I was incredibly driven about 7 years ago... I was a founder of a startup and had really lofty aspirations. I told my wife that it was very possible that we would be millionaires by the time we hit 40.
Fast forward to today and that did not happen. The startup is no more, but mainly due to burnout. We made money and did well, but not well enough. I never made my millions, but did have a substantial aqui-hire opportunity that I turned down that would have almost gotten me there.
Once that part of my life played out, I decided to make a 180 turn... I'm not working to exhaustion anymore and take a tortoise approach to my career. I've found that as long as I'm consistent and have my eye on my goals, it doesn't matter how hard I work outside of my day job. I just need to be consistent and take advantage of bursts of motivation.
I've accomplished a surprising amount with this approach. I'm not stressed, I have the best quality of life that I've ever had and work is generally fun. This is what my goal should have been from the beginning.
I'm 58. I spent over thirty years, writing and managing software projects that other people generally didn't use well (or mishandled while developing). It was frustrating, but they paid the bills, so there wasn't anything I could do about it.
Since leaving my last job, I started to look at working, and immediately, and with extreme prejudice, slammed into the notorious ageism in tech. It was a real shock, as I had always been treated with a fair degree of respect. That is no longer the case. Respect seems to be a virtue that no one practices, anymore (I'm not talking about "worship." I'm talking about simple, basic, courtesy and respect; like I give to others).
I had saved up a fairly substantial war chest, so I just decided to give up on looking for work, and have been spending my time since then, writing a lot of open-source code[0], and learning the latest stuff in the way I want.
Best decision I ever made. Too bad. I'm pretty good at what I do, I would have worked for a lot less than most (see "war chest," above), and would have been happy to take on riskier work with startups and whatnot.
[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY (and almost every green square will take you to an open-source repo, where I am the sole author, and you can view the checkins)
I could offer an alternative perspective on this as I’ve seen it done to a lot of people that haven’t much choice in the matter.
It’s entirely possible you’re not getting offers because they know you don’t need them.
I don’t mean to say they’re wanting to give the offers to less fortunate applicants - it’s just that you’ll be impossible to abuse relative to someone who they know needs the money.
“We need you to work until this is done.”
“No.”
“Chris, it’s very important and will be reflected on your performance review.”
“Ok. Still no.”
At the start of my career (ages ago now) I had an employer find out that my university progression was tied entirely to their performance review of my placement, and immediately start to insist on my working all the hours under the sun with the strong implication that if I didn’t play ball the note would be “unfavourable”.
When you’re young it’s not always clear how little crap you should take from people in more senior positions.
Some ideas (from a guy in his 40s who interviews every 6 to 12 months for high paying short-term project work):
- 25 years at a single company is working against you. Remove all that from your cv and just list the recent stuff you built.
- Most of your cv should be description of the repos with links. Cut out and summarise past experience ruthlessly, like you’re refactoring someone else’s old code.
- Remove the link to your personal git page, use the other one. On first sight it looks weak - it has some html files and a lot of docs. My first reaction was “meh”. It took me many minutes of browsing to figure out the real meat was in the other repo And then my reaction was “wow”. Most hiring manager don’t have time for this. People are not clicking on the green squares they are clicking on the source repos, you have about 30 seconds of their time.
- At this stage you might get bored or unhappy real fast in a job, if you are honest to yourself. Consider selling short term access to deep technical expertise - in your case Mobile Bluetooth on iOS.
It's not just age-ism about people, the same prejudices are also applied against software.
I'm currently #1 in "clean EPE matched" on the Sintel AI benchmark - by re-implementing a 2006 paper. I'm taking advantage of the additional computing power that we have nowadays by brute-forcing what used to be a gradient-descent solver. It appears that people have re-invented the AI wheel many times, but nobody checked to see what was there before deep learning became fashionable.
I see the same issue everywhere. Companies have a large agile web 4.0 team using obscure frameworks that I had never heard of before. But all the stuff that they built would have been included in a $9 WordPress hosting plan.
If you consider that almost every job in the tech industry is utterly useless, it makes sense why there is so much ageism.
Tech jobs these days are not about adding value, so your additional experience is worthless... The things that are valuable to companies are youth, optimism, loyalty and self-delusion.
Companies need a big headcount to give themselves leverage over governments and banks. Companies need a young workforce which they can influence and use as bargaining chips to make deals to get access to cheap money from the Fed.
The role of big corporations is to take people in when they're young and distort their worldviews so that they stay passive, childlike, compliant and docile as they get older - They're not going to rebel against the status quo, they're not going to complain about unjust government regulations which drive up the company stock price but at the same time diminish their freedom to leave the company and be independent.
Old people are not good because they can't be indoctrinated as easily and the benefits are much shorter-term since these old people don't have so many years left on this earth. The investment of brainwashing them doesn't yield so much and not for so long.
These big tech corporations are engaging in pure macroeconomics. They don't care about details like projects, clients and customers. In their world, the only things that affect their bottom line are:
- Governments
- Banks
- Investors
- Public opinion
Everything else is a detail which doesn't concern them. Everything that everyone does in those companies is ultimately about pleasing or manipulating these 4 entities in the most superficial way possible.
Funny, I'm also 58. I have also hit the ageism wall (although I'm currently at a place where I'm not the oldest, but then the software is also decades old). My plan is to build a bigger war chest while I can then go back full time to my first love, writing Free software. It's what used to be called "retirement" back when businesses were not run by 20-year-olds who plan to live forever.
I won't say ageism the main reason I moved from programming to tech writing, but it's certainly been something on my mind. I look younger than my 53 years, but I'm pretty clearly not in my early 30s anymore. But, I haven't experienced any real ageism in this field, at least yet.
Chis,
If somebody hires you based on this thread let us (or me) know who the employer is.
Like 'headmelted' pointed out, part of 'agiesm' is that it’s just that you’ll be impossible to abuse relative to someone who they know needs the money.
Programmers, especially the young are insecure douche bags, and I suspect that their insecurity leads to hiring docile individuals who can be coerced.
Not sure if this will help, but I'll share my very recent story of how ageism looks from the other (youngish people) side, which contains some pitfalls to avoid.
I'm 32, and the technical lead of a mid-sized research computing / ML team in quasi-academia. I'm the one who tells the boss whether a hire is technically competent, performing up to standard, is meshing well with the team, etc. So I don't make hire/fire decisions myself but have substantial influence on them.
Usually, when we hire people > 30, they are PhDs with a specific specialty, like statistics. But recently we hired a guy from industry in his early 50s to do some programming, web dev, and light ML. He had, obviously a long CV with programming and some practice with ML/statistics, although nothing related to our field. Here are some of the things this guy has done in the ~1 months before and since his hiring:
1. He frequently bullshits in presentations and meetings, pretending to know things he doesn't know.
2. Very shortly after joining, he has recommended we radically rebuild several of our systems in different, "better" ways -- ways which he's familiar with. For example, we have a web app on AWS Ubuntu, and he has repeatedly asked why we can't just run a Windows server.
3. If he doesn't know something, he insists on getting step-by-step tutorials from technical people in the lab, but tutorials in how to do things HIS way. For example, we all use Linux and an SSH client, but he wasted 2 hours of my time asking how to SSH into AWS using PuTTY on Windows, how to copy files using WinSCP, etc, since of course he only uses Windows. He claims he'll learn Linux eventually, but wants to use what he knows "for now", "so that he can more rapidly produce results".
4. The first time I met the guy in person (not immediately due to COVID), he had plopped himself and his laptop down in my desk, without asking, and even readjusted my chair settings, and complained about my office being messy. I'm #2 in seniority...
Any one of these alone would be...annoying, but all together he is almost a caricature of every ageist stereotype in tech. He expects a level of respect he feels is due his experience level, while simultaneously he resists learning anything about the way his new organization does things...presumably because he knows better?
It puts me in an awkward situation because I'm kind of his technical supervisor. If he were a new graduate student, I would tell him to cut out the bullshit, figure things out, and quit wasting my time (and commandeering my desk). Since he is almost twice my age it is too awkward to read him the riot act, though, and I don't really know how to deal with this.
My takeaway is that an older person in a new tech job should really, really avoid displaying arrogance and entitlement. Respect is earned, not given; even if you've spent 30+ years in the field, we whippersnappers don't know how competent you are (or not), until it's demonstrated. I'm not saying you made any of these mistakes, but sometimes it is easy to do some of these things unconsciously. Probably you are perfectly competent, but people like this guy are working against you.
You hear responses from younger generations like "Ok Boomer" to their elders' opinions and it is so cringe-worthy.
I don't think everything my parents taught me was perfect or even always correct but there's an irreplaceable amount of wisdom that comes from being alive twice as long.
The state and change of culture and technology is quite different.
I consider age like time an illusion. There’s biological considerations but I reject all the age cliches and sayings. Defy labels, limitations, distorted reminders — focus on living.
Not because I want to take it slowly, but because I have a lot on my plate and my natural tendency is to "unflatten time", fast-forwarding in my head all the different plays and things to do. Some of these will only apply in a year, but here I am thinking about them and worrying about them now. Worse still, I sometime make decisions related to these future things and as you all surely know, decisions are paid for with a mental toll.
So I dial back, focus on the immediate thing in front of me and remember that nearly any progress is made of trivial, tiny chunks.
Having an effective system of writing stuff down is key to that approach - your future ideas and various pending tasks need to spill into writing instead of lingering around your head. When you have a good writing system you can trust, then you can free your mind to focus on the now.
Well, take Johnny Cash. Half a mile a day * 30k days gives 15k miles; maybe it's enough to reach heaven, but not enough to e.g. reach the Moon.
So, when choosing to move steadily albeit slowly, you have to manage your expectations, and get used to get by with little.
Investing your time is not unlike investing your money: least risky strategies bring most stable but least spectacular results, while big bets bring both big gains and big losses.
For last few years, I have been telling myself to take it slow and do what you are doing now. I got a easy but a boring job. I figured this way I will save all my mental energy for my projects after work.
But this is slowly burning me out. The boredom of not doing any real work for 8 hours is soul killing. I do a lot of busy red tape work but it is not intelluctly stimulating.
So now I will do 180 and quit my job in a few months and go indie solo founder route.
I'm interpreting the "tortoise" comment as slow and steady, not apathetic to the day job.
Personally, I put my creative energy into my 9 to 5 job. Instead of using evenings to start side hustles or to "get ahead" on work, I unwind and get adequate rest. This is so I can be alert and switched on during my regular work hours.
I've found stretching myself thin starts to affect me quickly, and I feel like I'm actually operating at 50% on a permanent basis.
Once was backpacking for 11 months with only two bags. The second was 5 months in a car. I did learn a lot both times, but I never got fully independent and it may have set me back some.
Still in retrospect, it was a great journey and I'm still glad I made the attempt.
How about being a security guard? There are some cozy, chill, nothing-ever-happens places where you can just sit there at night, maybe do a couple of walks but other than that you could work on your projects! This way you have a steady job that will also be beneficial for pension (adds to work years), and you can work on projects that will pay off later. Do not forget to bring your laptop!
As someone who has generally tried to take your current approach and has generally been rewarded for it, yours is a refreshing perspective. There's a persistent voice in the back of my head that questions whether I'm acting out of fear, rationality, or just following a happy stasis. It's always reassuring to see the other side of this.
I follow this approach, too, and I consider myself successful, but I also have no voice questioning me. Consider for yourself if you'll regret what you're doing (or not doing) today ten years from now...
Did you have kids? I feel like that is a hard stop and pushes you beyond burn out with sleep deprivation and all your undivided attention, free time and career notwithstanding.
I understand this but most of the time I am excited about that new awesome idea that popped into my head. How do you focus on one thing without getting deviated?
For myself, I have two main creative outlets that take up most of my personal free time, and I alternate between the two depending on how I feel. I find them both rewarding and never regret the time spent on either - even when I don't produce anything of any value. I understand going in that there will be fruitless sessions (in terms of quantifiable output), so I count them as a price to get to the stuff of value, which is subjective anyway.
I see parallels everywhere else, and that pulls me back. Fundamentally, Snowdrift.coop (start at https://wiki.snowdrift.coop) is about public goods and collective action / coordination problems. When you think enough about the alignment of individual and group incentives, you start seeing how so many societal issues (moloch!) fall into this category. And yes, I'd like to fix all of those, and I get excited about projects that try to do so. But at the end of the day, given my skills, interests, connections, etc, nothing else I could do has the tiniest fraction of the potential to make a difference in the world that Snowdrift.coop does.
