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.
I agree, as a child I was mostly indoors and non-practical. Typical techie nerd reading a lot of books. Having a home now, I've started learning to fix so many things. Today I just replaced 2 shower taps (washers and valves) for a leaky shower. Was a little short on time and had some issues unscrewing the spindle so reached out to a plumber and was quoted $350 so screw that, I finished it myself. Anyone can do this with the help of a YouTube video. For all its faults, YouTube is an absolute treasure for DIY.
Cooking is another one I really leaned into during COVID. I think it's important to scratch a creative itch in these activities since many of my hobbies are consumption-oriented e.g. video games.
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 think you can both have true experiences when it comes to this. Some people enjoy the monotony of repetitive tasks, whereas others want to gargle glass after 10 minutes of it. I certainly know I don't want to work a job that physically exhausts me every day, but some people do enjoy that. I don't think it's romanticizing to say that good-paying warehouse work with proper benefits would be a boon to a LOT of people.
The thing with hard working jobs is that you need to consider pension. Probably you wont bei able to do heavy lifting stuff fulltime in your sixties. What then?
I think their point is about rich people who don't need a job or money, but now treat hard labor jobs as gym work.
These sort of people can always go back to what they were doing after they got fit from the gym work, and of course they can always do another gym work sort of job at will.
This is far different than somebody working these jobs to put food on the table.
I'm a software developer, but I did these kind of jobs when I moved to New Zealand under the Working Holiday Scheme. The minimum wage what I got for these jobs was more than what I earned as a software developer back in Hungary. It wasn't just free gym as we needed the money to support ourself, but it was still relaxing to not care about the big picture and only do what I was told to do without any responsibility.
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...
It was pay by the hour. No, the main motivation was being able to feel like I reliably accomplished something each day and hung out with a nice group of guys throughout the process. Hard work, visceral daily achievement, and camaraderie. The physical work was a part of it, but I wouldn't say it was the core thing.
Thanks for replying me.
Did you have autonomy (like did you feel you could execute your job in the way you think it was right)?
Did you have a mission (the feeling that your job was part of something bigger) ?
Nope and nope. Just clear instructions, clear tasks, and clear outcomes. Monotonous work and no sense of vision at all. No sense of responsibility either.
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.
I think this highly depends on the person. For me, it wasn't just about enforcing separation of equipment.
For a time, I was using the same desk for work during the day and then switching inputs on my screen to use my personal gaming PC in the evenings. I still shut off notifications, never had notifications on my phone, etc.
This wasn't enough.
So I set up a small desk in another part of the apartment and made that the work desk. It was better than using the same desk.
This wasn't enough.
I've realized that a lot of my emotional states and memory recall are very anchored to where I am physically. Just being in the same physical space after a stressful workday was the problem. Glancing at the plant in the corner that I was staring at while contemplating a challenging problem earlier in the day immediately made me start thinking about work again.
> Or go take a walk.
Walking is one of the best ways I've coped. But I also live in a four seasons climate, and this isn't always possible.
As much as I dislike the idea of going back to a physical office space, I think this is one of the hidden costs of WFH.
For me, work from home didn't really change the hardest things about shutting down. It has never been (again, for me) the equipment or the emails or the messages, but that the mind doesn't stop chewing on things. I can put away the computers and go for a walk and still have my mind working over whatever problems I was trying to solve. I think it's an example of the mind working against itself, because I enjoy solving problems but I also enjoy putting work aside after hours.
>For a time, I was using the same desk for work during the day and then switching inputs on my screen to use my personal gaming PC in the evenings. I still shut off notifications, never had notifications on my phone, etc.
I mean yea I have this too but I don't actively look at notifications. I'm constantly "on" and nervous but Ive just been that most of my life.
And now I'm in office. I do not know if its gonna get better.
> But I also live in a four seasons climate, and this isn't always possible.
Kind of curious what season it’s impossible to walk in, and how it’s related to 4 seasons?
I’ve lived in 4 season climates my whole live, and the only time I can think of it would be inadvisable to take a walk (though not impossible) is in the middle of a thunderstorm/typhoon.
I don't think it's about "advisability" per se, but desirability. I probably shouldn't have used the word "possible". I guess possible relative to my ability to deal with it.
Sure, you can walk in a snowstorm, when it's -15F, when it's downpouring, when it's 100F, but these are hardly a refuge from the inside environment in many cases.
Don't get me wrong. I've spent plenty of time doing exactly this, but my underlying point is that it's not a consistent or low friction option.
