I spoke to a long-time Microsoft and Facebook eng leader who left his post as a nonprofit software CEO due to burnout and then spent many months languishing and spiralling into depression.
He actually decided to get a job as an Amazon warehouse worker for 6 weeks for exactly the reason OP is struggling with: to get structure.
> In November, I suddenly thought, "I should at least get some sort of job somewhere just to have some regularity to my schedule, to enforce some daily practices". My number one priority was just to have structured work that would force me to get up every day—work that was very different from white collar jobs, in that I did not want to be asked to make a lot of decisions everyday.
> I didn't want the stress of managing people and teams. I didn't want the politics of subjective decisions being debated amongst team members. I wanted literally to be told what to do every day and I wanted that structure to be rigorous. I strongly felt that would help me get out of my depression.
As a burned out founder with ADHD, I took a break from tech and did a year as a personal trainer at a big box gym. It was such a great difference from tech work: physical movement, human interaction, paper-based, etc. The high levels of accountability (in addition to physical movement) were extremely satisfying.
I dream of a future of tech work that is more similar to the gym, rather than sitting at a desk. Some kind of augmented reality work space where you intentionally add physical friction (reaching, pulling, pushing), physical objects, human interactions, etc and lots of standing. I imagine the mental rewards of this approach would be really interesting, and you might finish the work day feeling physically energized.
I'm in tech and work from home. I own the home. I get heaps of physical exercise gardening and maintaining the house. Cutting back plants that are too big, putting new planets in. Mowing the lawn. Painting here and there. I have a leak in one of the bedroom ceilings. I built a deck out the back - that was a big job. You know there is also just normal chores around the house that keep me moving. Doing the laundry. Cleaning.
Anyhow, I say embrace your chores. Don't pay somebody to do them for you.
This. So much this. Over quarantine I found myself spending increasing amount of time cooking after coding time. Just because the difference of doing something productive with your hands is so sorely missed.
If something bridged those two, like Minority report but with even more movement, it would be gold.
Someone ITT mentioned warehouse jobs and workout endorphins coloring our view, but I think its more missing just moving things around with your hands.
This is a great comment, I've found myself wishing for a work environment that provides us with these human elements. We are animals that are designed to move!
Walking meetings, some type of AR technology so we can perform email responses/research while moving, and physical interaction with digital systems is the future I want.
This is such a fascinating story, I was literally thinking about this a few months ago when Equinox randomly contacted me. Also identify as an (ex)founder with ADHD. Would love to hear from you and hear about this journey if you're interested in connecting. jason @ jasonshen
The best work experience I ever had was working in a warehouse where I just unpacked and repacked lumber all day. It was a lot of nonstop lifting. I felt happy when I went home because I felt like I worked hard and got stuff done and it was really good exercise too. I did that work because I didn't know what I REALLY wanted to do after quitting my job (disillusionment and naive startup dreams without knowing what it took to succeed) and I wanted to experience hard work that wasn't in an office (i.e. work in the trenches).
Someone I knew told me I could work in his warehouse. It's too bad that it was so low pay. If the pay wasn't the issue, I wonder if staying at that kind of job would actually be really good for me. I would be physically healthy, my mind would be clear and refreshed all the time, and I would feel good about having worked hard every day. Would the positive effect still last if I did that work for years, or was the positive effect only temporary because it was a novel experience to me at the time (and I didn't care about the low pay at the time)? Interesting to consider.
I did a bunch of warehouse jobs when I was at uni. Some of the most depressing and soul crushing jobs I've ever had. The worst ever one I had was pulling a massive roll of sandpaper to a line and then another guy pressed a button to cut it. Then we lifted the cut sandpaper on to a pile. Repeat for 8 hours.
I didn't stay in that one past one day, far too boring.
Let's not romanticise these jobs. I think you're confusing the endorphins from exercise, which most warehouse jobs don't need, with the job.
I had a similar experience in my teenage years working in Dell factories (back when they still ran them out of Austin/Round Rock). One of the jobs they had me do for a week was to simply unload trucks that came in and put the computers/monitors/whatever onto a conveyor than sent them on their way. It was surprisingly satisfying, not to mention some of the guys I worked with were absolute riots. Kinda miss those days...
I can't speak for Amazon but I had an order picking job at a Volvo warehouse in college, and despite having to hit a certain number of picked items every day it was oddly relaxing.
Once you got good at it you could zoom through your day on auto pilot. Drive to aisle X, pick up N boxes at rack Y, rinse and repeat.
I think what the person is asking for specifically is some kind of responsibility to an external force that will force them to keep a schedule.
The thing in my life that most rigidly enforces a schedule on me is definitely not my job. It's my dog. No weekends off there, and I haven't slept past 6:30am in years.
I have found myself day-dreaming about a manual labor job for many of the same reasons. I am supremely jealous of my friends who work these types of jobs and can "leave it at the door" when they come home. I can't do that as well, even when I try to enforce boundaries. Slack, emails, my home office, etc... make it impossible to shut it all out. I'm considering tearing down my home office and working solely from a coffee shop because of it.
Why are you on your work PC/phone after work? Or is it all the same? I notice a lot of people do not have personal computers anymore... like back in the 90s.