I have a place to note them down. With time it gets filled, refined and culled. If they’re really great I’ll do it at some point. No need to rush to the fresh idea now.
Someone who consistently gets just a little better every day is more likely to succeed than someone who works insanely hard for just a limited period of time.
> just a little better every day is more likely to succeed than someone who works insanely hard for just a limited period of time
but someone who works insanely hard for a long time is going to beat the person who gets just a little bit better each day.
The point is, someone who works insanely hard gets to a certain required level quicker than someone who improves a tiny bit every day for a long time. Think cramming for an exam etc.
I can definitely relate to this. My own journey is, in addition to a couple of stints as a founder that didn't work out, I've worked primarily for other startups as opposed to large companies. After 10 years what I have to show for it is about $35,000 from one moderate sized acquisition of a startup you've definitely heard of but was not especially lucrative for anyone except the founders, some options that I never exercised and are worth 0 today since the company shut down, some other options that I never exercised and lost 3 months after leaving the company that may or may not be worth something eventually but I couldn't afford to exercise/didn't feel strongly enough to make a big bet on, and now finally some options where I have 8 years left on a 10 year exercise window which may actually go somewhere (but could also end up at $0 or something minimal).
I had other peers in my graduating class in college that went to work at places like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon while I went to do a startup with a few friends, then ended up mostly working as an employee for these other startups. I find it interesting to idly muse about what would have happened to someone who'd joined one of those companies in an entry level engineering role in 2010 and stayed there while having a fairly average career trajectory, say getting to a senior engineer level 5 years in and then plateauing, going from a stock grant size of maybe $50k a year when joining to $150k a year at senior level. Doing some rough estimates based on stock prices over the years, if you'd been in that position at any of these companies and never sold any stock you'd have something like $2.5 million (Google), $4 million (Microsoft) or $6 million (Amazon) in stock today. And of course your base salary and cash bonuses over that time would have been higher than your base salary working for startups.
I don't say this to complain, I'm still doing fine overall and there are a lot of people in the world who work very hard for a lot less. But I also don't feel like I've really accomplished much of any significance. It's pretty mind-blowing to realize that the less risky, more tortoise-like approach to a career would have been so vastly more profitable than what I've experienced at what I would say have been a pretty average selection of startups. And it's not like the startups have been so much more fulfilling, you're still pretty much a cog in the machine as an engineer even at a 30 person company.
In conclusion - working at a startup smaller than, say, series D is a fool's game and a very likely path to one day looking back and feeling like you haven't accomplished anything. Either become a founder to try to build something meaningful from nothing, or just work at a FAANG company as a 9-5 and get your fulfillment elsewhere and/or retire young.
Never selling stock is pretty risky. Sure in retrospect there's been a huge bull run in tech which made those stocks go up crazily, but most of the people I know in FAANG recommend selling your RSUs and buying index funds like VTI instead to diversify because who knows?
Yes, I feel like this over-ambition and risk has put me in a similar position. I still own around 300k worth of stock which is not liquid in one of the start-ups but it has been 8 years now. On the other hand I realize that with my background I would never be able to even get a job at FAANG in a first place so I really cherish the experience I got in one of the startups like opening the offices in different countries, travelling and getting clients (I am in tech sales). However looking back, I partially regret the decision to always strive for the outsized return as an employee you get 1 bet for 4 years of vesting, instead of many bets that VCs have. I recently landed a job in a more boring place and increased my income by around 120%, living the boring tortoise life with more politics, but I realised I stopped worrying about the future and really enjoy spending my free time on staying sane. In the end though, I always say that if I would have stayed in my own country and lived the super boring life, I would regret it in the end and so far it has been an exciting ride.
Mind sharing some more on this?
"I'm not working to exhaustion anymore and take a tortoise approach to my career. I've found that as long as I'm consistent and have my eye on my goals, it doesn't matter how hard I work outside of my day job. I just need to be consistent and take advantage of bursts of motivation."
Or, is there any article/post you may have written already?
It’s quite nice. You can live wherever you want, make your home just how you want it, have a variety of investments, and have your other half not have to work and raise the children and take care of a garden, etc. You can leave work as well to be even closer to the ones you love.
It takes a lot of stress out of day to day living and you can really plan a future. All while being able to continue work you enjoy or switch careers into something maybe isn’t as profitable but brings different enjoyment.
Funny piece. It can be so easy to waste time when we have the internet. I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news. Such an activity is useful every now and then, but at least for myself I often scroll around only to realize later that it was a massive waste of time I could’ve spent working on something I care about. I think the brain justifies it since hey, at least I’m “learning” something (not really).
Even something like an addictive videogame is designed to make you feel productive by giving you levels to progress through etc—fundamentally I think we all have a desire to produce, it’s just easy to spend time putting that energy into the wrong forms of productive activity, since these are usually easier and less isolating than actually producing crafts or products.
People are now terrified of putting down a screen and being left alone with their own thoughts for more than 30 seconds. It's horrifying what's bouncing around up in that dome, and having to process it.
But this is exactly what we did before. We got bored, we were wasting time, we were experimenting, and that's how great ideas came around.
Idk if it's just terrified, but I think we're addicted. This probably sounds ridiculous but I recently blocked some apps and sites on my phone and actually felt a little off for a day, like my sleep was weird. I think there was a slight withdrawal from the constant bombardment of stuff. It is helping kill my Facebook habit. I don't even really like the site, I just check it impulsively. It's weird.
Reddit is another one, the infinite scroll I think is addictive. Trying to kill that habit. But there is useful information on there so it's hard to disable it completely.
I can't lay hands on a link, but there was an article about the psychological phenomenon of time passing too quickly. It was a measurable state you could detect a brain as either being in or not in.
One of the most reliable ways to reset internal time perception? Experiencing nature.
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal, 1654 AD.
This is not a new problem, we are just experiencing a hyper version of it. Social media, the world's knowledge at your finger tips, is distraction on steroids.
Once all of your friends are hooked on their phone, it becomes very lonely to be the only one that doesn't stare at a screen. But what people naturally yearn for is not to get bored alone, but to get bored as a group. So the "quality of bored-ness" goes down as screen usage expands.
> But this is exactly what we did before. We got bored, we were wasting time, we were experimenting, and that's how great ideas came around.
Yep! I firmly believe that boredom is not just healthy, but a necessary part of life. Your mind needs downtime and your creativity and imagination need mind-numbing boredom.
Meditation is also a great way to force yourself to be alone with your thoughts. However, speaking from experience, that can lead to some uncomfortable truths -- so it's good to be prepared.
Even among people trying to be productive you sometimes see vortexes of distraction, for instance around note-taking. I like note taking (apps and paper) but I think there is such thing as an over-reliance on them. They promote collecting over being. Perhaps also they stop people from completing their own ideas. One becomes Penelope, weaving the burial shroud of a thought forever.
Note taking can be pernicious because it feels like doing something but it also gives an excuse to not put forth your own thoughts until you have all the pieces. Then they become so large they are unweildy. The more notes, the less supple.
It's ironic because the same tools can be used to empower your thinking[0]. Instead of collecting notes, note taking utilities can be used as a sort of L2 cache when you're trying to think something through. E.g. most of my problem solving involves repeated sessions with a text file, in which I dump my stream of thought and refine it. Sometimes it means literally talking with myself via a text file, sometimes it's constructing an artifact (like a prioritized list of things to do). Same tool, slightly different approach.
--
[0] - Or damage your brain. The fact that I can't think things through unless I'm writing thoughts down or drawing diagrams may be a sign of improved quality of thoughts, or a sign of me no longer being able to think without a crutch.
I have the opposite experience. I can recall discussions I've read months or years ago. In aggregate, it added a bit of depth to my perception of the world. They gave me a lot more vocabulary to process the world around me, as do good books.
> I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.
Time to set up my emacs config to manage my life and stop wasting time.
I find browsing hackernews to be one of the more beneficial activities I can do for 5-20 minutes as a break between more mentally taxing activities. Meditation, going for a walk, getting a snack or a drink, and a quick chat with a friend are other activities I consider both beneficial and short duration.
I have the complete opposite feeling. As long as you filter yourself fairly well on which topics you read, HN can be immensely useful. You can learn about new things that can help you a lot in your career, that you otherwise may have missed.
The gamification of Duolingo is something that has really worked for me (as an adult). It has all the parts of an addictive mobile game that keep you coming back: a streak that notifies you if you're in danger of losing it (this is the one that really works for me), social rankings, fun graphics, in game currency. I have a 410 day Spanish streak as of this morning!
I took French in middle/high school with the standard lecture/hw school structure and was a lot less successful than I've been with Duolingo. Duolingo alone probably isn't enough to really learn a language but combined with other resources it provides a great structure to keep you committed and provides a great foundation to build from.
Beware of gamification. There is a great talk[1] discussing intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation as it applies to video games, with the key insight being that extrinsic rewards decrease intrinsic motivation.
The speaker references a lot of research that seems worth digging into too.
I would advise you to fight any addiction your kids might have, especially gaming/other internet points addictions. Gamification is a fix that people addicted to dopamine rushes need, but children shouldn't require it. Instead I would work on framing work in a positive way.
I don't think we should think in terms like that. We don't always have to be working toward a goal. There's nothing won't with reading, taking a nap, it sound other unproductive activities. Also, not everyone has big lofty goals of self accomplishment. For some, constant goal seeking can be both stressful and emotionally difficult when goals aren't met.
We should be careful to paint with such a broad brush.
I don't know if internet is really the culprit to how easy it is to waste time. We have long created enough distraction to fill a entire lifespan.
Before I've encountered any digital computing device, I used to just play Sudoku during class. Or read novels; I had a textbook that carved, inside which hid a small novel. Or, just day-dream and think about stuff.
On the other hand, I enjoyed Sudoku and novels. I don't consider them to be a complete waste of time. In retrospect, they made my childhood better.
HN, Facebook, Reddit, Messenger, YouTube, news websites and dozens of other sites are on a block list from 0900-1800 M-F via a super useful plugin for Firefox (on mobile now and I can't remember it!)
> It can be so easy to waste time when we have the internet.
I'm just really glad I did college when the only thing distracting on the internet was Slashdot and you could only access it with a computer attached to an ethernet cable.
I'm almost certain I would not have made it past Freshman year if I had a smartphone.
> I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.
This is why I question curiosity as the prescribed value from HN leadership. In its place one could've easily said learning or mastery.
Life recently told the meaning of 'know-how' and real life has no competitor.
I spent countless hours fiddling with git tutorials, the best branching, workflow.. Nothing was even close to when I had to actual work with it on a tight rope.
Curiosity intellect is mostly dead baggage in ones head, knowing how to apply ideas as tools, to actually do something, and even have it in mind when you work so that you know you wrote enough, commit will be long, or merge will be ugly. It all balances out on itself and you actually feel light and capable.
what sort of gamification is there on HN, upvotes not much else? Maybe it's plausible to strike a deal with oneself not to look at upvotes or downvotes, I think that would make comments more sincere. It would be great to have a setting not to display upvotes and down-votes on your own comments but to still be able to respond on threads tab
Generally I'm glad that HN has minimal gamification, at least compared to the worst offenders reddit, fb, twitter etc.
> I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.
Browsing HN has never felt productive to me. At times useful, entertaining, informative, thought-provoking, and at others less so, when it can seem annoying, repetitive, pointless and so on. But never "productive".
When you increase the signal to noise ratio, it makes it even harder to stop reading. For all practical purposes, the internet is infinite; no matter how high you set your standards, gradually you will find enough sources to fill all your free time.
During the last few years, I switched from reading low quality content to reading high quality content. I am better informed about various things. But the problem of spending too much time reading remains unchanged.
Its funny because its hard to gauge – the things you think are the most productive feed strongly into your confirmation bias, so maybe they aren't really that productive after all. But that's fine.
In general though, I prefer the idea of going "all in" in whatever I'm doing. If I'm going to play video games, I'm making sure I have a damn good time doing it. If I'm going to put in work, I'm gonna make sure it gets done. Distractions will do you in in both cases. Ruin your fun time and mess up your productivity.
I completely agree with you. Some other distractions are the many intelectual hobbies overpraised out there, two of them which I know very closely: learning languages and reading lots of books (novels).
