Work less, get more done: Analytics for maximizing productivity (2009)

Personal growth then leads to taking on more responsibilities. Sometimes that leads to a promotion, other times it leads to better job opportunities. Either way, this contributes to salary increases.

And those environments are usually rapidly developing, so same results one year later returns smaller rewards.

Therefore, in some areas, one needs to constantly improve in order to deliver better results over time.

A layman's example: you cannot stagnate as an NBA player because the game constantly evolves and one must be to date with the latest tactics and techniques.

Assuming that the same results will give same rewards over an entire career is waiting to be made redundant by advances in the field.

Why not?

This is the prelude to burnout for lots of people. It’s almost always circumstantial and likely to be a result of decisions made by others, but the point is that making no progress sucks

So from there you can conclude that sometimes people want to make more progress. They want to be a bit more productive sometimes, just to fill our needs for self actualisation a bit.

I agree with your sentiment in the abstract, that it’s not up to workers to just maximize productivity for (really) no gain. Bosses want more output? That’s their problem.

But sometimes just being a bit more productive is good for the mood! And some people have trouble for process reasons rather than external reasons.

Most people have that in at least some aspect of their work and life.

They are working on their own thing (as the person in the post does), their compensation is directly (sales) or indirectly (almost everyone) is tied to it, because they want to see some impact or they simply have pride in their profession and work.

It seems odd to live a life with nothing you want to accomplish with more speed and certainty.

If this is a passive aggressive post about how you wish you were compensated more based on productivity, that is an entirely different challenge for you to sort out

I spent my 20s with your attitude and now regret it as I see my peers at a level or two above me.

Can you invoke Dilbert these days without incurring wrath of people he, apparently, offended? Sadly, I agree and most people seem misunderstand what his strip offered to the office-bound population ( which is the part you mentioned: politics and related bshittery).

I try to be more productive, but it is mostly, because I seem to be stuck on menial and boring stuff so I am forced to be clever and automated.

Are you remote? IMO once you hit a given bar - for some that's enough to not get fired, and others it's maxing out their bonus - you're done. Some days I work 10 hours. Some days I work 3. I'm always available during working hours but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm actively chugging through JIRA tickets or even thinking about work.

I agree with the general thrust of your entire comment but I don't really accept the premise of "I can't be more productive because I have to be here for 8h regardless." Why wouldn't you want to work 5x6 days instead of 5x8 if you could?

The point is to get more life per life :)

But everyone has their way to live life and their own preference coefficients. I don't weight comfort very much, for instance, but you do so highly. And we're all different: when I get more accomplished in the day, I feel more energized and eager to get on my Peloton and (also) hang out with people. When you do more in the day, you are tired.

So, the best I can say is that sometimes people of one type are talking to others of their own type and the answer to your "why?" is "No reason. That's how I choose to live my life. You don't have to do this if you're not this type".

It's no different from someone posting "If you want to jump start your battery, connect these leads to those terminals" and someone responding "Why? I would just call Geico and get them to send someone out". The answer to that "why?" is "You're not the audience. Skip it and go read something else".

I always wanted to be a contract engineer but over time it became clear that the legal requirements and state incentives were stacked against it. There were a few legal rulings that substantially increased the legal risk of employing contract labor directly and now most companies prefer to work through middlemen who capture a huge chunk of contractors salary. These Middle Men add basically no value to either party aside from legal deniability. Most attractive companies have stringent requirements on independent contractors in my field requiring that they have multiple sources of income.

Why would you doing more work for your company for the same pay not benefit your company?

It also seems to me that while increased productivity decreases the time you spend on a task, it doesn't necessarily require you to notify people immediately when you're done or dictate what you do with the time saved. It might be more slack. It might be something else you can do to make your job easier. It might examining the art of productive politics and bullshitting. It might be learning something work relevant you find more fun...

That said, far be it from me to alter any balance you're already content with. If productivity is for anything at all, it should include satisfaction.

If it doesn’t align with the deadline, the EM can then add other teammates to help balance the work or assign the entire project to someone else.

It’s a myth that these companies push you to burn out, it’s just we’re bad at estimating our own commitments. So a good EM will also take your deadline and add buffers to it when delivering their own schedule upwards.

The benefit to being more productive isn’t always about packing more work into a day. It’s also a skill to improve the amount of time you’re not working by giving you more free time.

You need to work somewhere else. Politics is everywhere, but it is not the only thing that matters at many companies. Competence and productivity matter too.

Absolutely yes!

Striving to maximize productivity should be a core value for anyone that works. We should always be looking to improve and to make things more efficient. This is a core value of capitalism that people seem to forget. We should want to make things continuously better.

Instead there’s this nihilistic take that anything like that is pointless and doesn’t pay off. The accomplishment of something great, the self improvement, should be considered a pay off in and of itself.

Doing the least amount of work to get away just brings everyone down. Why strive for better if mediocre pays the bills?

When I was running startups a decade ago I would regularly ask devs not to work so many hours. Grind culture was a thing, and it made our code much worse. The effect of lack of sleep and a shitty work/life balance is abundantly obvious in a PR.

Which is correct depends on who's paying. If you're a startup you want lots of Person A. If you're a consultancy you want lots of Person B.

Working on easy or routine problems for 40 hours per week is torture to me. The ratio between my productivity extremes can be most conveniently described as "infinite".

If you want to know the root cause of the 10x, 100x, whateverx developer, this is almost certainly it. Someone was likely inspired to work on a super hard thing and just kept going. They don't have some weird genetic defect or unfair educational advantage.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...