Refine your work time: tips from the creator of Ruby on Rails

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Ruby on Rails creator, founder and CTO of Basecamp, David Hansson, in his blog on Medium, said that by working the standard 8 hours a day without overload, you can do absolutely everything. But for this you need to refine your working time.

"How do you manage to do so many things?" - they often ask me. Usually in an undertone, as if I'm about to tell some secret. Are you only sleeping 5 hours a day? Or do you have a 12 hour day? How do you do it ?!

It is believed that highly productive people work harder. Often inhumanly more. They are focused on tasks from 8 am to 11 pm. The media love to talk about such feats of endurance and determination.

But I don't fit this image. I usually sleep well for 8, 5-9 hours every night. I am proud to work the traditional 40 hours a week, and I don't strive to do more, more, and more.

If I have a secret, it is the focus on the quality of every single hour. I do not mean time management from the nineties, according to the canons of which every hour was cut until the last minute, and peak productivity was squeezed out of every second. I'm talking about realizing that not all clocks are the same.

An hour when you are upset, distracted, sleepy, exhausted is 60 minutes of poor quality. It is foolish to expect that you will turn this time into high achievements. Garbage at the entrance - garbage at the exit.

40 working hours a week is the king's choice. I argue that almost everything can be done with such a glorious amount of time. Unless, of course, you squander it into meetings, multitasking, and poorly formulated tasks. For in this way you can spend an infinite amount of time.

Of course, there are physical limits. And here many find excuses for themselves: “I did everything I could! You cannot blame me, and I myself cannot, because I have done as much as every second person cannot. I squeezed myself to the bottom, so say thank you!"

Covering your butt in this way in your own eyes and in the eyes of those around you will gain temporary peace of mind, but these excuses will not hide your lack of ambition in the long run. Giving up ambition is a psychological defense method for those who are exhausted.

You need a set of mechanisms to refine your working hours - you need to improve their purity and quality. And here are the techniques I use for this.

Do you really need to be involved?

Like the sweet song of the sirens, voracious curiosity beckons us to participate in discussions of decisions, events, and other things. Even where you are not needed at all.

It's hard to come to terms with this, but while your knowledge and experience can be useful to other people, it can be so useless during a meeting that you won't even pay for a cup of coffee on it.

Do not read an unimportant letter, decline an invitation to a meeting, refrain from inserting your 5 kopecks into a chat discussion, diligently avoid chattering - this will free up a lot of time for performing a few important tasks.

Can it wait?

Some problems need to be solved on the same day so that they don't get bigger the next. It is better to deal with such immediately. But they are in the minority.

Most of the problems and opportunities will not lose their essence and value in a day, or in a week, or in a month.

Or perhaps the postponed problem will resolve itself by the time you pay attention to it again. Fine! So it was a job that didn't need to be done at all. Or this problem seemed much more important when you first encountered it than it really is.

The longer you put off solving a problem, the more you learn about it. And many questions are solved by themselves, if you give them a little "settle".

Can I leave work on this task?

The road to a bad day is paved with heroic attempts to be productive after hours of wasted. A common work mistake is not realizing the true depth of the problem.

You commit the crime of continuing to dig when you realize you need to dig a hole three times deeper, but you don’t acknowledge that it will take three times the effort.

The ability to refuse to solve the problem immediately is a critical skill that will help you save time. The sunk cost is the bet that will ruin you.

Am I ready for this?

Sometimes a problem takes time to mature, and sometimes it takes you time to mature before the problem is solved. We are not always ready to take on any task.

If I’ve gotten into a writing mood this week, then I have to fill a new site with texts, but most likely this is a bad week in order to organize work for the next quarter.

If my fingers are itching to write code, then I should finally fix a bug that has been hanging for a month, but not try to redirect my working attitude to an interview.

Our motivation has its own currents that change direction. And, of course, it's much easier to go with the flow than against it. As I said above, the solution of many problems can be postponed, so wait for the right flow, which will pick up the next task and bring you.

If you have the techniques to make every hour of work meaningful, but fail, maybe all of the tasks scheduled for this week are not falling into the stream of motivation? As a result, you will not do anything and you will feel disgusting.

But what will bring you peace - the knowledge that everything described above happens to everyone. And much more often than most are willing to admit.

Despite the clear understanding of the importance of high quality working hours, I often have useless hours during which I do much less than I hoped. So it goes.

It is important to increase the total number of productive hours and not worry if you cannot achieve the ideal.

Once you understand what quality working hours are, you don't want to work harder, harder, and harder. The difference between four hours of good work and a few days of bad work will be a revelation to you.

And if you squeeze out your working hours a little more, maybe you will add another 20-50% of your productive time? In fact, it will add 200-500% - yes, 10 times more.

To do everything, stop trying to do everything.