These activities by itself don’t yell any value by themselves and still free like a super productive to the extent of feeling incredibly productive. One should not forget that intelectual hobbies are in fact still hobbies.
On the other hand, why do so many highly skilled people push themselves so hard? I do not have any stats, it's just an observation looking at all the people in my environment, and then some public exponents.
I've grown up in a family where there was always enough, yet not much in excess. Most grown up people I knew in my childhood would probably complain that they would want more, yet they mostly just did their job, had enough and enjoyed their family life.
That is also true for some of the people I later met at university and then in business, but I get the impression that quite a lot of them, even though they have much better jobs than the people from my childhood, invest a lot of their free time trying to pursue their goal. And it is extremely rare that I see someone actually reaching it. It is far more often that their life becomes a lot more miserable, think divorce or similar.
Now don't ge me wrong, I think pursuing ones goals can be extremely valuable. But for a lot of people, pursuing a goal and trying to be productive with it while at the same time being married, raising kids, earning money, staying healthy and doing chores is most likely not going to lead anywhere good. So why is it so hard for smart people to accept that fact, and enjoy one or two hours of lazyness every day? Why do people take Elon Musk as an example, if even he himself decribes his life as not too nice?
Reddit was a huge time waste for me. I'd spend entire mornings and nearly all night browsing the site and arguing with other users. I wish I could get all of it back.
I worked for a big multinational bank and was reasonably comfortable but sometimes not very busy and most of the usual online distractions was blocked except for hacker news. I spent so much time reading hacker news that it was probably a big influence in me deciding to quit my job to join a bootstrapped startup as a CTO. Also probably the biggest mistake of my life. In the aftermath I ended up working as a contractor in a remote office for a tech company to recover my finances. During that time I used to spend my afternoon coffee break reading a newsletter from Matt Levine and I think that's probably one of the primary influences that made me end up working in finance again.
Watching sports and memorizing athletes’ stats is another waste of time a lot of people partake in. Here’s to hoping people are more productive during this hiatus.
I've been mentoring CS college students and new grad SWEs for a while. It's shocking to see how many of them perpetually feel like they're overwhelmed and short on time, yet they can't account for where they've actually spent their time. It's not uncommon for new grad SWEs to complain that an 8-hour work day is somehow consuming 100% of their weekday hours, leaving them without any time to do anything else. On further investigation, they're just being pulled into Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, TV, and video games for far more time than they realize. It's almost like those activities are subtracting 6+ hours out of their day without them realizing it.
Nobody likes to be told that they're wasting their free time, but I've had mild success encouraging people to use basic time tracking utilities like the Screen Time feature in iOS. It's eye-opening to watch people estimate their daily screen time around 30 minutes and then be shocked when their reports come back at 2-3 hours or more.
Of course, some amount of leisure activity is necessary throughout the day. It's important to not shame people for spending time on things they enjoy (Hacker News, video games, Reddit, Twitter), but it is important that they can be honest with themselves about how much time they're spending on those activities.
Measuring time spent in leisure activities is the only real way to start closing the feedback loop. Structured procrastination (Spending 5 timed minutes out of every 30 minutes on leisure activities, aka Pomodoro technique) is a good way to start getting a handle on this.
While some of what you are writing is probably true, a work day (especially pre-COVID), really takes up a lot more than 8hrs. If you live in a city and want to live somewhere affordable, you're often looking at 1hr+ of commute each way. You have to get up a little early to prep for the day. Some jobs don't count a lunch break towards your 8hr day, or expect you to stay later, so you end up working more like 9hrs. If you factor in ~30-60mins chores that you do after work such as cooking/cleaning its easy to take up ~10-12hrs doing _work type_ stuff.
So, if you're getting a full 8hrs sleep, how much time does that leave you on an avg work night to do things that _you_ want to do? Like 4hrs? And do you really want to spend all those 4hrs being productive? People need to relax and unwind at some point. If you follow the pomodoro technique and use 5min for leisure every 30 mins, you end up with only ~40mins of "leisure" in that type of day.
What if you want to do things like spend an hour working out at the gym / looking after physical health? What if you are single and want to spend some time dating? It quickly drains away at any time you would have to spend on your own personal projects, interests, hobbies.
> If you live in a city and want to live somewhere affordable, you're often looking at 1hr+ of commute each way.
Reading your comment and others beneath you, I sense many of you have a weird idea of what a city is.
What you describe is true only for a minority of cities. I live in a city with above median housing prices. I live a 10 minute drive from my work. My house is not expensive - in fact, the expensive neighborhoods are farther away.
Initially you may not have much of a choice on where you work, but if you go through your whole career not having that choice, you probably need to work on your career a bit. For everyone I know, they decided to make that compromise (don't want to leave awesome city, etc). For them, not having enough time in the day definitely is a choice.
I agree with the rest of your accounting, but will note that there are weekends. As for gym, I just figured out exercises I can do at home with minimal equipment. It's a lot more flexible (and takes less time) than going to a gym.
“ If you live in a city and want to live somewhere affordable, you're often looking at 1hr+ of commute each way”
Here’s a suggestion: don’t live an hour away from work?
With more companies going permanent remote, I find the whole concept of commuting for 2 hours round trip a day unimaginable. Especially for those of us working in Tech that don’t need a physical presence to deliver results.
> If you live in a city and want to live somewhere affordable, you're often looking at 1hr+ of commute each way. You have to get up a little early to prep for the day. Some jobs don't count a lunch break towards your 8hr day, or expect you to stay later, so you end up working more like 9hrs. If you factor in ~30-60mins chores that you do after work such as cooking/cleaning its easy to take up ~10-12hrs doing _work type_ stuff.
I thought the same thing, until I focused on tightening up my schedule and making active choices to minimize wasted time.
If you want to live somewhere that requires 2 hours (!!) of commuting each day, take long lunch breaks away from the office, have relaxed mornings with hours between alarm going off and leaving the house, that's fine.
However, you have to recognize where you're making personal choices. You don't have to choose a job and house combination that requires an hour long commute each way. You don't have to leave the office for lunch every day. You don't have to have leisurely mornings. It's perfectly fine if you choose to do those things, but you're not being completely honest with yourself if you start portraying those personal choices as completely out of your control.
> And do you really want to spend all those 4hrs being productive?
It's not about being productive all day every day. You can spend those 4 hours watching TV if you want, or you can spend those 4 hours going to dinner with friends, or going to the gym. It's your choice.
> If you follow the pomodoro technique and use 5min for leisure every 30 mins, you end up with only ~40mins of "leisure" in that type of day.
The Pomodoro technique is for work time. You shouldn't be Pomodoring you personal time after work.
> What if you want to do things like spend an hour working out at the gym / looking after physical health?
Make a priority and make it happen.
If you spend 1 hour at the gym 3 times per week, that's less than 3% of your waking hours. Surely you can find 3% slack in your schedule somewhere?
> It quickly drains away at any time you would have to spend on your own personal projects, interests, hobbies.
The idea of "side projects" has become a major problem for many new grads growing up the internet era. For some reason, many of them feel obligated to be working on side projects when they're not working. They basically end up with two jobs, a day job and tending to their side projects, and then they wonder where all of their time has gone.
The solution is simple: Don't do side projects if you would prefer to spend your time on something else.
It's all about making active choices in how you spend your time. Once you go down the spiral of assuming everything is an obligation in your life, your schedule starts to feel out of your control. Start being honest about the choices you're making and what you want to do with your time and it becomes much easier to take control again.
> It's not uncommon for new grad SWEs to complain that an 8-hour work day is somehow consuming 100% of their weekday hours.
I don't know man, I've been struggling with this myself. Obviously it's not literally true, but the problem is that after you account for 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work and chores/eating/hygiene/cooking/commute, every thing you want to do starts seriously cutting into the time that's left.
Need an hour more sleep than average? Wanna do some kind of workout on regular basis? Go out with friends, on a date, see a movie? Have a serious hobby that takes 2-3 hours 2-3 times a week? If you put it on spreadsheet it will fit but it's just seriously exhausting (yeah, better hope you actually have pretty high energy levels, that also varies from person to person). There is not much slack there.
I hear you, but I'll tell you what I tell my mentees:
Most of it distills down to being honest about your priorities. If you value relaxed mornings, relaxed evenings, and never feeling rushed before or after work, then there's nothing wrong with that. You're not obligated to go out with friends or allocate hours to hobbies during the weekday.
The problem comes when people say they value one thing, but when decision time arrives they do something else. If you have a hobby that requires 2-3 hours per week, then you make time a few nights per week to do it. If you want to go out with friends, then you make time to go out with friends.
Going to the gym is perhaps the easiest example. If you really value going to the gym, finding one hour three times per week is only about 3% of your waking hours. Find a gym located between your house and your office and travel time falls out of the equation.
Personally, I freed up an enormous amount of time by tightening up my schedule. Learning how to get out of bed, get dressed, eat breakfast, and get out the door in under 30 minutes was a game changer for me, and it wasn't even that difficult. Likewise, learning how to consolidate my chores and meal prep into small windows of time was an enormous improvement.
If you sleep 8 hours per night, you have 112 waking hours per week. If you spend 40 hours working and have a 30-minute commute each way (5 hours commuting per week), that leaves 67 hours of your own time. Even if you allocate half of that to chores and meal prep, you're still left with 34 hours, or basically an entire work week of personal time. Realistically, you're not going to spend 33 hours on chores, though.
It's all about priorities. If you don't want to real rushed or pressured during your off time, you don't have to, but you can't have it all.
I was there not very long ago, and sometimes I still feel that way. But the change I made is to be strict without being restrictive, discipline with a sense of freedom. The biggest habit that has helped me is to just choose 2-3 most important things to do in the day and try to get them done as early in the day as possible. It feels so great to accomplish, and it's challenging but not unreasonable. Choose one goal and I feel like a failure and if I don't do it. Choose ten and I won't even do one. But a few good goals is the perfect balance, if I miss one but get the others I feel good. (This habit I learned from Zen to Done which also has nine othrt useful habits to slowly adopt over time)
A 9 to 5 job might only be taking 50% of their waking time, but it could be consuming close to 100% of their mental capacity for the day.
There seems to be a an expectation that everyone should have a side hustle or has a creative outlet outside of work so they can get ahead or explore their true passions. But employment is structured in a way that your employer gets first dibs on your time and energy.
I'm a senior SRE in Google. I've got myself a NAS to back up my photos. Guess how many weeks it has been before I got the first terabyte of stuff onto it... Wrong, I'm still procrastinating on it :(
It is not just spending time on those sites/apps, it's the pressure society puts on them to get to the next step on the ladder. Perfect houses on Instagram. 24yo making 300K on Blind. 18yo on Youtube making 1M+. Even if you don't want to compare yourself to others, comparisons are everywhere. That adds cognitive load to the slow grind of getting started on a new job, and now 8 hours feel like 12, and at the same time the productivity trends tell them they "have not done enough today".
I think a few things aren't hammered into young people enough today.
1) Any action is greater than no action. It doesn't matter how much you suck at something. Do it. Congrats, you've beaten everyone who never started.
2) Finish things. No matter how ugly it is. Even if you have to half-kill yourself to drag it that last inch over the line. Congrats, you've beaten everyone who never finished.
3) Your worst effort is probably better than average. Stop obsessing about the 1% best. That's not who you're competing against. You're competing against the pool of real people a company / project could afford to hire, who are available to hire.
4) Everyone starts off terrible at everything. No movie covers the 10,000 hours someone is learning: that's why training montages are a cliché.
5) Forgive yourself. It's okay not to be spectacular every minute of every day. Consistency of effort is more valuable than cyclical manic-depression. The key to becoming better starts with accepting and being happy with where you're starting from.
I think this effect is tough for anyone tuned to care what others think, and it tends to be rougher the younger you are.
There's a significant lack of guidance in WEIRD societies about how to be a person, and this is topped off by the limited maturation rituals: learning to drive, first full-time job, graduating and buying a house come to mind - but we've somehow come to a consensus that putting a giant paywall in front of them and creating dependencies between them is fine.
Putting it like that, it's no wonder that so many young people are staying home, whittling their time away on scraps of "advice" on how to get on in life.
I've come to pity people who plug such "productivity" advice online, because I feel like they must be suppressing (or missing) an idea of the Good Life: a notion of using one's actions, or speech, to contribute to the common good.
I'm hopeful newer generations in the West will have the nous to reject false idols like "productivity" or extreme wealth, but I think it's on us to expose the painful lessons learned as we're transitioning into a cyborg society.