For home office I shut off the work PC and turn on the gaming PC where I am not logged in on work accounts. Work phone on disturb mode.
This is one of the biggest benefits to working from the office, at least for me. The mental shift between home and work is so much easier when they are very distinct physical places.
This is disturbing on a deep level. A person taking on such a job for self-discovery as if it were tourism. Most workers in that warehouse need those jobs, including those 60 year olds the ex-CEO felt sorry for. It reads like a parody of tech culture.
On a deep level? I once worked at UPS loading trucks for a winter season just because I was in between jobs. It was just about the hardest I ever worked and was an interesting experience. Are you implying that I should be forced to work tech jobs for the rest of my life just because I qualify for them? Should I view my specialized skills as chains?
It's a free country (the U.S. is at least) and by working in one job you are always implicity creating an opening in whatever other jobs you have opted not to take. I do understand your argument, and theoretically you are right: he perhaps took a job from someone who needed it more. But I can make the same argument about the service economy: if I mow my own lawn, am I taking money away from landscapers? If I cook at home, if I learn to fix my own bike, etc. etc. That kind of think is deeply disturbing to me. We each have to live our own lives at the end of the day.
It isn't disturbing on a deep level, there is just inequality on many levels. Most people who get an unequal share of the wealth are probably also taking on way more stress than the average person undergoes.
An ideal world would be one where someone was able to do focused creative work for a few months and then mindless manual labor for a few months and trade back and forth as desired. That will never happen but I would love it.
I've worked tech jobs, bio lab jobs, warehouse jobs, call centre jobs, and been unemployable for long stretches while depressed.
Working manual labour jobs is deeply humbling and in my opinion actually builds solidarity with the working class in ways you simply can't by intellectualizing from afar. If more people in privileged positions did this, I believe the world might be better.
"I took a warehouse job at Amazon". Then 1 year later they wrote a fascinating tale of the subcultures that develop within an Amazon warehouses, the stories and aspirations of people who arrived at that job, and how this quiet army of faceless people enable a service that even kings 100 years ago would have killed for.
Would that not be equally as bad since at the end of the day they took a job from someone that needed it?
When I was an intern I did a lot of boring work in data centers now and then. Unloading servers from boxes, labeling everything, making connections, installing stuff on racks, etc...
You only need semi-structure. Walk the dog every morning. Take out the trash at night. Read for a little while before bed. Call mom every Saturday. The exact times and durations don’t matter and won’t be known beforehand.
I made the mistake of trying to organize a master plan for how I would live my days. In my experience, it just doesn’t work out the way you plan it. Daily life is too chaotic.
I now use a much simpler approach instead. 8am, 12pm, 4pm, 8pm. These are the times by which I need to get something done.
For example, 8am: Walk the dog. By 8, it should be done. If it gets done before 7, even better. If it gets done at 8:10, start earlier tomorrow. 12pm: Fold the laundry. 4pm: Go to the store, call mom, read. 8pm: Make dinner, take out the trash.
When you are comfortable with how many tasks you assign yourself, add more tasks. But don’t go crazy when you’re just starting off. Keeping one habit is better than flirting with five.
I found that planning my _weeks_ was far more valuable than planning my _days_. As you point out, daily life is too chaotic, but a week is something you can actually work with.
I found the same to be true with dieting. You shouldn't plan your diet around single days of eating, you should plan it around an entire week of eating.
This is in line with what I've had success with. I've recently written about it here as well – just a morning walk ritual, more or less. It has been transformative. It's an incredibly easy, no-tech, free activity which lets my mind and body properly wake up and get primed for the day.
Some days I just wander for 15 minutes and look at the sun or feel the air and enjoy the moment. Other days maybe I'll start around 5:30 and carry on for an hour or two, then come home and get my kids ready for their day. It doesn't matter, and that's kind of the point. As long as I've made the time for it, as long as I get up and do it, I can feel it out and do what feels good.
It means I'm always awake and ready when I start my day. There's no dragging myself to my computer or trying to keep up with getting the kids ready. By letting myself ease into the day, energizing myself with fresh air and movement, I get way ahead of where I used to be despite spending far more time "doing nothing".
My other ritual, I suppose, is bed time. I get to sleep around 9:30, no matter what. Didn't work enough? Didn't make lunches? It doesn't matter. Just rest. I'll catch up in the morning after I wander aimlessly and find myself again.
My wife doesn't like my early bed time (she's a night owl), but I've begun guarding it closely. The structure isn't much, but it's enough. Like the author suspects for themselves, I really do need it.
Everything that happens in between is usually chunked into loose "get work done" and "hang out with family" – specific tasks are pretty easy to schedule into there, and I'm just careful to ensure there's little overlap. The boundaries of the day being clear makes it way easier to remain focused and ensure I don't end up trying to do everything at once.
I suspect if everyone made sure they got good sleep and had consistent wake and sleep structure, so many other parts of their days would fall into place as well.
Like the author of this article, I have a bad sleep schedule. It's something that came about from over 2 years of unemployment (and still job searching).
