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by magnamerca
2494 days ago
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I'm not a software developer, but basically a structural engineer / project engineer. I just wanted to say that my job is exactly like yours in some ways. Most of my quality work gets done in less than 2-3 hours; the rest of the time I'm either doing menial/repetitve tasks or talking to people / in meetings. I guess I'm just trying to point out that I think this isn;t exclusive to software jobs, but it's the same trend for any mental labour job. Getting into, and staying in, a state of flow requires a high cognitive workload, and getting back into it once you're kicked out is almost impossible some days. It often takes me at least 30 minutes to get back into that state, if at all. I think our society needs to re-think how we spend our time at work,but unfortunately that'll require government regulation, unless companies that are bold enough to switch to a 6 hour workday actual start making more money than their competitors. |
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Flow is one of those things that I think is related to interest in the task at hand but is also, as you point out, difficult to recover once disturbed. It's also highly unpredictable. The 2-3 hours I spend productively might not be in a continuous block but also the time spent giving the appearance of productivity makes it harder to (re)enter flow. If work was structured such that you could work when productive and take care of life admin when not, rather than a discrete chunk of time every day, I feel like it would significantly improve mentally demanding labour.
Ultimately I'd like to see everyone work less [0] for which I think the driving force has to be regulation (companies demanding these hours are just more-or-less rational actors in the system), the productivity gains are there but we seem to be busier than ever - we've thereby created new fields of work (TaskRabbit, Deliveroo, etc) for people to work in, but at little benefit to people or society.
[0]: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html