DRMacIver's Notebook

Working hours: A report on an anomaly

Working hours: A report on an anomaly

Published
2024-01-12

One of my most read posts is People don’t work as much as you think. In it, I report:

Here is my estimate of how much work I can get done in a day:

  1. Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work. Writing, programming, etc. Good days or easy tasks it might be three. It’s rarely four, and over a week almost never averages more than two.
  2. I can probably do some low effort reading, not very high quality code review (more at the level of “scan for obvious flaws” than “do an in depth study of the design”) on top of that without it massively eating into my energy levels.
  3. Four hours of coaching in a day, i.e. face to face time in which I have to be on and intelligently responding, is pretty close to my absolute limit - I can do five in a push but I will not be very competent for the fifth - and I cannot do this two days running. I have estimated 20 hours to be my absolute upper bound for coaching I could do in a week, and I’ve set my comfortable limit as 10 hours if I want to be able to maintain little things like getting any writing done or having remotely functional mental health1.
  4. I can probably do 4-6 hours of very routine stuff (e.g. mostly mechanical refactoring of code).
  5. I can sometimes do 4-6 hours of flow-state work (e.g. debugging a hard problem). This requires a problem with tight feedback loops, no interruptions, and a good physical and mental health day. I almost never get this combination at the moment, and when I had normal jobs this happened maybe a couple of times per year for a few days running at most each time.
  6. Idlework, where I think about a problem in the background while going for a walk or having a shower or the like, is mostly free.

I’ve got longstanding problems with stamina and energy levels that I want to improve. My health isn’t great, and I suffer from something that isn’t really chronic fatigue but is certainly chronic and certainly fatigue. It’s what the doctors dismissively call “tired all the time”.

A lot of these things feel like very intrinsic hard limits where it’s not that I don’t want to do more, it’s that I hit some sort of block where my brain stops working and I couldn’t do more if I wanted.

Anyway, recently (last few weeks, plus a good chunk of December) I’ve been working pretty solid six to eight hour days. I’ve also been ending these days… mostly fine? I’m noticeably a bit tired, but it’s not like I get to the end of the day and I’m dead. I’ve felt much worse on days I’ve done much less.

I don’t know if this will continue to be the case. I doubt it’s fully long-term sustainable,and even if it is, it’s come with some fairly significant downsides in terms of available capacity for non-work things which is a problem. but it also doesn’t feel like I’ve been pushing myself especially hard to achieve it.

As the rationalists say, I notice that I am confused.

Part of this is definitely a mix of my schedule and the project I’m on. Here’s roughly how that goes:

  1. I wake up whenever I likeOr at least whenever my body likes, which is not always the same thing.. Sometimes to an alarm, often not. This might be any time between 7AM (if I’ve slept well and got to bed on time) or 10AM (if I haven’t or didn’t).
  2. The morning is mostly not spent working. I check project Slack, I check on any jobs that have run overnight, anything I want to be ready for the afternoon I start running and write whatever I need to do to enable that. On a busy morning or one that starts early this might add up to two hours work. Most mornings it’s probably somewhere in the half hour to hour region. Mostly though I potter around, do home things, write, etc, and do whatever is needed to gradually become human. Sometimes I eat breakfast, sometimes I don’t.
  3. At around noon through one I have lunch. This is usually a full meal.
  4. At 1PM I switch into full on work mode. I work pretty solidly on code for the next four hours until people in US time zones start waking up.
  5. From about 5PM to 7PM I may still be working solo but I’m probably in calls or meetings for at least half of it.
  6. As close to 7PM sharp as I can, I close my work computer and stop working.
  7. Sometimes I’ll do about another half an hour of work over the course of the rest of the evening as I check on running jobs, etc. I try not to.

Most of these details feel essential to how much I’ve been getting done - the flexible mornings, the large chunk of flow state work, the transition out of flow state work to work with other people, and the hard cut off.

I don’t think these are sufficient though. Certainly I’ve had, you know, jobs before, and I wasn’t this reliably productive in them. What I’m describing would be possible on a good day, but good days were in short supply.

Here’s a list of everything that might be being helpful about the work itself:

And some tmore general things:

Here’s are some things that it probably isn’t:

Another thing maybe worth noting is that there was a significantly dip in this around the end of the holiday season. As mentioned, I started the year massively depressed, and it took a little bit to get back into the flow of it, and I had to gradually ramp up into this state over a period of a few days.

My best guess is that the core of it is that spending energy is actually energising rather than debilitating, as long as you can experience the demands on you as eustress rather than destress. I’m not sure I’ll be able to continue that, and it’s very very likely that there’s some sort of hidden precondition that I’ve not identified, but fingers crossed that it stays this way.