I kept a log of my job applications from last year. Going over them recently, I noticed that the timestamps gradually creeped up from afternoon to late evening as the year ended. I had a set "application window" of an hour but that window gradually shifted more and more into the night. I now go to bed very late around 4am and usually wake up at 1pm.
For some reason I find it hard to give the morning a "greater purpose" when you don't have a 9-5. There's not much in outdoor hobbies that I want to do (or afford to do) and I clean sporadically, no set schedule. I feel much less worse being awake and inside in the late night hours than to be up in the morning hours with nothing productive, so I just sleep through those morning hours. My peak energy has shifted more towards the late night.
Looking to see if I perhaps need an accountability partner. I am single and don't talk to close friends as much and even if I did they wouldn't be available most of the day because of their work schedules.
Exactly! Flexible rituals, not rigid structures. In particular, the morning rituals should be designed to encourage some form of productivity and the evening rituals should create closure.
What I found with my kids was that the sequence is more important than the time. Their bedtime routine has been pretty much the same for the last ten years, only the timing has changed.
I wish I had the option to have... any kind of flexibility in my life.
I'm forced to go to work at a certain time, which means I have to get up at a certain time.
I also eat at work, both lunch and dinner, so if I skip those then there's almost no time for me to eat.
I have to do chores when I get home for about an hour or two, then I have about 2.5 hours of "free time" before I have to go to bed and repeat the process.
Being able to have any kind of flexibility is an extreme luxury I think people take for granted.
This is one of the ways income inequality and systemic discriminations can drastically alter the life of people or groups of people. No time to think, to time to breathe.. no time to dream. The mind can die (or at least enter a sort of coma) long before the body in these circumstances. And it's incredibly hard to help yourself while in there, which is why the empathy and kindness of others matters so much too.
The story you're referring to was about a CEO who was looking for some relief from burnout and depression. He wanted the structure as an antidote to a specific feeling, not as a general desire.
All else being equal, I think the vast majority of people would prefer self-direction and autonomy to rigorous top-down order. People's choice and actions throughout the ages seem to reinforce this. I wouldn't mistake someone's personal choice to temporarily self-impose some structure as an example of "grass is always greener".
It is fascinating, how some people crave structure and yet cannot achieve it - and some are enslaved in structure and dream of freedom. Some are probably very happy within a given structure. Others prefer to create their own structures to live in. Myself, I suffocate in any structure, especially calendars and clocks.
Do you have kids or otherwise responsible for anyone? If not, one or two hours of chores per day is insane. Take a step back and examine if the chores you are doing are actually worth doing.
Obviously if you have kids or are a carer that probably does not apply.
> then I have about 2.5 hours of "free time" before I have to go to bed and repeat the process.
When I was younger, I switched to a 4x10s schedule for this exact reason. The limited time left after commute (long at the time) and other obligations at the end of the day felt wasted.
Somewhat surprisingly, I felt better when I decided that my 4 work days per week would be solid work/chores/obligations from morning to night. It no longer felt like I was missing out on anything because I wasn't trying to squeeze some hobby or social activity into a tired 2-3 hour slot at the end of the day. My free time and my work time were as separate as they could possibly get.
Even intra-day flexibility doesn't really solve the problem of having too much to do. My solution was to squish all of the to-dos together and leave my off days 100% flexible.
Even now, I try to finish errands and chores on weekdays for this same reason: Keeping weekends open is extremely valuable.
> If you don’t get what you want: it’s due to your decisions.
Asking genuinely, because I struggle with determining how much of what I don't get can be attributed to me:
What if I wanted to be healthy, but have $<any number of chronic, debilitating conditions with no clear identified cause, mechanism, and or cure>? I recently listened to a podcast where two people try to follow life-advice books and determine if it actually helped them, and one of the hosts had an extremely distressing time trying to attribute why her abnormal mammogram result wasn't being followed up on by her doctor, despite daily calls for two weeks, was something that was due to her decisions.
[How does this apply to being abused as a child? Being a domestic abuse survivor? Being the victim of a hate crime, displaced due to war or other disaster?]
Hmm. I am taking this comment at face value and not as a sarcastic response.
Even if you prioritize flexibility, if your position is at the bottom of the totem pole, you will find it exceedingly difficult to get even minute changes in it. Those employees are increasingly monitored to the point I would not have accepted as a kid, but it seems a more and more common practice today.
I guess what I am saying is that what you do matters, but not nearly as much as you give it credit for. Some of it is just dumb luck.
Yah, when I visited North Korea I asked them why didn't they just decide not to live there, grow more food or get a better job? I say maybe they should travel a bit in order to broaden their perspective on life. Try meditation or use a pomodoro timer to get focused! Get your head straight and prioritize that flexible lifestyle and the options are endless!
> I have to do chores when I get home for about an hour or two
How is this possible? Are you counting exercise as a chore? I probably do 2 hours of chores in a week and that includes a lot of things related to cooking which you don’t do
You can quit your job, move somewhere else, and live a different life. Your daily routine is your choice. Technically, you don’t have to do anything at all.
This comment shows such a lack of understanding of how most of the world lives. OP could be working to support aging parents or be a single parent or live in a place where the ability to access social services are dependent on where you were born (as in China). They could also just not make enough money to afford to move and be stuck in a cycle where most of what they make is spent on maintaining life essentials.
