is obviously a ludicrous assertion.
If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers. Smart piece with some cool data about deliberate practice and how to make the most of the time you’re working. The goal is to work smarter, not harder.