[mrjj]

I prefer to think about USA as no-vacation-nation. Just because it's good to think that there a lot of guys working 24/7 and if you don't do so, you are retired.

You can't do the smart work more than 4 hours a day, right, maybe it's just beyond energy exchange capacity in our brain that support extra concentration.

But everyone have a lot of a dumb work, documentation, settling professional conflicts in mail, pinging standstill tasks, routine refactorings or other forms of small product polishing, whatever.

I'm not sure that the 4 of "smart work" is including all those 20% of work giving 80% of value, its sounds funny but sometimes you have too much energy to do very valuable routine.

If you have predisposition to depression (as i do) you can liberate your own time and just waste it to extension your depression experience. Wow it's really worth it.

Depression is just negation of any actions. When external factors is punching your arse its hard to negate. When not, welcome to slow way down.

[dxbydt]

> USA as no-vacation-nation

As an immigrant who has been in the USA for some 15 odd years, I think this is about right. I've done a fair bit of traveling, and imho parts of Europe, South Asian & South American countries have a very work-less, pro-vacation culture. Its like, lets work a little bit for the money & then go home & spend time with the family. Here in the USA, I worked with Partners & MDs at GS with multi-million $ networth, and they'd still show up to work at 7am & leave work at 7pm. I'd often wonder what the motivation was. Too much peer pressure. Partners work 12 hours, so MDs clock in 13, so VPs are forced to do 14 & associates all-nighters. Forget 4 hours, if you can get Wall St to do the regular 8 hours instead of 12+, that would be an achievement in itself.

[afarrell]

How is documentation dumb work? Explaining technical concepts clearly is hard.

[mrjj]

Sorry, i don't want to injure any of the technical writers. They are the only guys keeping big projects from informational collapse. Moreover, they are some kind of project detectives, collecting clues about how this pile of * actually works.

But if you are making something, you have to make some pieces of human-readable information about it and the poor quality is significantly better that no internal documentation at all. That the way developer or manager can help real technical writer.

Also you can express your thoughts in short notes, schema drafts, checklists, documenting your mindflow. It's very usable and nearly impossible to delegate. You can steer at the lines and rectangles or lists, looking for missing points or removing redundant. Not hackworking, just harmonizing the details because it's odd to have time to polish shoes and no time to polish work.