Technically they could quit it all and walk off and become homeless, but is that realistic? This idea of endless choice, especially that without any potentially dangerous consequences, it's reserved for a small number of people.
Which country do you live in in which this is the case? Everywhere I've lived there have been jobs that are 9-5 and jobs that are less rigid, ranging all the way to self employment.
I have worked for years and made great efforts to get to a point in life where I have a say in what time I do my work. Most jobs I have had I did not have a choice. In the United States.
In general, I find myself to be someone who operates best within certain confines - for example, the time blocking from Cal Newport has been highly effective for myself.
That said, I caution against too much routine. I used to get really into it but remember many days where I felt like the day was ruined because I couldn’t get a workout in, or someone scheduled an 8am meeting, or any other myriad of things I grew dependent on. Too much structure is basically a fragile crutch, in my experience.
My personal morning “routine” is a quick cup of coffee and a half mile walk, and then straight to work. I time block the day first thing based on whatever my weekly goals for the week were, and try to keep about two hours of buffer time to allow some shifting throughout the day.
I’ve done this about a year now and it’s helped me keep the benefits of structure, without the guilt of when something “optimal” doesn’t happen.
I’ve noticed in my life I really limit my “must-dos”. In fact I may only have one. I have to run the four or so days a week I plan to. Too much structure I think doesn’t leave enough slack time and then too often does the inverse of what it disposed to do which is help you feel grounded. Everything else is sort of “agile structure”. Planning athe beginning of the day or maybe the week, but having a strict routine is almost like trying to plan years ahead of time, you just don’t know enough about what life will bring.
With a simple structure it really does feel like it brings order to chaos, if I have a really bad week and maybe don’t even get my runs in, it’s relatively easy to get my runs in the next week. Six different morning activities all at once? That’s just asking for failure.
Is there a "lite" version of Cal Newport's time-blocking techniques? I'm super interested every time I hear him explain it but I get overwhelmed and never end up implementing anything.
I wouldn’t really say it’s a big implementation. I just use a piece of paper and denote a line to each 30 mins of the work day.
So it might look like:
10: meeting
1030: bug fixing
11: bug fixing
1130: bug fixing
12: run
1230: run
1: lunch
130: feature work
2: feature work
230: meeting
3: feature work
330: feature work
4: plan next week
The above was my entry from last Friday, where I had a late start to the day.
At the start of my day I had kept the 12-2:30 block fairly empty (I knew some form of working out + lunch would show up, and I had wanted to do some feature work that day, but I didn’t know if any other meetings would pop up. They didn’t, so it worked great!)
I basically fill in meetings first, then work around them to put in the work I want to focus on for the day. The main caveat is I don’t focus on anything else for this blocks, and unless I’m in incredible flow and the task is definitely important, I always make sure I stop at the end of the block time (the whole “we will fill up whatever time we allot ourselves” theory).
I too decided to take the chaos out of my life, but it was much simpler than I had always thought.
1. Stop watching Youtube and browsing Reddit in your free time
2. Stop playing games in your free time
3. Stop using your phone for wasting time
4. Stop watching TV when you eat
5. Stop listening to podcasts while you sleep
6. Stop eating snacks with TV
What ends up happening as a result
- You start to sleep earlier and better
- Reading books becomes interesting again
- You wake up earlier and feel more fresh
- Realize you have a lot of free time
- Going outside for a walk is more interesting (less boring)
- Work tasks that were boring, now hold your attention more
- Finishing work tasks, and house chores, feel more rewarding now
A much shorter summary of this 'diet' is called the 'Dopamine Detox'.
What I'm trying to say is, a lot of this chaos and burnout, is just related to our addiction of time-wasting and addictive habits like browsing youtube and reddit more and more.
That’s a good set of rules to follow – if not the letter, then the spirit, e.g., I spend hardly any time on sites such as YouTube or Reddit so for myself, I’d replace Rule 1 with “Cut down on reading Hacker News (or other sources of interesting articles)” and I’d replace Rule 2 with “spend less time watching TV/films”.
I’ve recently got into the habit of watching TV while eating and snacking and after reading Rules 4 and 6, have come to the conclusion that it’s a bad habit; eating should be intentional and purposeful, not a thoughtless activity while being mentally engaged by some other activity. I don’t know if I could go cold turkey with external stimulation so from now on, if I’m eating alone, I’ll just listen to music (instead of reading or watching TV).
I've been reading through "I Didn't Do the Thing Today", which is in a lot of ways a rejection of the prevailing productivity sentiment. It's about self-care and treating yourself with grace, even when things don't come out as the most profitable or productive, at least so far.
And in that spirit I'll say to the author of this post: It's okay to nap in the middle of the day, or not eat breakfast, or work first thing in the morning and not do a Morning Page or Meditation or whatever aspirational-you has decided is worthwhile. We are all doing our best in the circumstances we have.
In my life I've found that better is really a game of averages. Some days are going to be great. Some weeks have a severe downward trend with no real reason that I can tell. Well. Maybe it's due to bad sleep quality or lack of exercise. All I can do is try to be the person that makes the good decisions and accept the person that I am, and that keeps me pretty happy.
