Hacker News Reader

Comment by typicalrunt | Hacker News Reader

I'm a legs-up-on-table type of dreamer and thinker when I work. However, after working in corporate environments for many years I'm developing what can only been called a cognitive dissonance about this type of quiet thinking. The issue is that managers have always wanted me to track my time in 15-30 min increments, and there is never an expense category for "quiet thinking and reflection". Thus I've started to feel like a time thief [1] and it weighs on my conscience even though I know, deep down, that my quiet reflections are being used to solve difficult problems.

[1] http://timewellscheduled.com/time-theft/

View on HN

"Time theft" is a term better reserved for systems that demand such a micro-accounting of your time per project without allowing for a good chunk to end up in an "admin/overhead category", especially if you're being paid hourly and billing a client. On-paper efficiency ends up looking great, but every employee is forced to choose between either shortchanging themselves or overbilling clients for quasi-focused time.

File it under Analysis; which is exactly what you are doing.

Research and Concept Design can work too, who else has some good buzzwords?

Schedule a meeting for "ideating" with several other people who want to think quietly. Rotate whose project gets billed for the time.

Analysis done by applying a sophisticated large scale neural network containing modules trained on, among other things, problem-domain expertise, common sense heuristics, general reasoning, and hopefully just the right amount of temporary-absurdity-ignoring free-form concept generation.

Considering how often the solution to a hard problem will suddenly appear after a good night's sleep, I wish I could bill clients for those eight hours! Or for time in the shower. . . . :-)

Well, you can.

You just have to bill them based on results (communicated as a set of benefits for them), not time.

I can't think of a better answer than "lie about it" and "let your results speak for themselves" ... which is not exactly a great position to be in

I've never been in such a position myself, but I have heard from more than one person whose boss more or less hinted that just making something up that has some vague relationship to real life is the de-facto expected behavior, because otherwise everyone would spend all their time filling in time-accounting sheets in 15-minute increments, and nothing would get done. So people ignore them until they have to turn some in, and then fill out two weeks' worth of accounting sheets based on a mixture of memory and making things up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com