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Comment by bluetwo | Hacker News Reader

The biggest thing I learned when analyzing my time, which I wish I had recognized earlier, was that I can have two types of productive days:

I can have days where I do a million small things and hop quickly from task to task.

Or, I can have days where I work on big issues and should not be interrupted by small issues.

But, if I think I'm going to have a day where I work on a big thing and it turns out I get interrupted by a million little things, I end up doing nothing well and end up very unproductive.

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This is why I and most of my team work from home on Fridays (we never book meetings either). It's tempting to dismiss working from home as a way of skipping on work, but there's no other time I can get 4+ contiguous hours in front of my computer with no interruptions or meetings. It's probably my most productive dev time all week, largely because I can plan for it. I frequently and vocally encourage work from home on Fridays to become a standard (but optional) "perk" in tech.

I used to take the shuttle to Twitter for an hour each way. I think I wrote most of the code I wrote there on the bus because of the reliable time in front of the computer.

Yep. Mirrors my experience with shuttles. I, too, have banged out some real work on a shuttle with headphones on. I unexpectedly regretted moving closer to the office because I lost this time, despite that making not a lick of sense.

Offices are for managers to feel that people are productive, not for people to be productive. Look around most offices and there is absolutely no space laid out for concentration time, except social concentration time.

> But, if I think I'm going to have a day where I work on a big thing and it turns out I get interrupted by a million little things, I end up doing nothing well and end up very unproductive

These can be some of the most frustrating and dispiriting days

I found other method to be effective for me. I work from home till noon - this are the best "brain hours" for me, so it's perfect to dive deep into hard dev tasks. I arrive at the office at ~12 and do all the biz stuff. Works good so far.

That is an old distinction that applies to writing as well:

* Creative day: work on big things, write a new chapter.

* Non-creative day: fix little bugs and papercuts, do spell-checking, generally improve or finish previous work.

I have also two types of days:

- I am ultra productive or...

- I am procrastinating the entire day

I wonder what causes this type of bimodal "quality of work" distribution.

It might just perceptual: it might be the case that days very into on of the two types are easier to recognize, tag and remember, whereas mixed days are not so vividly remembered.

I surely stop after a day of lots of little tasks and say "phew! What a day!" or after a big task is done "yeah! look at this cool feature you built today!" And even play with it a little. Normal days are not so reflected upon...

It's a result of many unconscious decisions by your brain which aim for regeneration and conservation of energy mainly.

Even when those are not needed..., the brain isn't too clever about modern work-load.

Very good question, I thought many times about this and could think that probably the beginning or how you start the day determines the rest of the day.

Cache prediction: it's not just a problem for CPUs.

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