I know this feeling extremely well. Routines are routinely broken by me, but I found that I just needed someone else there with me to do the thing. Even if it is just their presence.
When I was a graduate student, I often participated in summer schools and conferences where there was a strict schedule that included two or three meals a day. I absolutely loved it. I would like to live all of my life so that someone else would schedule my life for me, cook meals at right times, etc. And of course part of it was that most of the other people participating the event also did the same schedule as you so you always had friends to have lunch, dinner and coffee breaks with.
If someone has any suggestions on how to organize my life like a one big summer school, I'm listening. I guess joining a monastery would do it, but I don't really care for the other aspects of monastic life.
Flirted with a similar idea. The root of it was to externalize the mundane aspects of day-to-day life. The mundane: food, laundry, cleaning.
Food had two broad strategies: (1) Repeated Deliveries of staples with one afternoon a week dedicated to cooking, portioning and freezing. Meals are labeled and microwaved as needed. (2) Ad-hoc Food Delivery, think Uber Eats or Doordash for most meals. I found 2 to be excessively expensive. 1 requires dish-washing but I can mitigate it with using disposables whenever possible.
1 also requires setting up repeated automated deliveries. I haven't quite figured out how to do this yet, but I'm sure there's an Instacart-type service for it.
Laundry: there are door-to-door laundry services, and/or using an in-house cleaning service mentioned below
Cleaning: there are maid services. If well-planned you could have them arrive to wash the dishes created in the above step, as well as retrieve/put-away laundry. A robot-vaccuum helps between cleanings.
As for activities with people with similar schedules, that's the difficult part. Adults are chaotic.
There's signing up for the military, which would also neatly handle your other items.
So far I've found that a co-worker-based activity group is reliable. You all get off about the same time, the people are relatively stable from week-to-week, and you all have similar work lives.
Second best was a regularly scheduled meetup group.
You could live on a cruise ship. They have a daily schedule for fun activities and meal times. For many people, it is more fun than joining a monastery.
We used to do this with flatmates with dinner duty. One of us would cook dinner every night for the whole flat based on a rota. We were 5 people and all pretty close so that definitely helped!
I recently left a 400k+ job to work full time on an app addressing this exact problem, despite having a wife, daughter, and Bay Area mortgage . Of course productivity apps are a crowded space but I have a burning need to build the right tool for myself , and I believe might help others.
Remote work has pressed the need for me to improve here since I think I benefited by being in the same room as coworkers and being alone in my home the whole workday has pressed my ability to stay focused.
I struggled with ADHD , but because of past health issues, medication is off the table. Even though Vyvanse was a miracle for focus it caused some serious other problems. And the more I read about psychiatry and psychology the more I’ve gotten excited by lifestyle changes.
One thing I feel strongly about is that productivity tools need to be descriptive, not prescriptive . I’m not a robot, I need to work on what my gut is telling me to work on rather than what some reminder is telling me to work on. But I also need to do work and not scroll Reddit for hours so a tool helps with accountability for that.
I can’t over emphasize how enamored I am with Andrew Huberman Youtube video on the topic. He’s a Stanford neuroscientist with all sorts of suggestions on managing our dopamine levels with techniques like cold water therapy and intermittent fasting.
Social media, including hacker news and excessive email checking, can destroy your motivation if you don’t keep it in check. If you’re struggling with focus you simply have to monitor and moderate these things.
Please email me, username at gmail if this topic is of interest to you.
What I don't understand is that with a $400K salary you should easily be able to retire altogether within a few short years, which should completely solve the productivity issue. You wouldn't even have to dial back your lifestyle too much unless you are currently burning it on Veblen goods.
I'm grateful you are working on the app, however, as that sounds very helpful.
A typical Bay Area mortgage is what, $8k/mo? Add say $2k/mo for health insurance premium close to what a big co would provide. That's $120k/yr plus living expenses (call it $50k). At a 3.5 safe withdrawal rate, you'd need to save about $5mm. If your take home is say 280 of which you're spending 170, that's 110k/yr saved. So almost 50 years of savings, not counting appreciation.
Speaking from experience, sanity depletes faster than one's retirement account increases with a draining job.
400k in SF is about 260k after taxes. Figuring saving 50% would give 130k/year in savings and an expense rate of 130k/year. At 8.0% returns, it would take 14 years to have enough to withdraw 4%/year match 130k.
Readit News
He actually decided to get a job as an Amazon warehouse worker for 6 weeks for exactly the reason OP is struggling with: to get structure.
> In November, I suddenly thought, "I should at least get some sort of job somewhere just to have some regularity to my schedule, to enforce some daily practices". My number one priority was just to have structured work that would force me to get up every day—work that was very different from white collar jobs, in that I did not want to be asked to make a lot of decisions everyday.
> I didn't want the stress of managing people and teams. I didn't want the politics of subjective decisions being debated amongst team members. I wanted literally to be told what to do every day and I wanted that structure to be rigorous. I strongly felt that would help me get out of my depression.
https://www.jasonshen.com/120/
Update: posted this on HN since it seems to resonate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33072083
I dream of a future of tech work that is more similar to the gym, rather than sitting at a desk. Some kind of augmented reality work space where you intentionally add physical friction (reaching, pulling, pushing), physical objects, human interactions, etc and lots of standing. I imagine the mental rewards of this approach would be really interesting, and you might finish the work day feeling physically energized.
