That could backfire. Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's difficult to pick up from. To use the metaphor, perhaps you would be forcing them to park uphill.
> Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's difficult to pick up from.
Certainly some of them said that, and I had to push for them to leave anyway. I also feel like that when I’m coding myself sometimes.
But I think the of times when it’s actually true are vastly outnumbered by the times when it’s just an illusion, and it was obvious from the velocity and energy level that the policy worked.
I think this also creates a culture or at least impression of a culture that your boss cares about your work life balance, which, honestly, in today's world is valuable and can make your org stand out from other places where the norm is to work until you're burnt out.
Also shows an understanding of the importance of off-hour processing with any high thought work. Shower time, commuting, cooking dinner, sleeping. All things that give your mind time to coast over the things you may have struggled with in the day. It’s always easier later.
I don’t do offices, but I worked 2 extra hours last night to finish a train of thought. Today I won’t start until 3 hours after normal time and will play villainous with the kids (when they emerge)
I don’t get paid for presenteeism, I schedule my own hours. If someone was telling gme I couldn’t work after I wake up at 2am with a breakthrough, that’s as bad as someone saying I couldn’t stop work at 2pm because it’s a lovely afternoon and I fancy a bbq.
I pick the kids up from daycare at 4:30. Every few days its 4:25, I’m in the middle of something and I’ll spend 60 seconds writing out simple English sentences or bullet-points of what I need to accomplish when I get back to my desk. This context switch allows me to disengage. Sometimes I’m tempted to try “one more thing” a “Hail Mary” but it almost always backfires into a future wrong-approach distraction.
I'm the same way. I have a hard stop every day at 4:45pm to pick up my kids. I have an alarm on my phone that goes off at 4:40pm and I spend the next few minutes taking notes if/when I need to. I might also try to package my current state into a commit if/when it makes sense but I don't tend to stress about it.
> But I think the of times when it’s actually true are vastly outnumbered by the times when it’s just an illusion, and it was obvious from the velocity and energy level that the policy worked.
I agree, and relates closely to the YAGNI philosophy ("You Aren't Gonna Need It") [0]. It's easy to think, "I'm so close, it'll be easier just to do it now".
But what's so special about now? Are you really that much smarter right now than you will be tomorrow (or next week, month, year..)? More knowledgable? More prepared? Possibly... but it's more likely to be the opposite: in the future, you'll understand the problem better, you'll have more data to choose the best path forward, you'll realize there's another way to do it, or you'll simply have bigger fish to fry.
> But what's so special about now? Are you really that much smarter right now than you will be tomorrow (or next week, month, year..)? More knowledgable? More prepared?
Obligatory executive dysfunction angle: the special thing about now is that I'm doing the thing. Once I stop, it will take me anything between 2 hours to 2 days to start again.
I would work for such a guy. That tell me a lot about management caring about talent than any bs marketing pitch they give during interviews. Give me cold hard facts.
I learned this one the hard way, and have found it again and again since: often when it's the end of the day and I'm stuck in the middle of something that seems really hard, the best thing I can do is walk away, and the next morning, it suddenly seems very easy. I call this state "being in the hole." It's a kind of can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees thing. Always so satisfying to smash a thing in five minutes that I'd wasted an hour on the evening before.
Could, but likely won't: if the things you have to do regularly spill beyond the boundary of time set to do them, you're not deciding how to approach the things you have to do correctly.
Enforcing a constraint for the 90% scenario makes more sense than designing around the 10%.
Or they are on a hard nut to crack and better should sleep over it. I know unsolved bugs can make you sleepless sometimes but sleeping over them often does the right kind of "backtracking" in your mind that leads to the "branch" with the solution the next morning.
In almost every case that I find myself working on something "hard" stepping away, losing focus, and then thinking periodically about the problem leads to higher levels of clarity.