> Even if you don't want to compare yourself to others, comparisons are everywhere.
Where you live and your social circle dictate the comparisons that are made. These are not universal - moving to another part of the country will result in fairly different standards. Some of my friends (now acquaintances?) liked to spend a lot of money at expensive restaurants, hotels, etc. It's my choice whether to spend time with them (I don't spend much). Folks who need to change their wardrobe every so many months? Not in my circle.
Life is great if you set your own standards. It's liberating. Also, I've learned that the guy who makes $1M+ on Youtube is also living a very different life - one I don't want to have. Yes, I'd love the money, but not the sacrifices.
I don't get paid as much as most SV types - but whenever I audit my life, I realize that's the only thing "missing". Almost everything in my life is the way I wanted it to be (by design). I know what I value, and I both consciously and unconsciously achieved it. More money would be awesome, but do I want to sacrifice what I have? I doubt it.
Let's not kid ourselves here, an 8 hour work day takes up a ton of time when you factor in cooking, cleaning, and attending to other chores. Maybe you even have to take care of another small human too.
It is incredibly disingenuous to think all you need is a little time management and all will be right in the world.
Sometimes it takes a couple hours after a full days work just to recharge and focus deeply on a task again.
Lets not forget about the physical and psychological impact of shorter days in the winter time too.
Sincerely, a hardened in the trenches 10 year vet.
I started mentoring new grads after covid hit, trying to help them find jobs. The more I talked to them, the more I felt that I should have talked to them before they started their undergrad or Masters. Most of them had wasted away 4-6 years of their life and were struggling to find jobs in an already competitive field. They took the wrong courses, did not work on communication or networking and in general, seemed to have made bad decisions. Especially the ones that came from India to do their Masters (I did so myself a long time back) but had no one to guide them on what courses to take and how to go about job search, internships, etc.
100% agree. One of the first things I do when taking over a decent size sales team is install tracking software on their machines. Not because i care that they are on facebook or CNN but so i can SHOW them they are not nearly as productive as they think.
My personal theory backed only by my own professional history is that most people are only working about 3 or 4 hours a day, tops. Certain tasks like writing code or authoring content cannot be time hacked; it takes the time it takes. But I joke that I never worked LESS than I did once I became a VP and had very little tactical work to do. Most of the workday in many fields and sectors actually doesn't take all that long.
Seconded. Now that I've installed auto time tracking on my computer, my estimate is that people do 2-3 of solid work a day. The rest of time is eating, reading news, reading/writing email, social media etc. It takes serious effort to put in 8 billable hours.
You're just bombarded with the stuff that you should know - well, according to internet forums, at least.
On top of your basic CS curriculum, you should also be "crushing it" in:
- Full-stack development
- Research-level Machine Learning
- Heavy side projects like creating your own crypto currency, algorithmic trading platform, or whatever.
All while burning through the tens to hundreds of leetcode problems.
And of course, if you're a frequent visitor of certain forums or blogging platforms, you will find some user that's doing all of the above. Flashy website, writing research papers on the latest ML/Deep Learning models, writing interactive and insightful tutorials on leetcode problems, all while keeping a 4.0 throughout their CS-studies and climbing up the career-ladder and getting better internships every year.
I think that if you're comparing yourself to those types, and trying to keep up with them, you're gonna end up spending a lot of time without getting much done.
Of course, all while visiting the usual suspects of time-thieves (FB, Twitter, HN, Reddit, etc.)
There's this myth being perpetuated on most CS career forums (where 99% of the posters are other CS students) that you need to be some super-human rock star to even be worthy of the most lowly position. It's that, or bust.
>>There's this myth being perpetuated on most CS career forums (where 99% of the posters are other CS students) that you need to be some super-human rock star to even be worthy of the most lowly position. It's that, or bust.
This is of course given you are in your prime health, family, and other life situations. Its like CS and programming jobs in general are acting like a filter to promote only the candidates who in their best form at the moment.
My guess is this illusion will shatter around the next recession/depression. When people will realize they had more than work, and bazillion tons of luck going on for them, to be the superstars they thought they were.
Thanks for reminding me to turn on screen time on my phone. I am indeed wasting a lot of time on my phone reading things that don't get me much value while procrastinating on real work or things that I consciously want to spend my time on. This problem is a lot more prevalent on my phone than on my laptop. I catch myself browsing HN without any intent and without any goal, mostly reading comments and skimming on articles. It's a complete waste of time and I'm not really getting anything from it. I wish I could come once a week and get a synthesis of what's been happening over here. There are a lot of things that I absolutely don't care about at all and filtering on categories would help me skip those. I noticed that the top 30 or 60 items on HN move rather slowly and one visit a day is enough to not feel that you're missing out. I feel that I need outside help to regulate these behaviors.
I was on a similar situation until last month or so. I read this book called The Shallows by Nicholas Carr which references a lot of research that consuming lots of internet modifies your neural paths and makes you more distractable and harder to do deeper thinking (such as reading books, etc). I’ve since removed hn from my browser favorites and get a curated list of articles each friday from [1]. I just came here today to skim some articles as i’ve worked all day in a house project and my body hurts so I have no energy for other things.
This house project, some other mini-projects that i’ve done and the 2/3 books I read since last month is something i can now do because now I avoid HN (and the whole internet) by default..
I was in a similar boat until recently. One thing that has worked brilliantly for me is to use any service that gives you a notification/curates your feed for the top posts on HN. I personally use Pushbullet for this. Since I was already using it in my phone as well as my laptop and desktop (it's a pretty handy tool to share stuffs quickly between devices), I set up the Hacker News 500 channel which sends me notification for the top items on HN. I usually get 2-3 posts throughout the day, which is more than sufficient for me.
time is pretty much like money in that way, learn to manage one and you will manage the other. what you found works equally well with income as with time if you are not careful all the little numbers add up very quickly.
>Nobody likes to be told that they're wasting their free time,
Wasting free time, a.k.a living? Capitalist propaganda is so godamn effective. People now believe that every minute you spend not working is wasted time.
That's not what the original sentence says at all.
Every minute spent not working is free time, that's pretty much true no matter how much work you do.
And you can use that free time to actually live, i.e. have deep, meaningful experiences, or waste it by consuming cheap, addictive and mostly fake content on the social network du jour.
Everyone here is reading this article as a cautionary tale on procrastination. To me it’s about the unrealistic expectations we place on ourselves. Maybe that’s due to our fake meritocratic society, or comparisons made on social media, or our parents expectations.
I thought I’d be a millionaire by now, changing the world for the better, with a Wikipedia page and a yacht. But what I really want now is to put down the measuring stick, and be ok with being me. It’s time to stop beating myself up for not living up to the absurd expectations I set for myself as a child.
Even while being aware of my unrealistic work expectations, I often still find myself being disappointed when I reflect on my day.
Not being productive isn't what makes me disappointed. It's procrastinating in ways that don't even make me happy. It's too easy to be sucked into hours of binging youtube, reddit, wikipedia, or twitter.
I know I'd get way more satisfaction by going on a hike, practicing piano, learning a second language, or calling my family. But the simple distractions are too convenient and addicting.
Yes! It’s exactly this. I’m fine being unproductive, but at least I want to be able to reflect on my day and remember doing fun things (as opposed to dopamine roulette activities like Reddit).
It could be worse. You could be a millionaire, have sacrificed good years of your life and your health, and realise that happiness was achievable on a shoestring all along.
We’re sold a lie from the get-go, a lovely orange carrot dangling just in front of us. Very occasionally a lucky donkey catches the carrot, because the stick broke or somesuch - but the carrot is made of wood.
This is why we have billionaires. They’re the fools who didn’t know when to quit, chewing on wooden carrot after wooden carrot, insisting they’re delicious. More and more and more and never ever enough - because material wealth is good for satisfying your fundamental needs, but once it’s done that, the marginal utility diminishes rapidly, and you derive limited satisfaction from it.
As you say, be ok with you. Be happy in this moment and that moment, however it comes - being alive is enough - ask any cancer patient.
The handful of (tech) billionaires I’ve met all seemed to genuinely enjoy the work that made them rich. People have different utility functions (which is a good thing!)
But I hit 30 last year and found that what I truly wanted to do was make music, write, and spend time with my family.
I don't advocate mediocrity, but everyone doesn't have to be a high achiever. It's okay to live a fulfilling life doing what you like, even if it doesn't make you rich or earn you Wikipedia entries.
I think so, too! Sometimes we should re-evaluate our expectations and think about what we really want and why we want it. Furthermore, I think it’s important to realise that others might have other motivations such as money, success, curiosity, altruism and so forth so there really is little need to compare ourselves to them.
Most of us don’t have the energy to be productive all the time. It took a lot of work (ironically) for me to be okay with that and to allow myself to do nothing at times. Procrastination for me was the result of constant pressure which sucked so much energy that I just couldn’t BE productive anymore. Funnily enough when I allowed myself to slack around or fall a bit behind I ended up greatly improving my grades.
In the end for me it’s a tale of starting to live in the moment (as cliche as that might sound) instead of failing to meet one’s own impossible expectations.
On the other hand some very well-known people felt profound conflict about not achieving their self-imposed goals before actually doing so. There's a famous story about Caesar bursting into tears at the thought of how Alexander the Great had built an empire whereas Caesar himself had done nothing of note by the same age. [1]
It's common to read about other military leaders like Alexander who felt similarly, but perhaps military historians just like these stories. The behavior seems general. I would guess that Elon Musk is pretty frustrated that his rockets don't reach Mars yet.
Survivorship bias perhaps? I suspect even more people felt profound conflict about not having achieved their goals only to continue to fall short of their aspirations.
Two of my personal projects that usually get 2-3 visitors per day have been linked from Wikipedia pages (both history-related), as a 39-year old guy that is good enough for me.
Absolutely agree. In some ways I've done more than I ever expected, and in other ways I feel like I'm behind. But comparing my current self to what I thought back when I was 20 doesn't really matter at all. All that matters is that I'm happy with my life as it is, and that I feel like I have enough influence over things in order to change the things I'm not happy about.
I think the danger is not just unrealistic expectations from a point of view of "I'm just not that much of a genius/producer", but (not necessarily article-related) I think it's important to realize how unusual the story is of the "super successful" and "driven" people we so often compare ourselves to.
Now that I'm older, I realize that where I am is not surprising despite the work I've put in; what would have been far more unexpected would be for everything to have worked out and grown so large that I'd be one of the big successes.
That measuring stick would need to be configured against the mean, assuming it's needed at all (and it likely isn't).
Paradoxically, when I had all the time in the world I frittered it away on video games and the internet.
Now that I have multiple kids and my time is extremely constrained, I am very efficient with my time usage. I listen to audiobooks while doing the dishes. I plan in my mind exactly which programming tasks I want to accomplish as soon as the kids are in bed so that I can do them quickly and still have time to spend with my wife.
I’m very nostalgic about the countless hours I frittered away on video games and the internet as an adolescent. Part of me thinks it made me the person I am today, who I am proud of. I recently joined a Counter Strike team with work and had some of the most fun times I can think of recently. I compare that with the time I put aside to learn 3D modelling, which was fun in its own way but required more self motivation and the satisfaction took a lot more time to achieve. It made me question what society accepts as a valid way to spend spare time, as well as the purpose of how we spend our spare time.
I feel this deeply. I was extremely lazy in high school and college and then got my act together gradually throughout my 20s to the point where I feel like I no longer waste much time. I've experienced some success and accomplished goals as a result, but when I look back on my life, I remember those hours wasted playing video games most fondly.
There's a motivational saying that when you die you get to meet the person you could have become, and that's your individual heaven/hell. I've got a nagging fear that maybe if I learn to speak French or sell a business or whatever, raise a family, grow old and die, I'll come face to face with the guy who played 10,000 hours of Civ.
Me too. I remember my countless hours playing (arguably wasted) diablo 2 very fondly. I still recall a lot of the detailed stats of specific characters I had built. Also helps I had sunk the hours playing with my partner at the time, so it was also a bit of a bonding moment. Didn’t help my grades any though.
> It made me question what society accepts as a valid way to spend spare time
Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy?
