I'm a long-term remote worker. At first it was challenging. After a year of trying to create boundaries, I gave up.
Twice I'd had a 'bad' friday, only to have solutions reveal themselves while I was gardening over the weekend. I realised it did me no harm that my mind strayed to work while gardening, and in fact I was glad of it. So I made a decision to abandon attempts at erecting artificial structure, and quickly realised that trying to impose separations had caused more stress than it resolved.
I found it liberating to stop trying to 'leave work at work', and to not be upset if my thoughts stray to work when I 'should' be off the clock. In return, I stopped trying to block out the rest of my life from my home office. I enjoy a busy life with various community responsibilities and being able to give some attention to these (and family) during 'work hours' is something I value highly. In return I'm happy to perform work activities outside office hours as it suits.
I understand why this won't work for everyone, but for me, trying to set boundaries - which many people had told me was the way to maintain balance - was counter-effective. If anyone is having trouble setting boundaries; consider not.
For me the most important thing has been recognizing that I respond better to some boundaries than others.
Time boundaries are notoriously difficult to use well without a coercive force dragging you forward. For folks with executive function difficulties that often turns into the procrastination/anxiety brew that makes them seek out pharmacutical help. But time is often sought after first because it has a seductive simplicity: First you do this for an hour, then you do that...except that you overrun one and have oodles of time leftover for the other.
Place boundaries, on the other hand, work relatively well for me. In that instance the work literally is wherever you left it, and going about your day means checking off a visit to different places. The places can be small: Absolute distance and volume aren't really the issue so much as the perception of travel, and organization emerges from this as a matter of ergonomics. Computers actually make place organization harder because they tend to cram everything together. It takes active resistance.
Social boundaries hold a kind of cross between time and place: Checking in with a person can be challenging if you have to actively enter their space, but easy if you agreed to show up at a common place and time.
Place boundaries are much easier for me for the same reasons.
Turns out it's really just different strokes for different folks and everyone's inner world operates in a way that they absolutely require certain things and absolutely should avoid certain others. It's just different for everyone.
I worked out I needed to stop listening to other peoples advice before I became aware of any executive dysfunction, because I realized that other people's advice barely matched up with my personal experience and was largely useless, so I should simply stick to trying things and seeing what works for me vs what doesn't.
I get the feeling the range of inner world's is much more vast and varied than people truly realize. Wish there was a good way to calibrate for that.
I came to similar conclusions for similar reasons. For one thing I often spend some ‘work’ time dealing with personal stuff so it’s a fair turnaround to think about work (or even work) over the weekend.
Before covid, I was reaching my office around 7am and most of my team would drift in around 10am - and I’d be leaving around 4pm... Now that I’ve been working from home I still start at 7am but it’s much easier to take a multi-hour break (usually spent on some hobbies or chores, or just chilling) and then go back to work later on for a couple more hours. So I’m getting more sleep and putting more work hours in, but getting a lot more personal projects done. And yes, it feels liberating, so I guess I’m lucky. (And very lucky to have a great manager at work!).
This was my experience. I'm seven years into remote working and I spent the first half absolutely fighting to force myself into a 9-5. I did all the habits that everyone typically recommends here. Separate office, machines. Get dressed in the morning. Keep regular hours.
I'm not a regular hours kind of guy. I want to put in a couple hours at 2 am. I want to sleep in. I'd like to go for a couple hour walk in the afternoon. Maybe chores or something personal was stressing me out that needed to be taken care.
Once I came to terms with just letting the two blend together, so much stressed came off my shoulders. Now, I'm available 9-5 on my cell if the team needs to chat -- but I get tickets cleared out when the I'm at peak motivation for that kind of work.
I'm far more productive then when I was trying to force myself to slog through unproductive afternoons. I got the hours in, but not the work. Now, I feel much more balanced between work and personal affairs.
Kind of an interesting take. Same for me, the solution to vexing problems often come in off-hours.
My solution for creating boundaries is not to banish wrong-think at wrong times, but to simply prioritize "my time" versus "company time". If I am on company time, that hobby idea gets jotted down for after-hours research. But after I am off the clock, my personal interests get my attention and work can wait, or gets just a quick notation so that I can refocus on my own priority.
Interestingly working full-time again after a stint of contracting has made this easier. When I was doing mostly remote contracting, it was harder to separate -- the urge to generate billable hours made it hard to enjoy my free time. Now that I have FTE -- my weekends are mine, damn it.
Coming close to burnout, I realised the work game is bigger than me.
If I have so much work that I am drowning and people are looking for me to do more and more and more.....
that means my manager failed their Real Time Strategy Game and they need another worker at my level. Maybe that's because the next manager up failed their game, etc etc.
