The 120% Solution | Hacker News Reader

The 120% Solution

calacanis.com

11 pointsShamiq22 comments

  However, using 20% of your resources to pursue random projects is highly inefficient.
  [..]
  Well, our entire country has been taking 20% time for at least the past five years.
  [..]
  We’ve overspent, taken expensive vacations, built absurd homes (in both scale and
  quantity), run our savings into the ground and skyrocketed our debt to
  record levels.

Linking between Google's 20% time to our culture of hoarding and overbuying is unfair and tenuous to the extreme. The former produced a lot of R&D and contributed to the greatness of Google's products - the other was economically unsound stupidity by a consumerist society.

R&D can not be equated with wasting time and money. Anyone who does so is setting themselves up for failure when the economy rebounds.

  Yep, move the standard 35-40 hour work week right up to 48 hours.

More hours spent at work does not increase productivity unless you are actually producing for more hours (assuming your quality doesn't drop, which it will). France's productivity in the late 90s was a lot higher than the UK's, despite the former having an enforced 35 hour work week. Productivity and time spent at work do not correlate. Indeed, spending 10 - 20 hours more at work each week would probably hurt the economy further as people spend less on leisure activities.

If you skip everything until In the technology industry, a 48 hour work week would be, for most, a vacation. most of Jason's advice on what to do next is very good, however.

I think he's been a manager for too long. I can see the same reasoning coming from my father (who owns an architecture firm).

With business you're spending a lot of time in meetings, travelling for business or in various phone calls. To be sure, these things are taxing, but I get the feeling that one can do many more hours of these things in a week than one can with something like programming.

From that (business) perspective it seems natural that everyone else should work more. And I think that it's here where a wise manager will work longer (if it is in his or her interest, of course), but will not require the same of people whose jobs cannot support such a routine.

And I agree, Jason's advice is, in general, very sound.

  I was in Japan recently and was amazed at the personal productivity of each individual when compared to the U.S. workers.

As a generalization, appearing productive is more important than being productive in Japan.

I too was in Japan recently, and was amazed at how much time they spent at work. Yeah, not the same thing as productivity.

Being productive means getting things done, regardless of your definition.

Personally, I get a lot less done per hour in the 35-50 hour/week range than I do in the 1-35 hour range. But I've also found that this is mostly true when I'm working on the same project for 50 hours/week. Give me 35 hours of primary work, plus 10 hours on a secondary project, plus 5 hours on something totally different - and I do pretty well. Just me, of course.

> If you're a college student thinking of getting trashed this weekend, or taking a year off, don't.

Isn't college students "taking a year off" the way Google and Microsoft were formed?

Wasn't there a research done by Ford, which has shown, that long periods of overtime decrease productivity?

Mentioned in: http://lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presenta...

I thought he stopped blogging. Why does he pick his craziest email rants to publish online? Just to tilt the rest of us?

I was going to mention the same thing.. what's the point of his private list if he publishes most of them anyway?

Marketing? Private list to create appearance of exclusivity.

"Republishing: PLEASE DO NOT REPRINT WITHOUT PERMISSION

Forwarding: PLEASE DO FORWARD TO SMART PEOPLE"

I think a few of the recent ones were getting posted online elsewhere, so he just started putting them on his own site - cannot remember where I read or heard that though!

What a gross misunderstanding and over-simplification of the economic problems we're going through...

The biggest challenge we face in the near future is vast: it's the energy crisis.

The economic downturn is doing us, if anything, a favour: it means we use less energy, and are slowly prepared for the realisation we're going to have to work incredibly hard to dig ourselves out of the fossil fuel hole.

I advise a different rank of priorities. If you can start a company now, do it, even if you have a ton of credit card debt or are way under water on a mortgage. This is exactly what bankruptcy is for. It does society no damn good to have you working for the next ten years to stay current on a mortgage for more than your house is worth. That mortgage represents misallocated capital - this is both your fault and the bank's fault. Dedicating the next ten years of your productive life to paying it off doesn't make that capital any less misallocated from the societal perspective. Much better to build something valuable for people in that time. This is what bankruptcy is for.

Yeah! Let's all work like we're in startups, even though most of us aren't.

While I an advocating [...] stop–the debt associated with unnecessary consumption, I’m very much in favor of investment in new companies, ideas and eduction

Investment isn't debt. When I found a company and sell stock to investors, I'm selling them a piece of the company - something I've convinced them is worth more than the money they're paying.

Buying new plant, running a startup on cc's, etc - are all business debt. (and "investing" in your own company)

I love reading really light gray text on a white background, thanks Jason!

V. I. Lenin: To The All-Russia May Day Subbotnik

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/may/02.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subbotnik

History has made a full circle.

The premise is a little bit off I think. We didn't "take 20% and do whatever we wanted" as he suggested. We just mis-allocated. We got overly interested in houses.

We have to produce before we can consume. Many of the brightest minds and much of our productive workforce became involved in building over-sized houses. There was much money/paper shuffling that basically boiled down to pretending lots of stuff about over-sized houses. We didn't need so many houses. Unfortunately, we borrowed that production capacity from ourselves in other areas. Now we're short on all sorts of the things we should have been producing instead of too many houses. We have to work extra hard now to get caught up on those things. Oh and all of the businesses that basically existed in order to make pretend money based on too many houses are hosed.

There. Mine's shorter.

I bailed on this after I realized the entire article was along the lines of "The economy is bad. Really, really bad. It's so bad that I am now going to compare it to a salad fork for the next 26 paragraphs."

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