Anyhow, I say embrace your chores. Don't pay somebody to do them for you.
If something bridged those two, like Minority report but with even more movement, it would be gold.
Someone ITT mentioned warehouse jobs and workout endorphins coloring our view, but I think its more missing just moving things around with your hands.
Walking meetings, some type of AR technology so we can perform email responses/research while moving, and physical interaction with digital systems is the future I want.
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Someone I knew told me I could work in his warehouse. It's too bad that it was so low pay. If the pay wasn't the issue, I wonder if staying at that kind of job would actually be really good for me. I would be physically healthy, my mind would be clear and refreshed all the time, and I would feel good about having worked hard every day. Would the positive effect still last if I did that work for years, or was the positive effect only temporary because it was a novel experience to me at the time (and I didn't care about the low pay at the time)? Interesting to consider.
I didn't stay in that one past one day, far too boring.
Let's not romanticise these jobs. I think you're confusing the endorphins from exercise, which most warehouse jobs don't need, with the job.
Most warehouse jobs completely suck.
Once you got good at it you could zoom through your day on auto pilot. Drive to aisle X, pick up N boxes at rack Y, rinse and repeat.
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The thing in my life that most rigidly enforces a schedule on me is definitely not my job. It's my dog. No weekends off there, and I haven't slept past 6:30am in years.
For home office I shut off the work PC and turn on the gaming PC where I am not logged in on work accounts. Work phone on disturb mode.
Or go take a walk.
Its not "impossible to shut it all out"
It's a free country (the U.S. is at least) and by working in one job you are always implicity creating an opening in whatever other jobs you have opted not to take. I do understand your argument, and theoretically you are right: he perhaps took a job from someone who needed it more. But I can make the same argument about the service economy: if I mow my own lawn, am I taking money away from landscapers? If I cook at home, if I learn to fix my own bike, etc. etc. That kind of think is deeply disturbing to me. We each have to live our own lives at the end of the day.
An ideal world would be one where someone was able to do focused creative work for a few months and then mindless manual labor for a few months and trade back and forth as desired. That will never happen but I would love it.
Working manual labour jobs is deeply humbling and in my opinion actually builds solidarity with the working class in ways you simply can't by intellectualizing from afar. If more people in privileged positions did this, I believe the world might be better.
Your judgement doesn't feel helpful.
"I took a warehouse job at Amazon". Then 1 year later they wrote a fascinating tale of the subcultures that develop within an Amazon warehouses, the stories and aspirations of people who arrived at that job, and how this quiet army of faceless people enable a service that even kings 100 years ago would have killed for.
Would that not be equally as bad since at the end of the day they took a job from someone that needed it?
I don't know, I feel like this is just a retread of "Office Space" and office employees yearning to do construction work.
If anything it’s amazing that he stuck it out for 1.5 months without a financial incentive to do so.
It was almost therapeutic.
I made the mistake of trying to organize a master plan for how I would live my days. In my experience, it just doesn’t work out the way you plan it. Daily life is too chaotic.
I now use a much simpler approach instead. 8am, 12pm, 4pm, 8pm. These are the times by which I need to get something done.
For example, 8am: Walk the dog. By 8, it should be done. If it gets done before 7, even better. If it gets done at 8:10, start earlier tomorrow. 12pm: Fold the laundry. 4pm: Go to the store, call mom, read. 8pm: Make dinner, take out the trash.
When you are comfortable with how many tasks you assign yourself, add more tasks. But don’t go crazy when you’re just starting off. Keeping one habit is better than flirting with five.
I found the same to be true with dieting. You shouldn't plan your diet around single days of eating, you should plan it around an entire week of eating.
Some days I just wander for 15 minutes and look at the sun or feel the air and enjoy the moment. Other days maybe I'll start around 5:30 and carry on for an hour or two, then come home and get my kids ready for their day. It doesn't matter, and that's kind of the point. As long as I've made the time for it, as long as I get up and do it, I can feel it out and do what feels good.
It means I'm always awake and ready when I start my day. There's no dragging myself to my computer or trying to keep up with getting the kids ready. By letting myself ease into the day, energizing myself with fresh air and movement, I get way ahead of where I used to be despite spending far more time "doing nothing".
My other ritual, I suppose, is bed time. I get to sleep around 9:30, no matter what. Didn't work enough? Didn't make lunches? It doesn't matter. Just rest. I'll catch up in the morning after I wander aimlessly and find myself again.
My wife doesn't like my early bed time (she's a night owl), but I've begun guarding it closely. The structure isn't much, but it's enough. Like the author suspects for themselves, I really do need it.
Everything that happens in between is usually chunked into loose "get work done" and "hang out with family" – specific tasks are pretty easy to schedule into there, and I'm just careful to ensure there's little overlap. The boundaries of the day being clear makes it way easier to remain focused and ensure I don't end up trying to do everything at once.
I suspect if everyone made sure they got good sleep and had consistent wake and sleep structure, so many other parts of their days would fall into place as well.