But it doesn't matter why.
I do 9-5. And I go home. That is the employment contract. That is what I do.
I try to make good on my 9-5 so my own self worth is fine. But I only do my job.
Many however don't do this and it often reflects badly on those who do try to work normal hours. They essentially set the bar higher and unless you're more efficient, you fall behind in performance assessments or output.
One environment I interact with are all hypercompetitive and I probably look like an idiot to some of leadership because I refuse to work 60 hour work weeks like some of them grind away. If they decide to reduce or remove my services, life goes on, but we're somehow rolling back on labor's mentality about work life balance and being eaten alive by structures in place designed to force us to compete for the lowest rates (by adjusting either work or time in some way, shape, or form).
I have managed to find a niche where others are not grind-minded either. I won't pretend to tell you or anyone how to do this given the complexities of everyone's life. I'm sorry, I don't know.
I am obviously not Startup material! :-P
I am not management material.
I am not an entrepreneur par excellence.
I won't die rich.
But I hope to leave the world a better place than it would've been without me, even if only a little bit.
That only works if you either don't care about retention or long-term gains(which is an extension of retention).
You can argue the humanist point of view to not burn people out or the business point of view that happy, well rested people produce better work over the long term. There's tons of data to back it up if you want to go that route as well.
I've found you can frame the productive discussion beyond hours in the office by emphasising that we work hard and use the time outside work to be refreshed enough to do it consistently month over month, year over year.
I once read an article linked from Hacker News. I don't remember the title or anything that could be used to rediscover it. It might have been something about Scrum, waterfall etc.
It said there are 7 ways to deal with impeding deadlines, and only 4 of them are available to the people in the trenches. The other 3 are available to managers.
They are:
- extending the deadline
- assigning more people to the project
- changing the scope of the project (requirements)
Managers are notorious for avoiding responsibility and pushing it on other people. In degenerate workplaces, they want you to think failing a deadline is ALL YOUR responsibility and solely within your capabilities. Just work faster! Harder! LONGER!
Personally, the biggest win was to learn how to leave tasks unfinished.
This pays off in two ways - firstly I finish work when I planned to instead of "just five more minutes", which inevitably spins off into a series of open ended diversions. Secondly, it means I can start the next day with something I can sink in to, avoiding the feeling of procrastination and guilt that comes along with that, ultimately resulting in working later to pay back that lost time.
Reminds me of the "meanwhile back at the ranch" school of screenwriting: switch to your B story when your A story is at its peak of interest, and switch to your A story when your B story is at its peak. That way when you do switch back you won't have to work (too hard) to keep the audience's interest.
Love this whole thread. I thought I'd add a bit more for those who ended up in the same position I ended up in a little while back: if you're ever stuck in a position where you're forced to use an environment where you iterate so slowly that it takes days to a week to get from one error to the next error: take notes along the way as you go. Take notes about things which could be done differently if they weren't stuck a certain way. Not only does it neatly manage deadline anxieties, but it helps you build a map of friction points that are keeping things slower than you'd like, and it gives you the detail you need to slowly build cohesive and persuasive plans for improving the situation.
Of course, the optimal plan at that point could easily be for you (as it was for me) to leave the situation, but even so -- at least it makes that clearer!
I found that stopping 20 minutes before I intend to leave and making a list of things to do (and their current state) allowed me to start the next day a lot more easily. And it also produces a log of things done which is additionally useful.
I try to finish something every day. Sometimes I will work a little later but sometimes I also stop at 3pm. Took me a while to not feel guilty about finishing earlier but otherwise it's very one sided where you are expected to work more when needed but never work less even if things are quiet.
The thing i struggle with isn't really working extra hours or getting off hour messages. I think those are obvious problems and easy to be aware of.
My biggest problem is just having work thoughts come up, in the shower, eating dinner, on the commute, falling asleep. One time i was on vacation on the other side of the world and out of nowhere i suddenly realized I knew how to handle some problem i was having at work. I wouldn't get back to it for a week, i would need to take notes on my aha moment...
I'd say I have a lot more work thoughts invading my personal life than vice versa. When I'm at work I'm expected to pump things out and the cognative load leaves very little room for thoughts to creep in.
On the other hand when I'm relaxed and enjoying free thought, I sometimes can't help but use some of that freetime to think through work problems to reduce work stress. I suppose if my personal time was spent with high cognative load as well, it would be a fair trade off, but after working at high cognative function 40+ hours a week, my personal time tries to be as mentally relaxing as possible.