Back when I worked my last job. I’d find that when work was scarce (pretty common mostly thanks to an impenetrable bureaucracy) My brain would wake up and I would suddenly feel motivated to think about and work on new projects, then I’d get home and for some reason not have the energy and just pass out instead.
Perhaps a contributing factor is that when stuck at work you have a limited range of options that don't include passing out whereas at home you have fewer restraints and more competition from the easy solutions
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.
I genuinely miss working in an office because of this, and am looking to return to one soon, but right now it seems that just about every company has a hiring freeze in place for the foreseeable future.
A hybrid 3-4 in office / 1-2 out of office per week seems to be prime for my personal and social values at work.
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.
I didn't mean it at all in the sense that he's stealing those jobs, but that he is seeing it as personal development where most people in this situation have little choice but to bear this sort of profession over the course of their lives. He gleefully recounts how he now saw takeout food in terms of the manual labor he had to do, but sees it as a fun life lesson as opposed to the crushing realization that your life-force is seeping away with every bill. The poverty tourism is what I find sick. He can, and did quit the experience as soon as he was tired with it.
I think intention matters here and his was not to demean or "sight-see" the life of poor people. _You_ are choosing to view this from the most unfavorable angle.
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 agree with this a lot. It's the shakeup, I think. I've wondered in the past about companies pulling their skilled knowledge workers out of their usual roles and saying, "you're working in HR now" or "you're working in the warehouse now (if you want)". Let them do that from 3 weeks up to 3 months, and then go back to regular work. Or maybe inverted 20% time: Monday–Thursday in the warehouse, and Friday at your desk inside your IDE. I'd be really surprised if all the "obvious" reasons why this experiment wouldn't work actually showed up in the data at the end. My expectation is positive gains in productivity.
The lack of self-awareness is the disturbing part, or that the person interviewed failed to understand the actual lesson about the nature of working a shit job for your whole life like those presumed 60 year olds.
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.
Maybe you are right with the idea that more people should at least try these jobs. I agree it would be helpful. However what frustrates me is that they seem to draw all the wrong conclusions about this sort of work, and see it as character building which draws back to the directly unhelpful ideology of characterizing harsh labor for low pay as morally constructive. It is constructive in the sense that it gets you used to hardship, but it is still your life seeping away for little gain, which is the raw fundamental fact from which working class solidarity germinates the strongest.
Some time ago, John Stewart made the observation to Bezos that people would not want to just spend their working lives doing errands for the wealthy and would rebel. I suppose it's mindset like that of Bezos or the person in the post that made me react with disgust. I am failing to propose a solution, but the problem seems to be in part a lack of awareness from the well-to-do of this world that has dangerous consequences for the rest. After reading the post, I can't even think of something to suggest to the interviewee because the mental and class distance to be bridged seems so vast.
I totally want the employment system from Ursula Le Guin's The Disposessed. People cycle through jobs and everyone gets a feel for everything. Of course, it's not perfect...
"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'm not talking about the availability of the job, but the difference between poverty tourism and having to do those jobs for 40 years as opposed to 6 weeks.
It reminds me more of Kevin Spacey's character from American Beauty. After quitting his job in advertising, he takes an (explicitly) non-managerial job in fast food: "I'm looking for the least possible amount of responsibility"
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?]
Not the OP but I typically hear such advice in the form of thinking of oneself and one's circumstances as being entirely one's responsibility.
>What if I wanted to be healthy, but have $<any number of chronic, debilitating conditions with no clear identified cause, mechanism, and or cure>?
Then the person in the hypothetical would need to decide to define healthy realistically for their condition. While it may be something you want, wanting something impossible is a non-starter.
>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
Great example, in this case the host can decide to call another doctor's office to get a second opinion. Or following up in person. Or escalating to that doctor's leadership/board.
The host actually did follow up in person and tried to escalate. There wasn't another doctor's office to send them to, because the tests were explicitly called by a specific doctor and there would need to be authorization to transfer the tests... authorization from the doctor who wasn't responsive. Like I said, this was extremely distressing to hear about the host needing to apparently decide that this was their fault and the resultant distress the host was experiencing when after two weeks and many attempts from many angles, they were unsuccessful, and according to the advice they had no one to blame but themselves.
I'm afraid I don't understand how any of what you said has anything to do with attributing events in my life to my decisions. It just sounds like strategies to make decisions for future things, which isn't relevant. Could you explain?
