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Working when I feel like it results

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Josh

It’s been a busy few weeks for me at work which explains my lack of posts.  Recently I’ve been given a bunch of new projects to work on which makes this “uncommon coder” experiment more challenging.  But at the same time it makes it much more interesting!  Will I be able to keep up with the workload while still pulling off these crazy experiments?  Only time will tell…dun dun dun…

Anyway, my last blog was about only working when I felt like it.  Instead of doing the standard 9-5 work hours, I only went to work when I was in the mood and left and did something else when I wasn’t.

How did it go?  I’d say it was a success.  Over the past few weeks I’ve gotten rid of my old mentality of having to work X hours per day.  I take frequent nap breaks in the sun.  I go rock climbing in the middle of the day.  I go home to chill.  I don’t even think of how many hours I work per day anymore.  There’s no “work time” idea just “Ok, I feel like working, let’s go”.

How is my productivity affected?  I don’t have any hard statistics proving that my productivity stayed the same or not but I can tell you that those fewer hours of work have felt way more productive than I’ve been before.  In the long scheme of things I think motivation is the bottleneck to work productivity.  So as long as I only work when I’m motivated productivity will follow naturally.

It feels so empowering to be able to work like this.  Like I actually own my life.  The best feeling is leaving work early with no regrets and not feeling crap from overworking the whole day.

On to the next experiment…

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  • Mo

    Arranging your schedule this way is what allows you to feel like a professional as opposed to a drone. There is also joy in realizing that hard work may be hard because of the knowledge required, and not just because of the time required. That distinction is actually what really allows me to leave with no regrets on most days. “Yeah, I wrote 20 lines of code today… but it took 6 years as a script kiddie, 4 years as a college student at a top-5 CS program, and 3 years as a autodidactic professional to know which 20 lines to write.”

    I recently replaced a super buggy 60+ line regex nested in 8 levels of ifs that was trying to do some code transformation on python source with a flat case-oriented 20 line recursive traversal of an AST produced by understanding that yacc and lex exist and are solved problems. It also involved knowing what I couldn’t do (halting problem) and that I shouldn’t attempt to rewrite Turing-complete languages with finite automata ~ regexes. Yeah, definitely had no regrets that day when I left.

    • http://www.facebook.com/talekhinezh Joshua Primero

      Great point.  I could see a worse programmer easily spending a few weeks doing what you did in a day.

      For me, the problem was getting away from the mindset of more time spent at work equals more productivity.  It’s weird but sometimes it feels that just sitting at my desk is more productive than just getting up and leaving even if I’m not doing any work.  All it does in the end is waste time though.