I kept a log of my job applications from last year. Going over them recently, I noticed that the timestamps gradually creeped up from afternoon to late evening as the year ended. I had a set "application window" of an hour but that window gradually shifted more and more into the night. I now go to bed very late around 4am and usually wake up at 1pm.
For some reason I find it hard to give the morning a "greater purpose" when you don't have a 9-5. There's not much in outdoor hobbies that I want to do (or afford to do) and I clean sporadically, no set schedule. I feel much less worse being awake and inside in the late night hours than to be up in the morning hours with nothing productive, so I just sleep through those morning hours. My peak energy has shifted more towards the late night.
Looking to see if I perhaps need an accountability partner. I am single and don't talk to close friends as much and even if I did they wouldn't be available most of the day because of their work schedules.
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This is the second most top comment.
Also really illustrates the whole “grass is always greener …” thing.
All else being equal, I think the vast majority of people would prefer self-direction and autonomy to rigorous top-down order. People's choice and actions throughout the ages seem to reinforce this. I wouldn't mistake someone's personal choice to temporarily self-impose some structure as an example of "grass is always greener".
Obviously if you have kids or are a carer that probably does not apply.
When I was younger, I switched to a 4x10s schedule for this exact reason. The limited time left after commute (long at the time) and other obligations at the end of the day felt wasted.
Somewhat surprisingly, I felt better when I decided that my 4 work days per week would be solid work/chores/obligations from morning to night. It no longer felt like I was missing out on anything because I wasn't trying to squeeze some hobby or social activity into a tired 2-3 hour slot at the end of the day. My free time and my work time were as separate as they could possibly get.
Even intra-day flexibility doesn't really solve the problem of having too much to do. My solution was to squish all of the to-dos together and leave my off days 100% flexible.
Even now, I try to finish errands and chores on weekdays for this same reason: Keeping weekends open is extremely valuable.
What chores take up 1-2 hours each and every day, considering lunch and dinner are taken care of at work?
Edit: didn't sound to me like you have kids from your comment, if you do then it makes sense.
Asking genuinely, because I struggle with determining how much of what I don't get can be attributed to me:
What if I wanted to be healthy, but have $<any number of chronic, debilitating conditions with no clear identified cause, mechanism, and or cure>? I recently listened to a podcast where two people try to follow life-advice books and determine if it actually helped them, and one of the hosts had an extremely distressing time trying to attribute why her abnormal mammogram result wasn't being followed up on by her doctor, despite daily calls for two weeks, was something that was due to her decisions.
[How does this apply to being abused as a child? Being a domestic abuse survivor? Being the victim of a hate crime, displaced due to war or other disaster?]
Even if you prioritize flexibility, if your position is at the bottom of the totem pole, you will find it exceedingly difficult to get even minute changes in it. Those employees are increasingly monitored to the point I would not have accepted as a kid, but it seems a more and more common practice today.
I guess what I am saying is that what you do matters, but not nearly as much as you give it credit for. Some of it is just dumb luck.
How is this possible? Are you counting exercise as a chore? I probably do 2 hours of chores in a week and that includes a lot of things related to cooking which you don’t do
The things I used to be able to do once a week are a daily "quick go" now.
Somebody is always hungry. There's a trail of food and mess they leave behind. There's frequent spills. There's constant laundry and accidents.
Technically they could quit it all and walk off and become homeless, but is that realistic? This idea of endless choice, especially that without any potentially dangerous consequences, it's reserved for a small number of people.
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Which country do you live in in which this is the case? Everywhere I've lived there have been jobs that are 9-5 and jobs that are less rigid, ranging all the way to self employment.
I have worked for years and made great efforts to get to a point in life where I have a say in what time I do my work. Most jobs I have had I did not have a choice. In the United States.
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That said, I caution against too much routine. I used to get really into it but remember many days where I felt like the day was ruined because I couldn’t get a workout in, or someone scheduled an 8am meeting, or any other myriad of things I grew dependent on. Too much structure is basically a fragile crutch, in my experience.
My personal morning “routine” is a quick cup of coffee and a half mile walk, and then straight to work. I time block the day first thing based on whatever my weekly goals for the week were, and try to keep about two hours of buffer time to allow some shifting throughout the day.
I’ve done this about a year now and it’s helped me keep the benefits of structure, without the guilt of when something “optimal” doesn’t happen.
With a simple structure it really does feel like it brings order to chaos, if I have a really bad week and maybe don’t even get my runs in, it’s relatively easy to get my runs in the next week. Six different morning activities all at once? That’s just asking for failure.
So it might look like:
10: meeting
1030: bug fixing
11: bug fixing
1130: bug fixing
12: run
1230: run
1: lunch
130: feature work
2: feature work
230: meeting
3: feature work
330: feature work
4: plan next week
The above was my entry from last Friday, where I had a late start to the day.
At the start of my day I had kept the 12-2:30 block fairly empty (I knew some form of working out + lunch would show up, and I had wanted to do some feature work that day, but I didn’t know if any other meetings would pop up. They didn’t, so it worked great!)