Yes, I'm asking precisely how to think about external circumstances. If your thinking is that outcomes are because of your decisions, it means if a doctor blows you off after a cancer screening returns abnormal results you must've decided something to result in this. The podcaster decided the only logic there is that if you didn't want the doctor to blow you off you shouldn't have decided to proactively screen yourself for cancer.
Personally, I struggled with thinking about events in my life and my decisions leading to those events precisely because of seeing other people try to take that logic and apply it in good faith, resulting in horrible conclusions. That someone could've prevented their fibromyalgia and therefore they are at fault for getting sick. That someone's child abuse was something they need to take responsibility about.
Don't worry too much about trying to make sense of that advice. It's a bad take that only comes from people who've had the privilege of all of the problems they've known in life being self-inflicted[1]. (That's for the original commenter. The person you're responding to now is engaging in a major moving of the goalposts.)
Here's what I've been prone to tell people instead: you know how to always get what you want—always? It's by wanting what you're going to get.
Some people misunderstand this. It's not about settling or doing nothing. It's rather the opposite. It's to get people to go through the process of interrogating themselves about their wants in a way that engages the logical part of their brain—which is ultimately most likely to be the thing that leads to working out a path to whatever that want is, so long as it's reasonable to think that they can actually get it. In the extreme case you present: "Is it unreasonable for me to want to the abuse to stop?" The answer, of course, is an emphatic no. There's no need to stop wanting that.
In figuring out whether it is reasonable or unreasonable, the question becomes: what is required in order to actually get it?
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.
I mean you can say the luck argument about literally everything. It's not a reason to dismiss making choices.
Not having kids/pets is a huge choice to make to have flexibility. If you don't have dependents you don't need to spend time looking after them. You also don't need to make as much money so you can take a lower paying job. By being in the position to take a lower paying job, you can negotiate more flexibility etc.
Obviously that doesn't apply if you were forced to drop out of highschool to get a minimum wage job to take care of your sick parents/siblings.
Some people are less lucky than others, but I'd be willing to bet that a large percentage of HN readers that finds themselves with no flexibility have made many choices to end up where they are.
On average, as related to HN, you are probably not wrong. I still hate averages, because they tend to hide the reality ( and individual plight ) based on its extremes. I have no real data to back it up other than anecdata.
I count myself as ridiculously lucky that I am where I am doing what I do. Here I am mid-day, discussing non-work related items in my down time. I have the flexibility ( and a pet and a kid although that is basically like having two kids ), but I am unable to dismiss the idea that it is not just me factor that got me to that point. Looking back, there were tons of things that could have gone wrong that would put me on the wrong track ( and as is often with life, some things did ).
Otoh, I am not that much smarter than my sister and yet we are in very different places despite having the same upbringing, access and so on. You could argue that she is not on HN, but I would say that is a self-selecting process..
Like the sibling comment, I feel like we are talking about different things. You're talking about right and wrong paths and careers.
I'm talking about choices like kids, prioritizing salary over flexibility etc. I am not arguing that people in tech are there purely based on merit and no luck.
I am saying people that are already in tech make choices that give them more or less flexibility. Chasing a job at FAANG to get a massive salary and then using the salary to get an expensive car and massive mortgage is the wrong choice if you want flexibility. But it probably is the right choice if you want an expensive car and expensive house.
This sort of approach sounds useful on paper. People should indeed make better choices. In reality, however, this solves nothing because we are looking at societal problems as varied and complex as climate change, obesity, rising house prices, degree inflation, regular inflation, global uncertainty, constant digital surveillance, and so on. Even a person who has made "good" choices such as becoming a SWE is still at the mercy of macroeconomic changes. Maybe next year's AI will nuke front end work just like it's nuking other white collar job markets. Maybe the market will by nuked by actual nukes. The modern day careers depend on so many conditions that are outside of our control and can't be fixed on an individual level, even if it's still a good idea to make good choices.
I feel like we are talking about different things.
I'm talking about not having kids/pets (which is applicable to everyone) as a choice to make for more flexibility where as you are talking about careers.
Also you're talking about good VS bad choices. I don't think having kids is necessarily bad or good, it just depends on what you want or priorities are.
Kids/pets are good example as it would make my argument a bit clearer. Today we have a sizeable portion of the population that has no dependents, made good choices (had an education, worked hard etc.) AND is still stuck financially and professionally to the point where they can't really have that much flexibility or make many more tradeoffs. It's a lot worse in countries like China or Korea but it's still pretty bad in the West. There is a reason why fertility rates are plummeting, and it goes beyond the classic demographic model of higher development for lower fertility.