Typically, one takes justifiable pride for accomplishments that stand up to external scrutiny. That usually comes in the form of the accomplishment having an element of sacrifice, of pain and difficulty, of opportunity costs paid, and of a result that stands on its own as something not everyone can do. I am proud of some of my adventures; proud of some of my work; proud of some of the artistic things I have created. None of them are extremely amazing in the grand scheme of things, and I don't let any of it get to my head, but they do give me stories to tell at the bar that aren't dismissed with a wave of the hand as being frittered-away time.
Video games, on the other hand, are not exactly grand sacrificial effort. I can't imagine telling someone I was proud of myself for spending a few hours killing orcs on a screen while eating processed snack food alone in my underwear.
> as well as the purpose of how we spend our spare time.
It's only "spare" if you've really satisfied yourself in your best judgement of what you could otherwise be doing.
I like to put Slack and Laziness on a continuum. Laziness is putting things off, avoiding important tasks, pawning them off on others, rationalizing why you shouldn't bother, finding easier ways out even if the end result isn't as good, cutting corners. From the article:
> I was supposed to renew my car registration today. I haven’t opened the Web site.
That's classic laziness. Sure, the consequences can be dealt with later, a day or two without driving won't be the end of the world, but it also took about as much effort to write this self-effacing article as it would have to just renew the insurance and move on.
Slack, on the opposite side of the spectrum (and before the word was co-opted by a program that ironically takes up all possible Slack), is free time that you carve out of the world with your actions. Slack is arranging things so that you have time to relax, time to "surf down the luck plane" that you have created for yourself, so that you can allow things to proceed knowing that at the end of the slope, you're not actually in a worse off position than when you started. Slack is paid vacation time, where laziness is unemployment. Slack is a glass of wine at the end of the day, laziness is beer for breakfast. Slack is sitting in the hot tub after you work out, laziness is sitting in the bathtub after you eat a microwaved dinner. Slack is posting on HN on a cloudy Saturday morning while the kids (with breakfast in their tummies) watch a bit of TV, laziness is posting on HN when you're supposed to be writing a program at 3:00 on a Thursday afternoon.
Video games are something you can do in your slack time, or they're something you can do because you're lazy. That's the difference between a healthy hobby and a damaging addiction.
Alternately: When you have a wife and kids and job you like, a lot of your most important needs are well met -- if you can keep juggling everything.
Someone with hours and hours to do nothing likely isn't getting laid, isn't making much money, isn't intellectually gratified, etc. So you play games to occupy yourself to keep from going bonkers.
I've had a similar experience. There is something about scarcity of time that breeds discipline. Whenever I go through a period of life where I have to spend a huge amount of time on some particular task project I always think "man, when this is over I'm going to be able to use all this time to do X,Y,Z. It's gonna be great!" And then the project ends and I essentially waste all of my newly found free time. I end up accomplishing less, even on my side projects somehow.
This describes me very well. What the hell was I doing with all that time during my 20s? I wasn't out hiking up a storm, I wasn't making a lot of music, I wasn't out drinking with friends at every chance. I was inside doing nothing, shitposting online, watching trash TV that I can barely remember the plots of now. Work was productive, but when I went home, I left it at work... Relationship was stable, but I didn't max out every minute of it when I could...
Now, as soon as the kids are in bed, virtually every scrap of time is used for something productive. Except, obviously, for lazy Saturday mornings posting on HN ;-)
Yea there seems to be some thing of a positive feedback loop that one can get into. I’ve experienced this multiple times too. When I had a boring and easy job I had all sorts of aspirations of doing a side business or learning some new stuff etc. I ended up doing none of that and mostly playing games instead. When I had a busy (but interesting) job I ended up doing side projects, socializing a lot more and generally being more productive outside of work. Something like momentum from one activity carrying through to others.
Personally, the unquestioned Ethos of Productivity characteristic of early 21st century Western Society is much more dangerous than the distractions which can sometimes fill unstructured time.
The psychological rigidity and social sacrifices required of always being productive (with little to no unstructured leisure time) actively harms individuals and the societies in which they are embedded, perhaps to the exact extent they increase tangible and intangible forms of wealth.
Viewing this as business productivity versus distractions is a false dichotomy, though.
Life isn't just a series of context switches between being productive at work and wasting time at home. The goal is to be intentional with how you spend your time.
For example, coordinating a social dinner with friends isn't work, but it also isn't a waste of time. Going to the gym isn't typical productivity, but it isn't a waste of time either. Even playing video games to catch of with old friends isn't entirely a waste of time.
However, the modern world is full of traps that will lull people into spending their time in ways that feel enjoyable in the moment, but feel wasteful in retrospect. It's easy to pull out your phone and scroll Twitter for 30 minutes, but it takes more effort to pull out your phone and call and old friend or a grandparent for a check-in. It's easy to drop on the couch and select from an endless series of TV shows on Netflix and Hulu, but it takes a little more effort to go for a walk or go to the gym. Afterward, which of those two activities feels like a better use of your free time?
> The psychological rigidity and social sacrifices required of always being productive (with little to no unstructured leisure time)
Is this really a common goal, though? I've been around some extremely productive and successful people in my career, but none of them held any illusions about minimizing leisure time. I've also been in some high pressure and highly competitive environments, but the number of people who adopted an "all work and no play" approach to life was vanishingly small. In fact, the people who are most motivated at work are often most motivated to arrange the after-work get together, or the weekend trip for the group of friends, or to invite people over for home-cooked meals so we can catch up.
> In fact, the people who are most motivated at work are often most motivated to arrange the after-work get together, or the weekend trip for the group of friends, or to invite people over for home-cooked meals so we can catch up.
There seems to be a kind of phenomenon, like being in the zone but much longer (weeks at a time instead of hours), where you have an extreme drive to do everything you have to and want to do, a drive to live. I've only experienced it twice, in what I fondly remember as the most productive weeks in my life. And in those times, I'd juggle ridiculous amount of work with social occasions and wandering around, with no problem and a lot of happiness.
I wish I knew how to reproduce it, because these were also what I remember as the happiest of times. I suspect the people you mention are in this mode constantly. I wish I knew what's their secret. And not because I have a desire to be a workaholic or something - but I'd like to feel again those infinite amounts of energy and sheer will to make things happen.
I am not sure but I think you misunderstood Mistersquid, in that he associates productivity not only with work but with other things and times in life too. That's why he speaks of unstructured time in contrast. He doesn't make an opposition work vs leisure, he makes an opposition between productivity and un-structuration.
Typically the people about whom you talk in your last paragraph are trying to be productive even in their leisure time.
I have a feeling this is even more damaging for Millenials, because they constantly compare themselves with the rest of the world. In a sense, even leisure has turned into competition.
When I was in my teens a long time ago I did sports and learned classical guitar. If I had seen the acrobatics you see daily on Reddit or the "casual home musicians" on Youtube, I'd probably have given up all my efforts.
Doing a backflip seems like the normal thing any guy should be able to do nowadays.
I read this a lot online, but strangely enough I see the opposite in practice. Young people who grew up immersed in social media are primed to recognize the difference between a rising social media star and the norm. It's the older people who associate any degree of notoriety with ultimate success who struggle to understand the difference between a super star and someone with a lot of social media followers.
> If I had seen the acrobatics you see daily on Reddit or the "casual home musicians" on Youtube, I'd probably have given up all my efforts.
But you wouldn't give up your efforts if you attended a concert of a famous musician, would you? Seeing a video with a million views on YouTube is a step below being a famous musician to young people.
If anything, seeing people gain small degrees of fame and notoriety without going all the way to the top of their field is even more motivating for young people. Seeing different levels of success drives home the point that success isn't binary, it's a spectrum.
Personally, I feel like I struggle with this a lot. Whether it be reading on here, or seeing it in the news, it is hard to not compare myself to a 20-something year old who just sold his/her company for hundreds of thousands of dollars while I sit around reading the stupid article and playing Dota or starting my millionth side project. It is easy to see that not everyone is going to do something like that, but I think it is really hard to internalize the fact that I am the one not doing that too.
Then I get into this "well, won't be me anyway, so why bother" mood where I accomplish even less with my free time. I have urge to do more, but it is a vicious cycle sometimes.
I think it has to do with loneliness so many complain about. When being social is seen as waste of time useless thing, people dont socialize except in work. And that has consequences precisedly when yoi need friend the most or when work is highly competitive.
Being alive in itself is truly remarkable. I've made great friends. I've met people who ended up disappointing me greatly. I've married a smart, beautiful, ambitious woman twelve years ago. We've went through exhilarating ups and soulcrushing downs.
I've worked for a startup, which almost went under several times. I've worked for a corporate thresher which sucked life right out of me.
I've worked on niche projects in my spare time, which so far have amounted to nothing.
I've had panic attacks. I've experienced months of mania and perceived greatness.
Life is a present which keeps on giving. I'm grateful. Accomplishments are a matter of perception, experience in itself is utterly exhilarating to me.
This needs more upvotes. Life really should be about what you spend your time doing, not letting it waste away, not living for achievements, nor comparing ourselves to others, others from completely different worlds, but really making the most of the short time we have, whatever it is we are doing - having fun, doing work, taking a break, living life.
One of the greatest realizations I've had is that there really is no other time than the present. The future never is, neither the past, it's only the present. So, if all we have and can interact with time-wise is the present moment, then everything you can actually do can only be done at each particular now.
So, if you want to learn French, or Lisp, or riding a dirt bike, you can only ever actually do it, at some particular now. The trick then is to try and make sure somehow that for each particular now, you always have a clear idea of what it is that you should be doing. Otherwise you risk falling into the procrastination trap that can last as long as ones lifetime, as the article brilliantly demonstrates.
I think the trick is not doing things now for a better future... but to enjoy now more. If enjoying now means playing a video game, or walking the dog, or bing watching Netflix.. that's completely fine.
We should LIVE more in the now... not try to make the future you more happy. but the current you.
If that is working hard and learning and trying to become rich, if that makes you happy that's fine too.
What makes me happy is family, friends, seeing the world and building and learning about technology and playing with synthesizers... enjoy the current moment. ;-)
Readit News
Fast forward to today and that did not happen. The startup is no more, but mainly due to burnout. We made money and did well, but not well enough. I never made my millions, but did have a substantial aqui-hire opportunity that I turned down that would have almost gotten me there.
Once that part of my life played out, I decided to make a 180 turn... I'm not working to exhaustion anymore and take a tortoise approach to my career. I've found that as long as I'm consistent and have my eye on my goals, it doesn't matter how hard I work outside of my day job. I just need to be consistent and take advantage of bursts of motivation.
I've accomplished a surprising amount with this approach. I'm not stressed, I have the best quality of life that I've ever had and work is generally fun. This is what my goal should have been from the beginning.
I'm 58. I spent over thirty years, writing and managing software projects that other people generally didn't use well (or mishandled while developing). It was frustrating, but they paid the bills, so there wasn't anything I could do about it.
Since leaving my last job, I started to look at working, and immediately, and with extreme prejudice, slammed into the notorious ageism in tech. It was a real shock, as I had always been treated with a fair degree of respect. That is no longer the case. Respect seems to be a virtue that no one practices, anymore (I'm not talking about "worship." I'm talking about simple, basic, courtesy and respect; like I give to others).
I had saved up a fairly substantial war chest, so I just decided to give up on looking for work, and have been spending my time since then, writing a lot of open-source code[0], and learning the latest stuff in the way I want.
Best decision I ever made. Too bad. I'm pretty good at what I do, I would have worked for a lot less than most (see "war chest," above), and would have been happy to take on riskier work with startups and whatnot.
[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY (and almost every green square will take you to an open-source repo, where I am the sole author, and you can view the checkins)
It’s entirely possible you’re not getting offers because they know you don’t need them.
I don’t mean to say they’re wanting to give the offers to less fortunate applicants - it’s just that you’ll be impossible to abuse relative to someone who they know needs the money.
“We need you to work until this is done.” “No.” “Chris, it’s very important and will be reflected on your performance review.” “Ok. Still no.”
At the start of my career (ages ago now) I had an employer find out that my university progression was tied entirely to their performance review of my placement, and immediately start to insist on my working all the hours under the sun with the strong implication that if I didn’t play ball the note would be “unfavourable”.
When you’re young it’s not always clear how little crap you should take from people in more senior positions.
- 25 years at a single company is working against you. Remove all that from your cv and just list the recent stuff you built.
- Most of your cv should be description of the repos with links. Cut out and summarise past experience ruthlessly, like you’re refactoring someone else’s old code.