I basically fill in meetings first, then work around them to put in the work I want to focus on for the day. The main caveat is I don’t focus on anything else for this blocks, and unless I’m in incredible flow and the task is definitely important, I always make sure I stop at the end of the block time (the whole “we will fill up whatever time we allot ourselves” theory).
Maybe start scheduling more of your commitments and obligations in your calendar?
Or alternatively,
Start by keeping a time diary of how you spend your days and how long tasks take you, then use that to inform your time blocks
I too decided to take the chaos out of my life, but it was much simpler than I had always thought.
1. Stop watching Youtube and browsing Reddit in your free time 2. Stop playing games in your free time 3. Stop using your phone for wasting time 4. Stop watching TV when you eat 5. Stop listening to podcasts while you sleep 6. Stop eating snacks with TV
What ends up happening as a result - You start to sleep earlier and better - Reading books becomes interesting again - You wake up earlier and feel more fresh - Realize you have a lot of free time - Going outside for a walk is more interesting (less boring) - Work tasks that were boring, now hold your attention more - Finishing work tasks, and house chores, feel more rewarding now
A much shorter summary of this 'diet' is called the 'Dopamine Detox'.
What I'm trying to say is, a lot of this chaos and burnout, is just related to our addiction of time-wasting and addictive habits like browsing youtube and reddit more and more.
I’ve recently got into the habit of watching TV while eating and snacking and after reading Rules 4 and 6, have come to the conclusion that it’s a bad habit; eating should be intentional and purposeful, not a thoughtless activity while being mentally engaged by some other activity. I don’t know if I could go cold turkey with external stimulation so from now on, if I’m eating alone, I’ll just listen to music (instead of reading or watching TV).
Thank you.
And in that spirit I'll say to the author of this post: It's okay to nap in the middle of the day, or not eat breakfast, or work first thing in the morning and not do a Morning Page or Meditation or whatever aspirational-you has decided is worthwhile. We are all doing our best in the circumstances we have.
In my life I've found that better is really a game of averages. Some days are going to be great. Some weeks have a severe downward trend with no real reason that I can tell. Well. Maybe it's due to bad sleep quality or lack of exercise. All I can do is try to be the person that makes the good decisions and accept the person that I am, and that keeps me pretty happy.
In the ADHD community, it’s called body doubling ( https://doubleapp.xyz/blog/how-to-body-double ), but it can absolutely extend to those outside of the ADHD sphere as well.
If someone has any suggestions on how to organize my life like a one big summer school, I'm listening. I guess joining a monastery would do it, but I don't really care for the other aspects of monastic life.
Food had two broad strategies: (1) Repeated Deliveries of staples with one afternoon a week dedicated to cooking, portioning and freezing. Meals are labeled and microwaved as needed. (2) Ad-hoc Food Delivery, think Uber Eats or Doordash for most meals. I found 2 to be excessively expensive. 1 requires dish-washing but I can mitigate it with using disposables whenever possible.
1 also requires setting up repeated automated deliveries. I haven't quite figured out how to do this yet, but I'm sure there's an Instacart-type service for it.
Laundry: there are door-to-door laundry services, and/or using an in-house cleaning service mentioned below
Cleaning: there are maid services. If well-planned you could have them arrive to wash the dishes created in the above step, as well as retrieve/put-away laundry. A robot-vaccuum helps between cleanings.
As for activities with people with similar schedules, that's the difficult part. Adults are chaotic.
There's signing up for the military, which would also neatly handle your other items.
So far I've found that a co-worker-based activity group is reliable. You all get off about the same time, the people are relatively stable from week-to-week, and you all have similar work lives.
Second best was a regularly scheduled meetup group.
> how to organize my life like a one big summer school
It sounds like you don’t want to take on being an adult.
Responsibility gives you independence and power, you might want a therapist to help persuade and shortly guide you that.
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https://doubleapp.xyz/blog/how-to-body-double
Remote work has pressed the need for me to improve here since I think I benefited by being in the same room as coworkers and being alone in my home the whole workday has pressed my ability to stay focused.
I struggled with ADHD , but because of past health issues, medication is off the table. Even though Vyvanse was a miracle for focus it caused some serious other problems. And the more I read about psychiatry and psychology the more I’ve gotten excited by lifestyle changes.
One thing I feel strongly about is that productivity tools need to be descriptive, not prescriptive . I’m not a robot, I need to work on what my gut is telling me to work on rather than what some reminder is telling me to work on. But I also need to do work and not scroll Reddit for hours so a tool helps with accountability for that.
I can’t over emphasize how enamored I am with Andrew Huberman Youtube video on the topic. He’s a Stanford neuroscientist with all sorts of suggestions on managing our dopamine levels with techniques like cold water therapy and intermittent fasting.
Social media, including hacker news and excessive email checking, can destroy your motivation if you don’t keep it in check. If you’re struggling with focus you simply have to monitor and moderate these things.
Please email me, username at gmail if this topic is of interest to you.
I'm grateful you are working on the app, however, as that sounds very helpful.
400k in SF is about 260k after taxes. Figuring saving 50% would give 130k/year in savings and an expense rate of 130k/year. At 8.0% returns, it would take 14 years to have enough to withdraw 4%/year match 130k.