In other words, though it's true that outcomes are linked to choices, just the ability to make real choices (flexibility vs. salary or family, to name one) is predicated on a large dose of prior luck.
Being successful isn’t about knowing CS. It’s about navigating relationships. Tech skills are now table stakes. Do yourself a favor and diversify your skills.
I was dealt a shitty hand and rose above it. Emotional and sexual abuse. I blame no one.
I spent a decade reading and studying psychology to rise above it. I’ve shared too much. Do what you will with my advice. The common denominator is my perseverance to survive.
I made a choice to follow something better instead of losing hope. It will get better through constant incremental improvements.
If you have no hope find other people with the same problem. Talk to them. Hire a life coach. Literally do anything other than give up or feel outrage and cast hate.
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.
Yeah, obviously he meant "forced" as in "within the context of this job, if I want to keep it".
Taking too broad a view of what "forced" means just nullifies the term. Of course nobody could then ever be "forced" to do anything when suicide is an option.
It's hardly a luxury to pick a different job, this is complete and utter bollocks. There are people up and down the income and educational spectrum that do it, of every race, etc.
The narrative that people are forced to work a specific job is false and should not be reinforced.
> The narrative that people are forced to work a specific job is false and should not be reinforced.
Do you not know many people or are you 21? Those are two situations where your take wouldn't be confusing. It's not a narrative that people can't pick different jobs, it's a narrative that people can just get up and go work somewhere else. This can be true in any industry, unless you have a very scarce and in-demand set of skills and qualifications. Even then, your regional circumstances and any number of other things have a bearing on whether you can leverage that.
Sure, if you are single, young, and an extremely proficient software engineer with the paperwork to prove it and no dependents, and everything else in your life is totally arbitrary and can be rebuilt anywhere you are, then ya it's totes easy to just get a new that perfectly fits your lifestyle.
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.
Spot on. I don't want independence and I have no use for power. I just want to focus on having fun and spending time with good people without managing every single minor aspect of my life and having responsibility over stuff I don't care about. I could also to something useful, i.e. work, if absolutely needed. Is this too much to ask? I think that in the past loads of people lived like this; powerful people had lots servants to take care of the mundane stuff while they themselves concentrated on the big picture, while the servants lived almost like children in their master's households, focusing on the responsibilities they were paid for.
I already have a therapist, but so far he hasn't been able to turn me into a proper adult. Oh, and by the way, I'm close to 40 now so I don't think anymore that this is just a passing phase.
> I don't want independence and I have no use for power.
I used to think like this, it's easy to dismiss, "I want power" sounds like something a maniac would say. I don't believe you truly don't want independence, maybe less, but that still sounds like a real issue.
> I think that in the past loads of people lived like this;
> servants lived almost like children
That's absolutely not true, I'm no history buff, but servants had all sorts of pressure and responsibility put on them. Their tasks may have been menial in skill, but they were damn well complicated. Imagine bringing the wrong drink or spilling a glass of wine in front of the king, off with your head. They seem like children to us because life is so much more complex, we didn't die at 30.
> already have a therapist, but so far he hasn't been able to turn me into a man
Maybe I've mistaken your casual wording, but it's not their job to turn you into anything, they're supposed to at the very least analyze. Depending on their practice, they might give concrete guidance.
If you want to be some wealthy old mans pet, that's fine by me, but I don't believe you don't want independence, no one doesn't. I think you're just overwhelmed by the mundane obstacles we all need to pass to earn it.
For example:
>I just want to focus on having fun and spending time with good people without managing every single minor aspect of my life and having responsibility over stuff I don't care about
That's the bare minimum of reality, we've all got those things, even Kim Kardashian.
Maybe your job is too complicated and demanding? There's a place you can reduce your responsibility, but it doesn't have to be so black and white.
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.
You really don't have to be at the median mortgage when working (or even on a mortgage), or to live in the Bay Area once you've accumulated enough money, or to need 170k per year outside of the crazy places. If you do have a house, you can always sell and bounce.
We could argue semantics or find gotchas but at the end of the day getting paid 250K+ means that you can find financial independence very quickly, and that freedom becomes a choice attainable through some modest amount of diligence and planning over a relatively short period of time rather than an unlikely expectation. Having the most important resource, time, fully at your disposal is an immeasurable boon.
