[what_is_orcas]

> Did I work 20-30 minutes, or have I been working for a day or two? I would say a day or two, and the 20-30 minutes was the time needed to produce the deliverable of that work.

I would say that I do this too. There's a lot of stuff I can more or less do on autopilot and stuff that requires actual attention and finesse, for lack of a better word. I feel like management thinks that I'm good at my job for all of the autopilot stuff that I can crank out, and that makes up for the time I spend implementing one of the more interesting bits.

I think one of the ways that remote work changes this is that I can do other things while I think through a tricky problem; I can do dishes or walk my dog or something instead of trying to look busy in a room with 6-12 other people who are furiously typing because that's how the manager and project manager understand that work gets done.

[derekp7]

The way I explained it to my boss, is to give him a list of numbers to add up in his head and come up with a total. He looked at the list for a couple minutes, then gave me the answer (I framed the whole thing as a riddle). I then looked at him and said it looked like he wasn't working on the problem for the last couple minutes. He replied that he was thinking during that time. My reply back is "That is what I have to do the majority of the time on my projects, is think about it then spend a relatively short amount of time spitting out the answer. The problem is I also have to look busy while I'm doing it". He then saw the light.

[i2shar]

If you have to explain that to your boss, you are working for the wrong person. We are in a creative field, he shouldn't have to be explained this.

[necovek]

As long as they are willing to learn, I think that's fine.

I like to make parallels with sports: when I am on the court, I am so much dumber about what's going on. Suddenly, when I am on the sidelines, I can see patterns, strengths and weaknesses for each team and so forth. It's not that I was dumb while on the court, it's just that your brain is in a different mode of operation (focusing on your own performance in this particular case).

[bogeholm]

Sounds like you asked “how would Jesus explain this to my boss” and got an answer

[galoisscobi]

This is great! Wish our senior director would understand this. The man loves the idea of butts in seats for long hours and can’t wait to have us back in the distraction riddled office.

[Freak_NL]

Or just go and have a shower in the afternoon. It's the best remedy to an afternoon dip I know and one of the major benefits of working from home. It's a great place to solve problems before getting down to coding.

Doing the dishes is indeed a good one too.

[giantrobot]

Doing the dishes or other chores doesn't work for me at all but showers are great. When I was at Apple one of the few unalloyed good aspects of the spaceship campus were every section had showers available.

I'd take a brisk walk around the spaceship and then hit a shower. It was a great way for me to avoid an afternoon slump and let me do a lot of background processing in relative peace.

[dixie_land]

I root caused so many hard to debug issues in the shower! Including some obscure bug in Darwin kernel implemented in assembly. Not that I take my laptop to the shower but exactly like the parent thread mentioned, the problem is still background processing in your head.

[some_chap]

Sounds like we should ban you from the shower, then.

(Amusing to see “root caused” == “diagnosed” and != “caused”.)

[bogeholm]

As a non-native English speaker, on of my favorite things about English is that you can (ab)use just about any noun as a verb and make it sound natural