- Remove the link to your personal git page, use the other one. On first sight it looks weak - it has some html files and a lot of docs. My first reaction was “meh”. It took me many minutes of browsing to figure out the real meat was in the other repo And then my reaction was “wow”. Most hiring manager don’t have time for this. People are not clicking on the green squares they are clicking on the source repos, you have about 30 seconds of their time.
- At this stage you might get bored or unhappy real fast in a job, if you are honest to yourself. Consider selling short term access to deep technical expertise - in your case Mobile Bluetooth on iOS.
I'm currently #1 in "clean EPE matched" on the Sintel AI benchmark - by re-implementing a 2006 paper. I'm taking advantage of the additional computing power that we have nowadays by brute-forcing what used to be a gradient-descent solver. It appears that people have re-invented the AI wheel many times, but nobody checked to see what was there before deep learning became fashionable.
I see the same issue everywhere. Companies have a large agile web 4.0 team using obscure frameworks that I had never heard of before. But all the stuff that they built would have been included in a $9 WordPress hosting plan.
Tech jobs these days are not about adding value, so your additional experience is worthless... The things that are valuable to companies are youth, optimism, loyalty and self-delusion.
Companies need a big headcount to give themselves leverage over governments and banks. Companies need a young workforce which they can influence and use as bargaining chips to make deals to get access to cheap money from the Fed.
The role of big corporations is to take people in when they're young and distort their worldviews so that they stay passive, childlike, compliant and docile as they get older - They're not going to rebel against the status quo, they're not going to complain about unjust government regulations which drive up the company stock price but at the same time diminish their freedom to leave the company and be independent.
Old people are not good because they can't be indoctrinated as easily and the benefits are much shorter-term since these old people don't have so many years left on this earth. The investment of brainwashing them doesn't yield so much and not for so long.
These big tech corporations are engaging in pure macroeconomics. They don't care about details like projects, clients and customers. In their world, the only things that affect their bottom line are:
- Governments
- Banks
- Investors
- Public opinion
Everything else is a detail which doesn't concern them. Everything that everyone does in those companies is ultimately about pleasing or manipulating these 4 entities in the most superficial way possible.
Like 'headmelted' pointed out, part of 'agiesm' is that it’s just that you’ll be impossible to abuse relative to someone who they know needs the money.
Programmers, especially the young are insecure douche bags, and I suspect that their insecurity leads to hiring docile individuals who can be coerced.
Deleted Comment
I'm 32, and the technical lead of a mid-sized research computing / ML team in quasi-academia. I'm the one who tells the boss whether a hire is technically competent, performing up to standard, is meshing well with the team, etc. So I don't make hire/fire decisions myself but have substantial influence on them.
Usually, when we hire people > 30, they are PhDs with a specific specialty, like statistics. But recently we hired a guy from industry in his early 50s to do some programming, web dev, and light ML. He had, obviously a long CV with programming and some practice with ML/statistics, although nothing related to our field. Here are some of the things this guy has done in the ~1 months before and since his hiring:
1. He frequently bullshits in presentations and meetings, pretending to know things he doesn't know.
2. Very shortly after joining, he has recommended we radically rebuild several of our systems in different, "better" ways -- ways which he's familiar with. For example, we have a web app on AWS Ubuntu, and he has repeatedly asked why we can't just run a Windows server.
3. If he doesn't know something, he insists on getting step-by-step tutorials from technical people in the lab, but tutorials in how to do things HIS way. For example, we all use Linux and an SSH client, but he wasted 2 hours of my time asking how to SSH into AWS using PuTTY on Windows, how to copy files using WinSCP, etc, since of course he only uses Windows. He claims he'll learn Linux eventually, but wants to use what he knows "for now", "so that he can more rapidly produce results".
4. The first time I met the guy in person (not immediately due to COVID), he had plopped himself and his laptop down in my desk, without asking, and even readjusted my chair settings, and complained about my office being messy. I'm #2 in seniority...
Any one of these alone would be...annoying, but all together he is almost a caricature of every ageist stereotype in tech. He expects a level of respect he feels is due his experience level, while simultaneously he resists learning anything about the way his new organization does things...presumably because he knows better?
It puts me in an awkward situation because I'm kind of his technical supervisor. If he were a new graduate student, I would tell him to cut out the bullshit, figure things out, and quit wasting my time (and commandeering my desk). Since he is almost twice my age it is too awkward to read him the riot act, though, and I don't really know how to deal with this.
My takeaway is that an older person in a new tech job should really, really avoid displaying arrogance and entitlement. Respect is earned, not given; even if you've spent 30+ years in the field, we whippersnappers don't know how competent you are (or not), until it's demonstrated. I'm not saying you made any of these mistakes, but sometimes it is easy to do some of these things unconsciously. Probably you are perfectly competent, but people like this guy are working against you.
You hear responses from younger generations like "Ok Boomer" to their elders' opinions and it is so cringe-worthy.
I don't think everything my parents taught me was perfect or even always correct but there's an irreplaceable amount of wisdom that comes from being alive twice as long.
The state and change of culture and technology is quite different.
I consider age like time an illusion. There’s biological considerations but I reject all the age cliches and sayings. Defy labels, limitations, distorted reminders — focus on living.
If I manage to do one useful thing every day, it adds up to a lot of useful things over time. And that has proven to be enough.
There's a sort of mediocre Johnny Cash song with the chorus "Even I might get to Heaven at a half a mile a day"
That's basically how I try to live my life.
Not because I want to take it slowly, but because I have a lot on my plate and my natural tendency is to "unflatten time", fast-forwarding in my head all the different plays and things to do. Some of these will only apply in a year, but here I am thinking about them and worrying about them now. Worse still, I sometime make decisions related to these future things and as you all surely know, decisions are paid for with a mental toll.
So I dial back, focus on the immediate thing in front of me and remember that nearly any progress is made of trivial, tiny chunks.
Having an effective system of writing stuff down is key to that approach - your future ideas and various pending tasks need to spill into writing instead of lingering around your head. When you have a good writing system you can trust, then you can free your mind to focus on the now.
Well, take Johnny Cash. Half a mile a day * 30k days gives 15k miles; maybe it's enough to reach heaven, but not enough to e.g. reach the Moon.
So, when choosing to move steadily albeit slowly, you have to manage your expectations, and get used to get by with little.
Investing your time is not unlike investing your money: least risky strategies bring most stable but least spectacular results, while big bets bring both big gains and big losses.
But in the scale of each year I’m super productive.
But this is slowly burning me out. The boredom of not doing any real work for 8 hours is soul killing. I do a lot of busy red tape work but it is not intelluctly stimulating.
So now I will do 180 and quit my job in a few months and go indie solo founder route.
Personally, I put my creative energy into my 9 to 5 job. Instead of using evenings to start side hustles or to "get ahead" on work, I unwind and get adequate rest. This is so I can be alert and switched on during my regular work hours.
I've found stretching myself thin starts to affect me quickly, and I feel like I'm actually operating at 50% on a permanent basis.
https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/perspective/a-tale-of-t...
Once was backpacking for 11 months with only two bags. The second was 5 months in a car. I did learn a lot both times, but I never got fully independent and it may have set me back some.
Still in retrospect, it was a great journey and I'm still glad I made the attempt.
I understand this but most of the time I am excited about that new awesome idea that popped into my head. How do you focus on one thing without getting deviated?
Motivation invariably wanes
Someone who consistently gets just a little better every day is more likely to succeed than someone who works insanely hard for just a limited period of time.
The years don't come without the days.
but someone who works insanely hard for a long time is going to beat the person who gets just a little bit better each day.
The point is, someone who works insanely hard gets to a certain required level quicker than someone who improves a tiny bit every day for a long time. Think cramming for an exam etc.
I had other peers in my graduating class in college that went to work at places like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon while I went to do a startup with a few friends, then ended up mostly working as an employee for these other startups. I find it interesting to idly muse about what would have happened to someone who'd joined one of those companies in an entry level engineering role in 2010 and stayed there while having a fairly average career trajectory, say getting to a senior engineer level 5 years in and then plateauing, going from a stock grant size of maybe $50k a year when joining to $150k a year at senior level. Doing some rough estimates based on stock prices over the years, if you'd been in that position at any of these companies and never sold any stock you'd have something like $2.5 million (Google), $4 million (Microsoft) or $6 million (Amazon) in stock today. And of course your base salary and cash bonuses over that time would have been higher than your base salary working for startups.
I don't say this to complain, I'm still doing fine overall and there are a lot of people in the world who work very hard for a lot less. But I also don't feel like I've really accomplished much of any significance. It's pretty mind-blowing to realize that the less risky, more tortoise-like approach to a career would have been so vastly more profitable than what I've experienced at what I would say have been a pretty average selection of startups. And it's not like the startups have been so much more fulfilling, you're still pretty much a cog in the machine as an engineer even at a 30 person company.
In conclusion - working at a startup smaller than, say, series D is a fool's game and a very likely path to one day looking back and feeling like you haven't accomplished anything. Either become a founder to try to build something meaningful from nothing, or just work at a FAANG company as a 9-5 and get your fulfillment elsewhere and/or retire young.
> less risky
Never selling stock is pretty risky. Sure in retrospect there's been a huge bull run in tech which made those stocks go up crazily, but most of the people I know in FAANG recommend selling your RSUs and buying index funds like VTI instead to diversify because who knows?
Isn't this the definition of risk? If it was a foregone conclusion that you'd make more money this way, it wouldn't be risky at all.
Or, is there any article/post you may have written already?
Are you being colloquial?
Being a millionaire by 40 (in 7 years or less) is quite likely for anyone with the talent to launch a startup, by working at a regular big conpany.
Launching a startup lowers those odds by quite a bit (but increases the small chance of being a manymillionaire).
Dead Comment
It takes a lot of stress out of day to day living and you can really plan a future. All while being able to continue work you enjoy or switch careers into something maybe isn’t as profitable but brings different enjoyment.
Even something like an addictive videogame is designed to make you feel productive by giving you levels to progress through etc—fundamentally I think we all have a desire to produce, it’s just easy to spend time putting that energy into the wrong forms of productive activity, since these are usually easier and less isolating than actually producing crafts or products.
But this is exactly what we did before. We got bored, we were wasting time, we were experimenting, and that's how great ideas came around.
Reddit is another one, the infinite scroll I think is addictive. Trying to kill that habit. But there is useful information on there so it's hard to disable it completely.
One of the most reliable ways to reset internal time perception? Experiencing nature.
I try and take more walks now.
This is not a new problem, we are just experiencing a hyper version of it. Social media, the world's knowledge at your finger tips, is distraction on steroids.
Often my surfing feeds my ideas. My latest creation is derived from downloading Reddit to my brain on the regular.
Boredom is a great stimulus. It’s not a pre-requisite.
Once all of your friends are hooked on their phone, it becomes very lonely to be the only one that doesn't stare at a screen. But what people naturally yearn for is not to get bored alone, but to get bored as a group. So the "quality of bored-ness" goes down as screen usage expands.
Yep! I firmly believe that boredom is not just healthy, but a necessary part of life. Your mind needs downtime and your creativity and imagination need mind-numbing boredom.
Note taking can be pernicious because it feels like doing something but it also gives an excuse to not put forth your own thoughts until you have all the pieces. Then they become so large they are unweildy. The more notes, the less supple.
--
[0] - Or damage your brain. The fact that I can't think things through unless I'm writing thoughts down or drawing diagrams may be a sign of improved quality of thoughts, or a sign of me no longer being able to think without a crutch.
I haven't taken full control of myself back yet, but that thought was a strong wake-up call to me.
Time to set up my emacs config to manage my life and stop wasting time.
... but I made a technical decision because of an idea on hacker news.
You should have researched that decision outside of hacker news. Less aggregate time spent.
I worry it is just teaching them to get gamified...
But the idea is nice - banks that enforce aging and budgets, shops that put fresh produce at the checkouts and never sell chocolate bars...
I took French in middle/high school with the standard lecture/hw school structure and was a lot less successful than I've been with Duolingo. Duolingo alone probably isn't enough to really learn a language but combined with other resources it provides a great structure to keep you committed and provides a great foundation to build from.
[1] https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012290/Achievements-Considere...
If we approached every challenge with “how do we design experience that builds on and supplements user motivation?” We’d leap forward as a species.
We should be careful to paint with such a broad brush.
Before I've encountered any digital computing device, I used to just play Sudoku during class. Or read novels; I had a textbook that carved, inside which hid a small novel. Or, just day-dream and think about stuff.