There are many counterarguments regarding work or maybe wanting to buy expensive things and whatnot but the choice is there and any highly paid person can figure out the planning part with maybe less than a week of research.
You definitely need to count that. Even with pretty conservative assumptions, it massively changes the outcomes. For those numbers, and assuming 5% growth of investments after inflation, you can retire in 23.5 years (using https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=28... for convenience).
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.
Who says you need to match 130k? If you no longer have to work, you no longer need to live in the Bay Area. 70k would be luxurious in a less expensive place, if you take into account that you no longer have to work. Heck even 35k would be paradise. Many earn that while still working.
It's at the extreme end of the scale and will depend on your personality. Keep in mind that with 35K and no professional obligations you can do all of the following easily without any sacrifice in terms of leisure or family time or even energy levels:
- Shop around for healthy food at bargain prices
- Learn how to cook well and make the most of all that food
- Learn and have the time to fix 90% of maintenance issues
- Have the time and energy for sports and exercise
- Can dedicate more time to your family, kids need fewer toys because they have their father or mother back
- Travel for VERY cheap and you now have the time to actually do it at any time
- No longer a need to buy status or social class signaling goods because you no longer need to deal with professional expectations and setting a good impression in the minds of people you don't actually like
- Learn personal finance and your local legal system to maximize every drop
- No longer a need to buy things that make you cope with stress or long hours or even regular hours doing stuff you don't want to do
- As a corollary to the above, fewer risks of health issues, obesity, posture problems, alcoholism or self-medication, sleep disorders, psychological disorders, etc.
- Engage in creative pursuits
- Might no longer need a car in the traditional sense
To me that sounds like a better life than that of 99% of people who have ever lived. Now remember that we are talking about jobs and salaries for which a 4% rule at 70k or more is extremely doable. Which means you can not only have the life I just described but can also pay for your kid's education and the occasional health scare.
Instead of retire, let's say never having to do something you don't want to do (professionally) at which point you don't need productivity boosts. You just do things you'd do anyway. And if you don't do them, were you that interested in it to begin with?
Instead of desiring and expecting structure and going limp once the structure fails, try instead to drop the crutches and strengthen the "muscle" that keeps you always dynamically evaluating what is best for you to be doing at this very moment. There's a desire to have a simple world where you just color in between the lines and everything works out while you go on autopilot, but the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry - the world does not owe you your schedule. Just stay awake and always be re-evaluating, don't get caught in sunk-cost fallacy, and don't hold onto anything too tightly.
No. Don't drop crutches before you can walk with crutches. Then try not to use them less. Some people will always need crutches, that's okay. If you can fly you run, if you can't run you walk, if you can't walk you crawl, if you can't crawl you roll around. Keep moving :).
How do you even start doing this? I have poor self control and usually start projects/tasks right as the deadline approaches. I wish I was that productive all the time...
Mindfulness meditation is a big help here. It works for me but there are other methods, e.g. memento mori, psychedelics, journaling, minimalism, travel, nootropics, exercise until exhaustion, new social groups, always pushing a bit out of your comfort zone. It's a bit chicken and egg, but letting that seed be planted in your head and keep at it for a while and don't get caught up in dogma or any particular method.
Structure is important. Personally, it has been something I've found more difficult to adhere to as I've gotten older and more successful.
When you start out in your career you find structure essential: I HAD to be up early or I wouldn't make the 30 mins walk to my train. I HAD to get home on time to collect my child from nursery, and I couldn't risk the train being late.
As I've progressed in my career I've been able to afford cars. I don't have to get up so early because I can work remotely. My son is almost an adult and mostly looks after himself.
I think it is a momentum thing and you don't realise when you are on that train. Younger me could wake at 4am to travel and start work at 8am so he could leave early, collect his son and then go to the gym.
Older me is lazy. My body aches, I don't have the drive I used to have. I'm comfortable. But I'm not really comfortable; I'm drained; I'm aching and I'm struggling to enjoy things.
Noone talks about the affect of the grind you have to do early on in life.
Yeah I'm about where you are, maybe a little past that. My kids are at university or out on their own. I don't really have rigid work hours. I can easily go to bed and sleep for 10 or 12 hours. I think I am slowly recovering from about three decades of sleep deprivation.
Years ago I had the idea to create an automated "task assigner" to solve this problem. Once loaded with suitable data (perhaps a hard problem), it would just feed you tasks, "Do this now", and you'd do the tasks and feel happy that you had completed its assigned tasks. Based on the theory that the trouble isn't with doing stuff but more deciding what do do and in which order. Too busy to actually write it though.