> My biggest problem is just having work thoughts come up
I remember an interview with David Allen of GTD, and he was asked what he had planned for the afternoon, and he said, “I don’t know. I’ll find out then”. At the time, I hadn’t used GTD much, and I thought this was tongue in cheek. Years later I realized he was dead serious.
The big win of GTD (or similar) is not a Swiss Army knife of task management. The big win is returning mental bandwidth to you.
All the time! I'll try to email one or two lines to myself to remember it later. I've found this is the quickest way to give myself confidence that I'm not "losing" the idea if I stop thinking about it now.
To help with the 'defining' bit, I've been making a conscious effort to separate work from home over the past few months in a few ways. Even though I'm at home and nobody sees me most of the time, I get into "work clothes", even if it's just a T-Shirt or polo, and trousers.
At 5-6PM, I'll shutdown the laptop and put it away, out of sight, and get back into "home clothes". The acts, despite its placebo effect, helps immensely in switching to home mode.
For people new to working from home, having work clothes is one of the most beneficial things I do personally. I would say over the last 15 years of working remotely this is the most impactful intentional thing I do for my productivity and work life balance.
Plus, it’s a super easy thing to try for a few weeks to see if it works for you.
I don't do the work clothes but I shut down my laptop at 6pm and only turn it on the next day. Also, no e-mail or anything work related on any of mother devices.
If you want to keep your balance in life, it is helpful to adhere to certain regular routines and habits. There is in fact a musical about this, and the challenges of doing so:
- In a world with other people.
- While also allowing yourself and others the life-autonomy to pursue their happiness.
Tangentially related question for the hackernews audience: When you learn, do you do so on company time or personal time?
I often feel like if I'm not "working" (IE; actually producing something) then I'm somehow cheating the company. This doesn't apply for the simple "trial-and-error" stuff that kind of comes as a part of the job, but sitting down to read a book or watch some tutorials etc; I could never imagine doing in the office.
But this _is_ work according to my long-term partner.
Have you ever been able to solve a problem at work that nobody else could, or solve it faster, or cleaner, or more robustly, by virtue of having learned previously about some random topic which you had no idea would one day be applicable to your work? I think most programmers have, and I'd hope that a good boss at a good organization would understand that - as long as you're accomplishing everything that's required of the job - independent learning is a great use of (a reasonable fraction of your) time that will benefit both you and the business.
I once "solved" a tricky issue with a random bug in an FPGA processing data from DDR. The issue was hardware "malfunction": DDR can flip some bits if accessed in some ways.
No one on the team did know about that, no one believed my fix could work (a one line for a bug we investigated on and off for months). It did. I had read a computer security article about how row hammer can be used to gain privilege or something and made the connection.
During my yearly evaluation, I mentionned it as the most impact that year. I was nearly laughed at. This bug precluded the product from functioning more than a few minutes, and we targeted at least several hours without any glitch. No one noticed that without me in the team, the product was dead for a few more month at least.
It depends on what I am learning - if it is required training or continuing education, that is part of my job and I do it on company time. If it is for my own personal projects, hobbies and interests, it is my own time.
The short answer is, it should be company time (to at least some degree). I have development as part of my work plan and, while I'm a bit flexible about things, I have absolutely been spending ~half-days this summer on predominantly classes. Some of those more or less directly feed into other work I do, others less so.
But to your broader point, if I need to step back to do some learning for a work task/presentation/etc. I absolutely consider that to be on the clock.
I learn stuff on my own time. If I need more time and the learning phrase is directly related to the my work then I can ask manager to reduce workload. But usually I don't need to ask. I also believe that self-learning in free time is standard expectation for our industry (software). If I run a company later, I would expect the same for my hires.
IMHO this type of learning can be work as long as it aligns with what the company needs. Dicking around with Rust because you think it might be useful one day doesn't count. There's a grey area for sure.
I also think that it's healthier to strive for setting+hitting ambitious outcomes, and thinking less about literal hours that you're working.
(My blog co-author wrote a post about a very closely related topic - the TLDR is that it's really a manager's job to look for ways to train their team by aligning learning areas with what the business needs. Without that alignment, you'll always have the tension that you called out where it can feel like you're not doing "real work" while learning: https://staysaasy.com/management/2020/08/01/Growth-Paths.htm...)
I think a bit of both to be honest. I don't generally surf the internet while in working-hours, but I always make an exception every Thursday to read the current LWN release.
Computers are my hobby, not just my job, so I feel that I research and experiment in my own time. But I'm reasonably happy to experiment at work, in short doses.
As the article describes, many points apply to the specific team and team culture.
One of the best things that I did (which was triggered for other reasons) was to remove my work email from my smartphone. When you only have a laptop to get work done and cannot get emails or chat on the device you carry or check throughout your waking hours, the matter of leaving work at work becomes a lot easier. Shutdown your work laptop around a specific hour everyday and you're (mostly) free.
