[cimmanom]

How strict is your employer about butt-in-seat schedule?

If you have full flexibility, I’d suggest aiming to hit 40 hours on a weekly basis rather than 8 on a daily basis. That gives you the flexibility to work, say, 10 hours one day because you’re really on a roll, and to stop at 6 hours the next afternoon when you’re tired and distracted without feeling guilty.

Don’t go over 40 hours on a regular basis. That’s a recipe for burnout. A week of crunch time every 3 months is one thing. But regular 50-hour weeks aren’t sustainable for most people.

I’d also suggest setting goals in the morning for what you want to accomplish in a day. Put down your work when you reach the goal, unless you’ve got several more hours in the day. In that case, set another goal for the remaining hours. If it becomes clear that you won’t reach your goal within a reasonable number of hours for the day, put your work down whenever you hit a stopping point close to the time you’d planned to wrap up for the day.

More experience should help you make increasingly accurate estimates of what you can accomplish in a day, so you’ll hone this process as time passes. Plus it’s great practice at estimating, which is a difficult and valuable skill.

It’s unusual to hire junior engineers fully remote in part for this reason: more experience in a “typical” work environment give you more context for these sorts of judgement calls.

[Terr_]

From my own experience, burnout is primarily emotional. Time spent is a side-effect.

It's not how many hours you work, it's how much of your experience involves despair, frustration, and resentment. That might either be towards your employer ("stupid schedules, I'm not valued"), towards yourself ("this should be easy but I'm failing"), or towards the universe for simply not being the way it "should" be.

[dstick]

Amen. Working on my own products has never caused any kind of fatigue. It’s energizing :)

[codewithcheese]

I find there is inevitably still tough days working for yourself on a project that takes more than a month. Overworking can lead to losing sight of your goals which can lead to burn out.

[dstick]

Fair enough! Breaks and structure remain important.

I wake up every morning at 5:00, do some excersises, write down my goals, do pushups until I can’t any more and then process all emails from the past 24 hours. Once that’s done I set a todo list for that day and push things forward that aren’t a priority.

So far, this ensures I’m able to stay on top, don’t lose track, can work 10 to 12 hours a day easily and not feel tired or unproductive.

There’s still plenty of time left for “life” as well. Just have to be in bed at 22:30 at the very latest.

Setting goals, cooking every day and adhering to that routine works wonders to be honest, I highly recommend it :)

[codewithcheese]

Ok I can see why you don't get burnt out much. I don't exercise and go to sleep at 4am lol

[mpolsz]

I feel the same. From my own experience, I've done both 9h-10h of productive work for few weeks in challenging projects and 8h ass-in-seat in crappy and bad managed ones.

[hartator]

It’s both. You can be fine doing somehing you hate for a couple of hours. But 12h and more.

[evansj]

Beautifully put.

[pandler]

> If you have full flexibility, I’d suggest aiming to hit 40 hours on a weekly basis rather than 8 on a daily basis.

I think this is an exceptional answer. I’ve been working as a contractor recently where I am hard capped at 40 hours a week and it’s been wonderful. Work 12 hours one day when I’m in the zone and don’t even think about stopping? Sweet, that’s 4 hours off my Friday afternoon. Can’t concentrate today? That’s fine, I’ll put in some extra time tomorrow.

That’s a major change from my previous position where I felt like I never had a “not at work” mode and there was always more I could do.

I think capping yourself on a weekly basis is valuable because it gives you flexibility on a day-to-day basis while retaining a regular cadence.

[dnautics]

I'm not convinced burnout comes from merely working hard, it comes from when you work hard and expectation of reward is missed.

[papacuppa]

Agreed. It seems to me that burnout from work would only be qualified if burnout from play was a thing - because work to the fortunate among us, is play. Managing expectation is key, or more palpably perhaps - anticipation. The scientist, Robert Sapolsky, has done some interesting work on how dopamine affects behaviour. He shows that we get far more pleasure/dopamine from anticipation [future] rather than reward [present], where dopamine dries up. Our endurance is largely about our perception of the future. Good video here if anyone is interested: https://www.theguardian.com/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2...

[Insanity]

In my case, it was due to crunch time shortly before release, and then after the project was released falling into a void of not knowing how to fill my time.

Which caused stress and eventually a burnout that I am only just slowly getting out of, after about 5 months.

I suppose it is different for each person though.

[goatherders]

Spot on. When I was younger I could do 15 hour days without looking at the clock when orders were coming in and shipments were going out. Reward is a big motivator for time invested.

[jypepin]

I don't agree with that, because the number of hours you work are pretty irrelevant when not in a butts-in-seats setup. Also, burnout is not really directly related to the number of hours you work.

Work should be focused on productivity, not hours spent. Employers, clients and managers have expectations of a quantity of work being accomplished for a specific budget, and it doesn't matter to them if its done in 2hrs or 200hrs.

[chrisweekly]

>"Employers, clients and managers have expectations of a quantity of work being accomplished for a specific budget, and it doesn't matter to them if its done in 2hrs or 200hrs."

You're assuming every project is fixed-scope, fixed-cost and variable-time. In my experience that matches a small minority of projects.

[jypepin]

Although " fixed-scope, fixed-cost and variable-time" makes it easier, this works also in other situation, including variable-everything, part of a product team.

You are given tasks or projects for a specific budget (budget, for your manager is 1 engineer). They have expectations on what 1 engineer can deliver on average.

This is what people mean when they say "we care about output, not butts in seats".

[sdegutis]

Experience alone doesn't help you get better at estimating. You also need to have reasonable stopping points. That's why I try to aim for rigid 8 hour days, rather than being flexible. It allows me to see how much work I accomplished in a given day, and what kinds of tasks generally take less time or more time. Days are very intuitive chunks of time to reason about, and I find this helps my estimations be a lot more accurate.

[hartator]

Interesting, I would advise the reverse, get into a daily routine, try to not variate too much, and avoid working the weekends.