Rituals can be important. I recently worked on a mostly daily exercise routine and it's life changing. I'm now focusing on a monthly/weekly/daily planning. If I try to even do two habits, I have much lower results.
Counterintuitively, there's requirements to have more slack time. It's has to be dedicated and active. I need time to waste. I just need that time to be intentional, timed and shamefree. One trick, I use is to set a timer, get myself a glass of water, and then turn down the bed like a hotel before a Movie.
I recently retired from working for other companies after a 35 year career; but I have a personal side-project that I have worked on for about a decade. During that time I would usually spend spare time on it in the evenings or on weekends. Now I can work on it anytime I like.
Without some kind of structure, it is easy to let a whole week or two go by without accomplishing much of anything. So I make sure that I get up at 7am every morning and do something productive on it each day. Some days I will only spend a couple hours on it, others I will work 10+ hours on it.
Since startup founders often have to wear many hats, it can be a challenge to decide what to work on each day. To prevent boredom and to spread tasks around so that progress is made in several different areas; I roll a single die every day to decide which of six areas to work on that day. 1 = Work on a new feature. 2 = Test an existing feature or run benchmarks. 3 = Fix bugs or optimize some code. 4 = Write documentation, blogs, or newsletters. 5 = Work on marketing and sales. 6 = Reach out to existing customers for feedback or help them figure out how to use it better.
I love the idea of using a dice to randomize the tasks you choose! Does using a physical object to “ground” your productivity practice make it feel more “real”/tangible-feeling than, say, running an RNG program on your computer? I’d imagine it does, but I’m curious.
Structure is good, but it’s really hard to self impose. Before you had to do one thing: work within a structure. Having to self impose means you have to do two things: create structure and then do the work within it.
It doesn’t help that advancing as a technical worker often removes that structure, or forces you to create it. I am given freedom as a perk of seniority, but for me it’s been a burden.
I'm the opposite. I hate structure and predictability. I keep launching new side projects, changing jobs, changing countries because I can't stand repetition or structure.
I enjoy doing nothing, going to sleep and waking up when I feel like it. It's the only time I feel happy. It's too bad people like me don't usually get rich. I'm 100% certain that money would buy me happiness. I don't even need it to buy stuff. I don't care about material things. I don't care about status. I just need enough money to do nothing whilst not having to live in a forest.
This is a weird article. It has almost no content, and is just a small personal journal entry. It has the exact same sign-off as a different personal journal entry (with slightly more context) that got front-page exposure earlier today, and submitted by the exact same person: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=memorable, who is a developer for the blogging software these articles were authored with. Feels like a weird / non-genuine stealth marketing campaign.
It is important to listen to the body. I tried to have a spartan level of self discipline and that put me in a express route to burn out. And I burned out.
Burn out is not easy to climb out of, so I would rather be less than ideally productive than be disciplined to an extent that ignores my humanity and that damages me severely.
I feel like it's a losing game to try to force yourself into a "productivity" mindset, as if you're some type of black box that needs to be optimized for certain behavior.
Structure is good and habit is key, but don't imprison yourself in it, in my opinion.
A local rooster waking me up everyday at 530am has done wonders for my productivity. I'm not even joking, I wake up and close the windows so my wife doesn't get bothered, make coffee, code for a few hours before work, then do my work day, play with my son, and finally I end up going to bed quite early (10am) due to being dead-ass tired. I was about to try and get rid of the rooster, but I actually love the little dude now.
One of the absolute easiest ways to add structure when unemployed is to pick a substantial exercise goal and work towards it. Endurance events are ideal but could also be something like a new Deadlift PR. For the former, if you pick a long enough distance such as Ironman or Half Ironman you’ll be training in the region of between 10 and 20 hours a week which is a part time job in itself.
For the latter, you’ll be doing less but the time spent commuting to the gym, doing your workout and showering is probably still going to add up to somewhere in the 5 - 10 hour range if you’re doing it 5/6 days a week.
You can pretty much find an app for every mainstream sport imaginable where you can get a full year of personalised programming for under £200. If you then combine this with a training course of some kind to learn a new skill and a creative project/side hustle, you end up with a self-structured life by default that is pretty satisfying.
If anyone wants app recommendations for specific sports leave a comment and I’ll write a list of the best ones I’ve found.
Maybe try defining your structure in terms of the effort you put in and what you accomplish (with respect to that effort), rather than a schedule or a sequence of items on a checklist. Your coffee or teeth-brushing rituals are minor, accidental details.