On the other hand, I enjoyed Sudoku and novels. I don't consider them to be a complete waste of time. In retrospect, they made my childhood better.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...
I'm just really glad I did college when the only thing distracting on the internet was Slashdot and you could only access it with a computer attached to an ethernet cable.
I'm almost certain I would not have made it past Freshman year if I had a smartphone.
This is why I question curiosity as the prescribed value from HN leadership. In its place one could've easily said learning or mastery.
I spent countless hours fiddling with git tutorials, the best branching, workflow.. Nothing was even close to when I had to actual work with it on a tight rope.
Curiosity intellect is mostly dead baggage in ones head, knowing how to apply ideas as tools, to actually do something, and even have it in mind when you work so that you know you wrote enough, commit will be long, or merge will be ugly. It all balances out on itself and you actually feel light and capable.
Generally I'm glad that HN has minimal gamification, at least compared to the worst offenders reddit, fb, twitter etc.
Browsing HN has never felt productive to me. At times useful, entertaining, informative, thought-provoking, and at others less so, when it can seem annoying, repetitive, pointless and so on. But never "productive".
Increasing the signal to noise ratio would help reduce time spent scrolling. A “filter” by keyword feature would be massively helpful.
During the last few years, I switched from reading low quality content to reading high quality content. I am better informed about various things. But the problem of spending too much time reading remains unchanged.
In general though, I prefer the idea of going "all in" in whatever I'm doing. If I'm going to play video games, I'm making sure I have a damn good time doing it. If I'm going to put in work, I'm gonna make sure it gets done. Distractions will do you in in both cases. Ruin your fun time and mess up your productivity.
These activities by itself don’t yell any value by themselves and still free like a super productive to the extent of feeling incredibly productive. One should not forget that intelectual hobbies are in fact still hobbies.
I've grown up in a family where there was always enough, yet not much in excess. Most grown up people I knew in my childhood would probably complain that they would want more, yet they mostly just did their job, had enough and enjoyed their family life. That is also true for some of the people I later met at university and then in business, but I get the impression that quite a lot of them, even though they have much better jobs than the people from my childhood, invest a lot of their free time trying to pursue their goal. And it is extremely rare that I see someone actually reaching it. It is far more often that their life becomes a lot more miserable, think divorce or similar.
Now don't ge me wrong, I think pursuing ones goals can be extremely valuable. But for a lot of people, pursuing a goal and trying to be productive with it while at the same time being married, raising kids, earning money, staying healthy and doing chores is most likely not going to lead anywhere good. So why is it so hard for smart people to accept that fact, and enjoy one or two hours of lazyness every day? Why do people take Elon Musk as an example, if even he himself decribes his life as not too nice?
Nobody likes to be told that they're wasting their free time, but I've had mild success encouraging people to use basic time tracking utilities like the Screen Time feature in iOS. It's eye-opening to watch people estimate their daily screen time around 30 minutes and then be shocked when their reports come back at 2-3 hours or more.
Of course, some amount of leisure activity is necessary throughout the day. It's important to not shame people for spending time on things they enjoy (Hacker News, video games, Reddit, Twitter), but it is important that they can be honest with themselves about how much time they're spending on those activities.
Measuring time spent in leisure activities is the only real way to start closing the feedback loop. Structured procrastination (Spending 5 timed minutes out of every 30 minutes on leisure activities, aka Pomodoro technique) is a good way to start getting a handle on this.
So, if you're getting a full 8hrs sleep, how much time does that leave you on an avg work night to do things that _you_ want to do? Like 4hrs? And do you really want to spend all those 4hrs being productive? People need to relax and unwind at some point. If you follow the pomodoro technique and use 5min for leisure every 30 mins, you end up with only ~40mins of "leisure" in that type of day.
What if you want to do things like spend an hour working out at the gym / looking after physical health? What if you are single and want to spend some time dating? It quickly drains away at any time you would have to spend on your own personal projects, interests, hobbies.
Reading your comment and others beneath you, I sense many of you have a weird idea of what a city is.
What you describe is true only for a minority of cities. I live in a city with above median housing prices. I live a 10 minute drive from my work. My house is not expensive - in fact, the expensive neighborhoods are farther away.
Initially you may not have much of a choice on where you work, but if you go through your whole career not having that choice, you probably need to work on your career a bit. For everyone I know, they decided to make that compromise (don't want to leave awesome city, etc). For them, not having enough time in the day definitely is a choice.
I agree with the rest of your accounting, but will note that there are weekends. As for gym, I just figured out exercises I can do at home with minimal equipment. It's a lot more flexible (and takes less time) than going to a gym.
Here’s a suggestion: don’t live an hour away from work?
With more companies going permanent remote, I find the whole concept of commuting for 2 hours round trip a day unimaginable. Especially for those of us working in Tech that don’t need a physical presence to deliver results.
I thought the same thing, until I focused on tightening up my schedule and making active choices to minimize wasted time.
If you want to live somewhere that requires 2 hours (!!) of commuting each day, take long lunch breaks away from the office, have relaxed mornings with hours between alarm going off and leaving the house, that's fine.
However, you have to recognize where you're making personal choices. You don't have to choose a job and house combination that requires an hour long commute each way. You don't have to leave the office for lunch every day. You don't have to have leisurely mornings. It's perfectly fine if you choose to do those things, but you're not being completely honest with yourself if you start portraying those personal choices as completely out of your control.
> And do you really want to spend all those 4hrs being productive?
It's not about being productive all day every day. You can spend those 4 hours watching TV if you want, or you can spend those 4 hours going to dinner with friends, or going to the gym. It's your choice.
> If you follow the pomodoro technique and use 5min for leisure every 30 mins, you end up with only ~40mins of "leisure" in that type of day.
The Pomodoro technique is for work time. You shouldn't be Pomodoring you personal time after work.
> What if you want to do things like spend an hour working out at the gym / looking after physical health?
Make a priority and make it happen.
If you spend 1 hour at the gym 3 times per week, that's less than 3% of your waking hours. Surely you can find 3% slack in your schedule somewhere?
> It quickly drains away at any time you would have to spend on your own personal projects, interests, hobbies.
The idea of "side projects" has become a major problem for many new grads growing up the internet era. For some reason, many of them feel obligated to be working on side projects when they're not working. They basically end up with two jobs, a day job and tending to their side projects, and then they wonder where all of their time has gone.
The solution is simple: Don't do side projects if you would prefer to spend your time on something else.
It's all about making active choices in how you spend your time. Once you go down the spiral of assuming everything is an obligation in your life, your schedule starts to feel out of your control. Start being honest about the choices you're making and what you want to do with your time and it becomes much easier to take control again.
I don't know man, I've been struggling with this myself. Obviously it's not literally true, but the problem is that after you account for 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work and chores/eating/hygiene/cooking/commute, every thing you want to do starts seriously cutting into the time that's left.
Need an hour more sleep than average? Wanna do some kind of workout on regular basis? Go out with friends, on a date, see a movie? Have a serious hobby that takes 2-3 hours 2-3 times a week? If you put it on spreadsheet it will fit but it's just seriously exhausting (yeah, better hope you actually have pretty high energy levels, that also varies from person to person). There is not much slack there.
Most of it distills down to being honest about your priorities. If you value relaxed mornings, relaxed evenings, and never feeling rushed before or after work, then there's nothing wrong with that. You're not obligated to go out with friends or allocate hours to hobbies during the weekday.
The problem comes when people say they value one thing, but when decision time arrives they do something else. If you have a hobby that requires 2-3 hours per week, then you make time a few nights per week to do it. If you want to go out with friends, then you make time to go out with friends.
Going to the gym is perhaps the easiest example. If you really value going to the gym, finding one hour three times per week is only about 3% of your waking hours. Find a gym located between your house and your office and travel time falls out of the equation.
Personally, I freed up an enormous amount of time by tightening up my schedule. Learning how to get out of bed, get dressed, eat breakfast, and get out the door in under 30 minutes was a game changer for me, and it wasn't even that difficult. Likewise, learning how to consolidate my chores and meal prep into small windows of time was an enormous improvement.
If you sleep 8 hours per night, you have 112 waking hours per week. If you spend 40 hours working and have a 30-minute commute each way (5 hours commuting per week), that leaves 67 hours of your own time. Even if you allocate half of that to chores and meal prep, you're still left with 34 hours, or basically an entire work week of personal time. Realistically, you're not going to spend 33 hours on chores, though.
It's all about priorities. If you don't want to real rushed or pressured during your off time, you don't have to, but you can't have it all.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/17/what-billionaire-ray-dalio-t...
There seems to be a an expectation that everyone should have a side hustle or has a creative outlet outside of work so they can get ahead or explore their true passions. But employment is structured in a way that your employer gets first dibs on your time and energy.
I'm a senior SRE in Google. I've got myself a NAS to back up my photos. Guess how many weeks it has been before I got the first terabyte of stuff onto it... Wrong, I'm still procrastinating on it :(
1) Any action is greater than no action. It doesn't matter how much you suck at something. Do it. Congrats, you've beaten everyone who never started.
2) Finish things. No matter how ugly it is. Even if you have to half-kill yourself to drag it that last inch over the line. Congrats, you've beaten everyone who never finished.
3) Your worst effort is probably better than average. Stop obsessing about the 1% best. That's not who you're competing against. You're competing against the pool of real people a company / project could afford to hire, who are available to hire.
4) Everyone starts off terrible at everything. No movie covers the 10,000 hours someone is learning: that's why training montages are a cliché.
5) Forgive yourself. It's okay not to be spectacular every minute of every day. Consistency of effort is more valuable than cyclical manic-depression. The key to becoming better starts with accepting and being happy with where you're starting from.
There's a significant lack of guidance in WEIRD societies about how to be a person, and this is topped off by the limited maturation rituals: learning to drive, first full-time job, graduating and buying a house come to mind - but we've somehow come to a consensus that putting a giant paywall in front of them and creating dependencies between them is fine.
Putting it like that, it's no wonder that so many young people are staying home, whittling their time away on scraps of "advice" on how to get on in life.
I've come to pity people who plug such "productivity" advice online, because I feel like they must be suppressing (or missing) an idea of the Good Life: a notion of using one's actions, or speech, to contribute to the common good.
I'm hopeful newer generations in the West will have the nous to reject false idols like "productivity" or extreme wealth, but I think it's on us to expose the painful lessons learned as we're transitioning into a cyborg society.
Where you live and your social circle dictate the comparisons that are made. These are not universal - moving to another part of the country will result in fairly different standards. Some of my friends (now acquaintances?) liked to spend a lot of money at expensive restaurants, hotels, etc. It's my choice whether to spend time with them (I don't spend much). Folks who need to change their wardrobe every so many months? Not in my circle.
Life is great if you set your own standards. It's liberating. Also, I've learned that the guy who makes $1M+ on Youtube is also living a very different life - one I don't want to have. Yes, I'd love the money, but not the sacrifices.
I don't get paid as much as most SV types - but whenever I audit my life, I realize that's the only thing "missing". Almost everything in my life is the way I wanted it to be (by design). I know what I value, and I both consciously and unconsciously achieved it. More money would be awesome, but do I want to sacrifice what I have? I doubt it.
It is incredibly disingenuous to think all you need is a little time management and all will be right in the world.
Sometimes it takes a couple hours after a full days work just to recharge and focus deeply on a task again.
Lets not forget about the physical and psychological impact of shorter days in the winter time too.
Sincerely, a hardened in the trenches 10 year vet.
My personal theory backed only by my own professional history is that most people are only working about 3 or 4 hours a day, tops. Certain tasks like writing code or authoring content cannot be time hacked; it takes the time it takes. But I joke that I never worked LESS than I did once I became a VP and had very little tactical work to do. Most of the workday in many fields and sectors actually doesn't take all that long.
You're just bombarded with the stuff that you should know - well, according to internet forums, at least.
On top of your basic CS curriculum, you should also be "crushing it" in:
- Full-stack development - Research-level Machine Learning - Heavy side projects like creating your own crypto currency, algorithmic trading platform, or whatever.
All while burning through the tens to hundreds of leetcode problems.
And of course, if you're a frequent visitor of certain forums or blogging platforms, you will find some user that's doing all of the above. Flashy website, writing research papers on the latest ML/Deep Learning models, writing interactive and insightful tutorials on leetcode problems, all while keeping a 4.0 throughout their CS-studies and climbing up the career-ladder and getting better internships every year.