If you're not compelled, I would strongly recommend doing the same. This doesn't mean that you will not work after working hours (there may be times when it's required), but you certainly won't be distracted by notifications and slipping into work unnecessarily when it's clearly not urgent. If you do not have a work provided smartphone and are using your personal device, then this is also safer for you since MDM policies are applied even on employee-owned devices and (depending on the OS) give a lot of information about your device/apps/usage and control on the device to your employer. I don't see any reason why I should do that with any employer.
Once you stop sending emails or responding to emails at odd hours (meaning, post normal working hours), others will usually get the hint and stop treating email with the same urgency as phone calls.
Step 5: Realize you (probably) work a B.S. job[1].
I realized I was dedicating my precious life to the pursuit of profit for people at the very top to the detriment of my own well being. If my job disappeared tomorrow, would society be negatively impacted in any meaningful way? No, in fact it might even improve. Realizing this, I just stopped caring about expectations to sacrifice any more time than necessary to my job.
#5. Amen. My blue collar friend has a saying - "8 and gate". I used to spend lots of time at work trying to get something finished. Or started. Or whatever. But at the end of the day I'm not getting paid for that, or praised for that. And if it doesn't get done today, or tomorrow - the world won't end. And I could be doing something more productive like exercising, spending time with my kids, etc. etc.
Same here, but I suspect many "career" people here on HN, who grind away in startups imagining they are designing the next big thing that'll save humanity, don't want to hear this.
That's a pretty good summary, but .. I think it depends.
IMHO for many tech companies, "After Hours" has come to not exist for many employees, especially in engineering. I work with teams in India and Europe; since Covid there's been a serious expansion of meetings with these teams, so 7am, 6:30 am meetings, 9pm meetings, and so on.
For a little while, it was fine, I am a helpful person by nature. But after two months or so, I decided this was not being treated as temporary, so started simply declining. It is not without political cost to do so. Being able to decline is a privileged position, and definitely there are many people in the company who don't think they have that option. Obviously that's wrong, but it has been so easy for many companies to impose this on their exempt workforce that I think turning back the dial will be a struggle.
"Step 5: Realize you (probably) work a B.S. job[1]."
Very important to realize this. Also, from my experience if you just work 35 or 40 hours per week but use this time to really work, you are already way more productive than most people.
I encouraged my girlfriend to get a separate cellphone. As a kindergarten teacher it doesn't seem obvious, it is incredible how much they plan and discuss after hours. Now she switches off her phone and enjoys her leisure.
One way to avoid work from home, is to pick a profession where your work is simply unable to follow you home.
Sounds obvious as hell, but it's true - some professions, even in tech, come with the benefit that you're not allowed to bring your work home.
Some people will probably say "but that just makes you stay longer at work", well - yes and no. Completely depends on your work guidelines. Some workplaces have stringent rules, and will practically shoo you home/refuse you OT if you work too much OT.
I'm a solo founder working from home, and even though I'm kicking goals with the startup, I'm really having struggles with separating work from the rest of my life within my headspace. For quite some time, I've been waking up at 3am with work thoughts perhaps twice a week, and will struggle to go back to sleep.
Does anyone have any advice, beyond what this article mentions?
Sometimes I wake in a panic with something I need to remember to do. Keeping a notebook by the bed really helps me. I jot down whatever it was, which makes me feel like I’ve “dealt” with it, even though that only means it’s on my to do list or just out of my head so I won’t forget it.
I’ve also found making a list of things I want to do tomorrow and writing them down helps me not have those panic wake ups in the first place.
This helps on mobile the most IMO. While Android can have separate profiles it's just so convenient to switch apps instead. At least for those who don't already have a separate work phone
Twice I'd had a 'bad' friday, only to have solutions reveal themselves while I was gardening over the weekend. I realised it did me no harm that my mind strayed to work while gardening, and in fact I was glad of it. So I made a decision to abandon attempts at erecting artificial structure, and quickly realised that trying to impose separations had caused more stress than it resolved.
I found it liberating to stop trying to 'leave work at work', and to not be upset if my thoughts stray to work when I 'should' be off the clock. In return, I stopped trying to block out the rest of my life from my home office. I enjoy a busy life with various community responsibilities and being able to give some attention to these (and family) during 'work hours' is something I value highly. In return I'm happy to perform work activities outside office hours as it suits.
I understand why this won't work for everyone, but for me, trying to set boundaries - which many people had told me was the way to maintain balance - was counter-effective. If anyone is having trouble setting boundaries; consider not.