Organization to get clarity, not to be prescriptive. To easily see things like what’s going on, when deadlines are, and what’s involved, and what you want in the first place. Organization not to set a schedule, routine, time management, or anything like that. It’s about making things simpler.
Laid back mindset so I can take it easy and get things done at the same time. Like working smart, not hard. Instead of trying to be fast, productive, efficient, take your time, be more thoughtful. It helps to naturally avoid procrastination, because the thought of doing something you don’t feel like isn’t so repulsive. You can just take your time, relax, and get it done. If you avoid feeling pressured, it makes it easier to concentrate, and do a better job.
My goal is to wake up, and not care about what day it is. I really don't want to be stressed at night. I don’t want to dread Monday or look forward to the weekend. I don’t want to be so worked up that my brain looks for distractions. I don’t want to have to hype myself up to something.
Being organized helps me see what I might wanna do when I wake up, and be at peace when I want to get some rest. Being laid back helps me to actually start doing something and even have a chance to enjoy it. It helps me to take a break when I need it, and to pick it up again later. It makes it easier to be patient when something is challenging.
Once had a field job where I did nothing about it after I left. And then I had a new job where I was working at a desk and still continued to work after I went home. The latter job I aged considerably. While in the former, I was in the best health. But man, there were some days that I had to fight to get up in the morning after tiring myself the previous day. Little did I know it was keeping me young.
I have moved between phases of high productivity and high procrastination. IMO a system and routine are great if you have a goal you genuinely want to achieve. The more time it takes to achieve the goal (I’m thinking 5+ years) the more helpful a system/routine is. The problem occurs when you find yourself working hard to achieve a goal you have no genuine interest in - and then no system is going to help you.
Good for them to envision a structure of their own. If they end up not being able to build the habits I can only say that in case of having kids you will find structure alright.
That or you‘ll simply disintegrate into the void.
Pick life though and just do it (Atomic habits is probably a good start, check durmonski.com for an efficient write up).
I resonate with this a lot and the part about not knowing if that lack of structure is what makes you unproductive is a question I’ve asked myself a lot lately. It’s hard to know the answer and I always get different feedback from different people when asked which almost always just boils down to what they do.
Keep trying. I know it’s a struggle. Lots of stuff will not work or last. But once in a while you may get that one tiny little habit to stick, and every little bit helps.
I heard great things about this book called Atomic Habits, so I bought it. Unfortunately I could never remember to read it, and I'm not sure where it is now.
Ha, I finally ordered that book a few days ago, last minute before I’d set off on holiday (I procrastinated ordering it for about 2 months). It should of arrived the day before I left, but unfortunately it didn’t and now I’m on holiday without it. Was looking forward to reading it, but I guess I’ll have to wait a bit longer.
Something I remind myself now and again, “Tomorrow starts today.”
To me, this means, look at the next day’s calendar (commitments, obligations, logistics) the night before. If you don’t have any… make some arbitrary ones up.
All structure is self-imposed anyway (as evidence by those that are late for everything).
My circadian rhythm is structure enough. As for morning and night routines, I have them, and it usually involves a phone. So first thing I check in the morning is my local news, and then world news (so I can have some context for the whole day and to be alerted of the fact we're not in a nuclear war). Then caffeination happens to bring me back to baseline reality.
As for night, I catch up on social media, then place the phone in another room so I'm not tempted to doom-scroll. I have a dedicated non-internet iPod for listening to podcasts with the VLC app which typically sends me to sleep. If I have problems sleeping, I take notes, since my brain is buzzing with valuable ideas which I execute on the next day.
Guy, excuse me, but you have home, family and work.
So, which especial "structure" you are dreaming of?
What a magic level of "productivity" do you want to reach?
Set your alarm for 7-30, have breakfast if you want, don't have breakfast if you don't want to, if you can and want to take a nap during the day, that's fine.
You're doing so well, so enjoy it.
Because the Teacher said life is like a zebra - there are a white stripe, a black stripe, a white ... and then, inevitably, there will be a hole in the ass under the tail.
:)
On the other side of it, I recently decided to let go of the idea of structure. I spent a large portion of my life trying to be one of those structured productive people with habits and such. I have a wide array of skills and none of them were gained from habits and structure, they were gained from following a passion.
I'm happier now, my spirals are smaller, I forgive myself easier. I also think I am more productive.