I think that if you're comparing yourself to those types, and trying to keep up with them, you're gonna end up spending a lot of time without getting much done.
Of course, all while visiting the usual suspects of time-thieves (FB, Twitter, HN, Reddit, etc.)
There's this myth being perpetuated on most CS career forums (where 99% of the posters are other CS students) that you need to be some super-human rock star to even be worthy of the most lowly position. It's that, or bust.
This is of course given you are in your prime health, family, and other life situations. Its like CS and programming jobs in general are acting like a filter to promote only the candidates who in their best form at the moment.
My guess is this illusion will shatter around the next recession/depression. When people will realize they had more than work, and bazillion tons of luck going on for them, to be the superstars they thought they were.
The gravy train always stops somewhere.
This house project, some other mini-projects that i’ve done and the 2/3 books I read since last month is something i can now do because now I avoid HN (and the whole internet) by default..
[1] https://hackernewsletter.com/
I encourage you to look into it: https://www.pushbullet.com/
I've been complaining like that when I've been spending around 3h on commute per day
Remote is life changer
On the other hand I've been commuting by public transport, so I had a lot of time to read books :P
That’s because I listen to a lot of Spotify.
Wasting free time, a.k.a living? Capitalist propaganda is so godamn effective. People now believe that every minute you spend not working is wasted time.
Dear lord.
Every minute spent not working is free time, that's pretty much true no matter how much work you do.
And you can use that free time to actually live, i.e. have deep, meaningful experiences, or waste it by consuming cheap, addictive and mostly fake content on the social network du jour.
I thought I’d be a millionaire by now, changing the world for the better, with a Wikipedia page and a yacht. But what I really want now is to put down the measuring stick, and be ok with being me. It’s time to stop beating myself up for not living up to the absurd expectations I set for myself as a child.
Even while being aware of my unrealistic work expectations, I often still find myself being disappointed when I reflect on my day.
Not being productive isn't what makes me disappointed. It's procrastinating in ways that don't even make me happy. It's too easy to be sucked into hours of binging youtube, reddit, wikipedia, or twitter.
I know I'd get way more satisfaction by going on a hike, practicing piano, learning a second language, or calling my family. But the simple distractions are too convenient and addicting.
We’re sold a lie from the get-go, a lovely orange carrot dangling just in front of us. Very occasionally a lucky donkey catches the carrot, because the stick broke or somesuch - but the carrot is made of wood.
This is why we have billionaires. They’re the fools who didn’t know when to quit, chewing on wooden carrot after wooden carrot, insisting they’re delicious. More and more and more and never ever enough - because material wealth is good for satisfying your fundamental needs, but once it’s done that, the marginal utility diminishes rapidly, and you derive limited satisfaction from it.
As you say, be ok with you. Be happy in this moment and that moment, however it comes - being alive is enough - ask any cancer patient.
But I hit 30 last year and found that what I truly wanted to do was make music, write, and spend time with my family.
I don't advocate mediocrity, but everyone doesn't have to be a high achiever. It's okay to live a fulfilling life doing what you like, even if it doesn't make you rich or earn you Wikipedia entries.
Dang, new life goals...
> make music, write, and spend time with my family
But seriously, that sounds about right for me too. Maybe insert 'code' after 'write'.
Most of us don’t have the energy to be productive all the time. It took a lot of work (ironically) for me to be okay with that and to allow myself to do nothing at times. Procrastination for me was the result of constant pressure which sucked so much energy that I just couldn’t BE productive anymore. Funnily enough when I allowed myself to slack around or fall a bit behind I ended up greatly improving my grades.
In the end for me it’s a tale of starting to live in the moment (as cliche as that might sound) instead of failing to meet one’s own impossible expectations.
It's common to read about other military leaders like Alexander who felt similarly, but perhaps military historians just like these stories. The behavior seems general. I would guess that Elon Musk is pretty frustrated that his rockets don't reach Mars yet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar#Early_life_and_c...
Basing your life on others achievements seems like a pretty sad life to live.
Two of my personal projects that usually get 2-3 visitors per day have been linked from Wikipedia pages (both history-related), as a 39-year old guy that is good enough for me.
Now that I'm older, I realize that where I am is not surprising despite the work I've put in; what would have been far more unexpected would be for everything to have worked out and grown so large that I'd be one of the big successes.
That measuring stick would need to be configured against the mean, assuming it's needed at all (and it likely isn't).
No doubt. To me it seems that the author is writing about being unable to meet basic goals due to depression from not having met more fanciful goals.
Deleted Comment
Now that I have multiple kids and my time is extremely constrained, I am very efficient with my time usage. I listen to audiobooks while doing the dishes. I plan in my mind exactly which programming tasks I want to accomplish as soon as the kids are in bed so that I can do them quickly and still have time to spend with my wife.
There's a motivational saying that when you die you get to meet the person you could have become, and that's your individual heaven/hell. I've got a nagging fear that maybe if I learn to speak French or sell a business or whatever, raise a family, grow old and die, I'll come face to face with the guy who played 10,000 hours of Civ.
pours some Monster energy drink on the floor
Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy?
Typically, one takes justifiable pride for accomplishments that stand up to external scrutiny. That usually comes in the form of the accomplishment having an element of sacrifice, of pain and difficulty, of opportunity costs paid, and of a result that stands on its own as something not everyone can do. I am proud of some of my adventures; proud of some of my work; proud of some of the artistic things I have created. None of them are extremely amazing in the grand scheme of things, and I don't let any of it get to my head, but they do give me stories to tell at the bar that aren't dismissed with a wave of the hand as being frittered-away time.
Video games, on the other hand, are not exactly grand sacrificial effort. I can't imagine telling someone I was proud of myself for spending a few hours killing orcs on a screen while eating processed snack food alone in my underwear.
> as well as the purpose of how we spend our spare time.
It's only "spare" if you've really satisfied yourself in your best judgement of what you could otherwise be doing.
I like to put Slack and Laziness on a continuum. Laziness is putting things off, avoiding important tasks, pawning them off on others, rationalizing why you shouldn't bother, finding easier ways out even if the end result isn't as good, cutting corners. From the article:
> I was supposed to renew my car registration today. I haven’t opened the Web site.
That's classic laziness. Sure, the consequences can be dealt with later, a day or two without driving won't be the end of the world, but it also took about as much effort to write this self-effacing article as it would have to just renew the insurance and move on.
Slack, on the opposite side of the spectrum (and before the word was co-opted by a program that ironically takes up all possible Slack), is free time that you carve out of the world with your actions. Slack is arranging things so that you have time to relax, time to "surf down the luck plane" that you have created for yourself, so that you can allow things to proceed knowing that at the end of the slope, you're not actually in a worse off position than when you started. Slack is paid vacation time, where laziness is unemployment. Slack is a glass of wine at the end of the day, laziness is beer for breakfast. Slack is sitting in the hot tub after you work out, laziness is sitting in the bathtub after you eat a microwaved dinner. Slack is posting on HN on a cloudy Saturday morning while the kids (with breakfast in their tummies) watch a bit of TV, laziness is posting on HN when you're supposed to be writing a program at 3:00 on a Thursday afternoon.
Video games are something you can do in your slack time, or they're something you can do because you're lazy. That's the difference between a healthy hobby and a damaging addiction.
When you have hours and hours available for the rest of the week, why fret about it? You have so many other opportunities ahead.
Someone with hours and hours to do nothing likely isn't getting laid, isn't making much money, isn't intellectually gratified, etc. So you play games to occupy yourself to keep from going bonkers.
When you are young, you trade time for money.
When you are middle aged, you trade money for convenience.
When you are old, you trade money for time.
nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.
For me it just pushes the point that every situation is a negotiation.
Now, as soon as the kids are in bed, virtually every scrap of time is used for something productive. Except, obviously, for lazy Saturday mornings posting on HN ;-)
The psychological rigidity and social sacrifices required of always being productive (with little to no unstructured leisure time) actively harms individuals and the societies in which they are embedded, perhaps to the exact extent they increase tangible and intangible forms of wealth.
Life isn't just a series of context switches between being productive at work and wasting time at home. The goal is to be intentional with how you spend your time.
For example, coordinating a social dinner with friends isn't work, but it also isn't a waste of time. Going to the gym isn't typical productivity, but it isn't a waste of time either. Even playing video games to catch of with old friends isn't entirely a waste of time.
However, the modern world is full of traps that will lull people into spending their time in ways that feel enjoyable in the moment, but feel wasteful in retrospect. It's easy to pull out your phone and scroll Twitter for 30 minutes, but it takes more effort to pull out your phone and call and old friend or a grandparent for a check-in. It's easy to drop on the couch and select from an endless series of TV shows on Netflix and Hulu, but it takes a little more effort to go for a walk or go to the gym. Afterward, which of those two activities feels like a better use of your free time?
> The psychological rigidity and social sacrifices required of always being productive (with little to no unstructured leisure time)
Is this really a common goal, though? I've been around some extremely productive and successful people in my career, but none of them held any illusions about minimizing leisure time. I've also been in some high pressure and highly competitive environments, but the number of people who adopted an "all work and no play" approach to life was vanishingly small. In fact, the people who are most motivated at work are often most motivated to arrange the after-work get together, or the weekend trip for the group of friends, or to invite people over for home-cooked meals so we can catch up.
There seems to be a kind of phenomenon, like being in the zone but much longer (weeks at a time instead of hours), where you have an extreme drive to do everything you have to and want to do, a drive to live. I've only experienced it twice, in what I fondly remember as the most productive weeks in my life. And in those times, I'd juggle ridiculous amount of work with social occasions and wandering around, with no problem and a lot of happiness.
I wish I knew how to reproduce it, because these were also what I remember as the happiest of times. I suspect the people you mention are in this mode constantly. I wish I knew what's their secret. And not because I have a desire to be a workaholic or something - but I'd like to feel again those infinite amounts of energy and sheer will to make things happen.
Typically the people about whom you talk in your last paragraph are trying to be productive even in their leisure time.
When I was in my teens a long time ago I did sports and learned classical guitar. If I had seen the acrobatics you see daily on Reddit or the "casual home musicians" on Youtube, I'd probably have given up all my efforts.
Doing a backflip seems like the normal thing any guy should be able to do nowadays.
> If I had seen the acrobatics you see daily on Reddit or the "casual home musicians" on Youtube, I'd probably have given up all my efforts.
But you wouldn't give up your efforts if you attended a concert of a famous musician, would you? Seeing a video with a million views on YouTube is a step below being a famous musician to young people.
If anything, seeing people gain small degrees of fame and notoriety without going all the way to the top of their field is even more motivating for young people. Seeing different levels of success drives home the point that success isn't binary, it's a spectrum.
Then I get into this "well, won't be me anyway, so why bother" mood where I accomplish even less with my free time. I have urge to do more, but it is a vicious cycle sometimes.
Being alive in itself is truly remarkable. I've made great friends. I've met people who ended up disappointing me greatly. I've married a smart, beautiful, ambitious woman twelve years ago. We've went through exhilarating ups and soulcrushing downs.
I've worked for a startup, which almost went under several times. I've worked for a corporate thresher which sucked life right out of me.
I've worked on niche projects in my spare time, which so far have amounted to nothing.
I've had panic attacks. I've experienced months of mania and perceived greatness.
Life is a present which keeps on giving. I'm grateful. Accomplishments are a matter of perception, experience in itself is utterly exhilarating to me.
I love life. I'm 37.
That hit hard amigo! Nicely written post.
this is the biggest part of my life that is missing. life is almost not worth living without it.
One of the greatest realizations I've had is that there really is no other time than the present. The future never is, neither the past, it's only the present. So, if all we have and can interact with time-wise is the present moment, then everything you can actually do can only be done at each particular now.
So, if you want to learn French, or Lisp, or riding a dirt bike, you can only ever actually do it, at some particular now. The trick then is to try and make sure somehow that for each particular now, you always have a clear idea of what it is that you should be doing. Otherwise you risk falling into the procrastination trap that can last as long as ones lifetime, as the article brilliantly demonstrates.
We should LIVE more in the now... not try to make the future you more happy. but the current you.
If that is working hard and learning and trying to become rich, if that makes you happy that's fine too.
What makes me happy is family, friends, seeing the world and building and learning about technology and playing with synthesizers... enjoy the current moment. ;-)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_angel_in_the_clock