Not saying one shouldn't seek structure and try to make it for themselves. If that's your path, go for it. But for me, I think that ideal was harmful and hindered a lot.
I also struggle with not having enough structure, which is exascerabated by being a solo founder who works from home. I often tend towards being a night owl unless I'm very careful about going to sleep on time. Sometimes taking a melatonin tablet will help me stick to my sleep schedule, but sometimes that doesn't even work.
One thing that has really helped me over the last month or so is booking regular sessions on https://www.focusmate.com. Even if I just book a 20 minute session every morning, this helps me stay consistent with clearing out my email inbox and answering support tickets quickly. (Although I'm actually in a session right now and I got distracted with writing up this comment. I will go back to doing my emails after this! I should probably share my screen with my session partner so that I don't get so easily distracted.)
I also used to get very overwhelmed when I would see a lot of cards in my Trello todo lists. The problem is that I would dump all of my thoughts and ideas into a single Trello board, so it would turn into a bizarre mix of miscellaneous projects and ideas for things to do, like "buy some new socks", "pay an invoice", "go to an Ethiopian restaurant", "take some drum lessons", etc.
I solved this by creating a new Trello board that is strictly for important tasks. So now I have an "Ideas" board which is my old dumping ground of random things, and a "Tasks" board that only contains important things that I actually need to do. I also came up with a priority system where I would prefix each title with a number from 0 to 9, and I set up some Butler automations that would automatically sort the list alphabetically in ascending order. So then I would start each day by looking at my tasks board and doing the highest priority tasks first. During a lunch break, or after I finish my important work, then I allow myself to take a look at my "Ideas" board and maybe pick a fun project to work on, or do some personal errands. It's pretty hard to maintain a work/life balance when you work and live in the same place, because everything really starts to blur together. One minute I'll be working on a bug fix for a customer, and the next minute I'm playing around with some home automation project.
Throughout my career I've spent a lot of time stressing out about how productive I'm being. Trying many different methods. Finally I decided that if I feel stressed out about my productivity I would write down everything I've done during the day. Usually turns out I've done a lot of stuff that I it's actual work that I just discount as not work. Some days get taken over by mandatory work that doesn't feel productive but is.
I struggle a lot with structure, I find that I am the most productive when things get really chaotic and random and I get flung in to a project or work item that I have no idea what's going on with. I think I'm quite weird that way but I know some other people who like that approach too. This goes for my life outside of work as well, forced structure feels strange to me.
Not having kids, I feel like a family clears up the optimization problem of:
* what should I be doing with my time?
* what is important to think about?
As a software dev with a flexible schedule, my life feels arbitrary. I pick up hobbies because I need stuff to do, I try to eat better to take care of myself, I save money and live frugally for a rainy day. But there's no common thread to all these. It's just stuff I picked.
This is the main reason I hate the holiday season. It's obviousy nice to take a break and spend time with loved ones, but as I don't spend it at home, my structure/routine just completley falls apart and I can't wait for the week to be over by the end and I'm craving normality.
I think it would be more beneficial if you examine your activities and behaviors at work hours. The wouldn't be much difference in your work output if you eat launch in the morning or spend a little time with your family. If there's a «problem» somewhere it's probably during work hours.
I have a pretty well structured life because I enjoy it that way. Does it make me more productive than people with a less structured life? Maybe a little bit, but I doubt it makes a big difference. A rigid structure always means fragmentation, waste and unnecessary overhead.
Maybe it's a symptom and not the actual underlying cause. You went through all the trouble to put into writing your need for structure so it's off the table that your problem is that "you aren't trying to implement structure in your life."
I'd add a favorable context to the routine. Being around people that appreciate your ideas / goals makes it a lot easier to maintain than on your own, or worse, surrounded by negative people.
It doesn't seem that there are many software development positions (which is relevant for many users here) in the (assuming US) army or military in general.
I imagine the signals or intelligence corps will take you in a heart beat providing you don’t have a history of mental illness or some other condition that disallows entry such as autism. They were even contemplating lowering the fitness test requirements for devs because they were that desperate to recruit. At least that’s what I heard over here in the UK about our military. I thought about joining long and hard but ultimately decided it wasn’t for me.
The Space Force is hiring devs and data scientists.[1] What they mostly do, after all, is collect huge amounts of data from various sensors and try to make sense of it. With college and engineering training, go for an officer position.[2]
I think it's just an indication of how many people see themselves in the words, regardless of who wrote them, and hope to find some direction in the resulting discussion.
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