Just be sure you can bill as much of your time pooping as possible.
I've been using billable hours now for a year and a half. That's the only part I've gotten used to.
Obviously, when the revolution comes, your manager will need to be the first to update his calendar to indicate he will be put against the wall.
Naked mole rats are hard for me to look at. There was a clear, plastic nest for them in the Lincoln zoo. It looked just like a serial killer had just been by the area.
I also forget that I'm senile (tautologically, maybe); it's the star-nosed mole that I can't look at.
The most baffling thing about it is the idea of doing only one thing at a time. I'm playing computer games while eating breakfast in the morning and watching TV at night. I'm teleworking while doing chores or other things around the house. (I know I'm supposed to be focusing on work, I'm only doing other things in the background, I promise.) At work I'll often have two different documents open at a time and respond to emails as they come in, in addition to blogs and other time-wasters like this. I exercise while commuting. Cassandane reads or listens to podcasts while commuting or cleaning. How would all this look on the calendar? Does your boss explicitly have multitasking time, double-book himself for things like that, or not budget time for the games and housework but understand that they happen a lot anyway? Or does he focus with laserlike precision on whatever he's doing at the time?
I don't suppose I could do what your manager does either, but in working with my disorganized son on his college applications, I was thinking about my own incredibly poor organization skills at his age, and realizing that my young self would be astonished at my current feats of discipline. It wasn't until my 30s that I really started to get my act together, and a few decades later, I'm still improving.
I believe that most people are creatures of habit. When someone is so busy that they're constantly pulled three ways at once, that schedule adds sanity and focus.
Myself, it takes a while for my brain to wrap around a problem, and then it's all I think about, maybe late at night; I mean, I can set it aside to make dinner and talk about stuff, but I have a hard time engaging on a separate unrelated intricate set of thoughts. Schedules and interruptions mean reacting superficially to me. Of course, here I am now and yes I have a bunch of time that's nothing like wrapping my head around a problem or cleaning or connecting with people I care about.
Schedules also force to zero the possibility of zero-productivity days, if having those is a risk they also help that way.
Personally, I regard a bit of reading unrelated Wikipedia pages is essential to my work.
I have some experience working with people on doing less ambitious versions of this thing as a therapist, while I don't particularly do the thing. (I do occasionally, at least in spurts, have other organizational systems I get excited about, and usually they decay, and then I have to build myself up again -- I just never make an appointment to do a particular kind of work. I frame everything in terms of targets/goals and let myself decide moment to moment how to meet them.)
My experience with other people, and myself, is that "I can't do this" in the absence of observable material or cognitive constraints, and especially in a situation where you have active support from another person, means a combination of "it is hard/not my habit" to do this and "I don't want to do this because expending the effort isn't worth it to me." Depending on the reason someone doesn't want to do it, that effort can be intense -- it's not like it isn't understandable.
I'm pretty clear both that I "can't" make an hour by hour schedule for my day, and that "can't" means I don't want to.
The reason I work on time organization stuff in therapy is that it's part of treatment for both depression and addiction. If you don't have those problems or other related ones, and reading about naked mole rats isn't causing problems in your life, then it isn't a particularly important problem to solve. I found Toggl hepful when I was trying to track my hours.
I think there's two skills, and I'm curious as to whether or not this guy has the second one.
1. Planning the day, one week at a time, into chunks.
2. Sticking to what you plan, or sticking to the spirit of it - rearrangements are okay, but spending the vast majority of your time goofing off and feeling bad about it means that the planning was worthless.
It reminds me of the dieting tips - there's planning out your food for the week in a realistic way, and then there's actually sticking to the plan.
I'm guessing this guy actually sticks to the plan.
I am super terrible with unstructured time. Whenever I've tried to do something like this, it's been, "Whoops? it's already 9:30? I was supposed to be done goofing off by now and working but I haven't even read half my blogs yet."
Fortunately/unfortunately, my life is structured for me like a Swiss clock by virtue of the type of job I have and who I married.
Fortunately/unfortunately, my life is structured for me like a Swiss clock by virtue of the type of job I have and who I married.
The 4 kids probably help with this too.
. Sticking to what you plan, or sticking to the spirit of it - rearrangements are okay, but spending the vast majority of your time goofing off and feeling bad about it means that the planning was worthless.
Yeah, I'm curious about how the OP manager handles this. I can't imagine doing that week planning thing, but not so much because of the planning as because I know the plan wouldn't survive a day. Hell, it's difficult for me to rigorously plan work even an hour out, because breaking news happens and it has to take over from whatever you're doing.
For what it's worth, I don't think the calendar you describe is really meant for 'now I am working on this' but instead as a record of what he has done to back up his billing to your clients.
Maybe he is one of those (very very nice) crazy people who just do what is written down, but I think he was showing you a way to justify your billing without worrying to much about it minute by minute.
For what it's worth, I don't think the calendar you describe is really meant for 'now I am working on this' but instead as a record of what he has done to back up his billing to your clients.
Maybe he is one of those (very very nice) crazy people who just do what is written down, but I think he was showing you a way to justify your billing without worrying to much about it minute by minute.
You're not getting credit for both those comments, Monti. I do think there was some of that, but I know he himself mostly sticks to it. He's also the guy who plans the week's meals in advance and actually cooks and eats them. Some people are just really fucking organized, I think.
You're manager is a cyborg. I also question whether this is aspirational and how much of his schedule he actually adheres to.
Toggl
I went with this, because starting and stopping timers was just too damn hard.
My mom can schedule unstructured time and stick to it, like this guy. I remember asking her how she got out of bed so easily when she's always chronically exhausted, instead of hitting snooze, and it was like she couldn't understand the question. "What do you mean, why don't I hit snooze? How is there a choice? I don't ask myself if I want to, I just do it." She is high-anxiety and highly organized and sees it all as automatic and like there's no other way any of these things could possibly go. It just doesn't compute.
I structure my life a lot more than I did let's say five years ago, both at work and in my personal life. This is related to parenting and it's also a skill I learned last fall to deal with falling behind a bit at work. But in my case "a lot more" just means recurring reminders for regular tasks, writing up to-do lists if too many incidental things have come up, and sometimes scheduling reminders or blocking out time for bigger tasks that I should focus on.
Reviewing my personal and work calendars, there are 11 things on them this week, not counting meetings someone else put there and Veteran's Day. That's probably 10 more than there were five years ago at this point, but still miles and miles away from scheduling an entire week in one- and two-hour increments. I'd go insane.
I tend to just bill by the comment.
I realized recently that I should have been doing this for my entire career as a grad student and postdoc when I was working on my own projects and the boss just checked in on me now and then, but now that my job involves being constantly interrupted I'm once again at a loss.
Ability to do this with work is definitely very dependent on how senior you are. This guy can decide in advance how he will spend his time because, well, he can decide how he wants to spend his time. He doesn't have senior managers coming up to him with impromptu requests all the time.
He's also the guy who plans the week's meals in advance and actually cooks and eats them.
I mean, I do that and I'm spectacularly disorganised.
Maybe if your scheduling app delivered you a cookie when you did things on time?
Interesting we are all focused on different goals from this anecdote. I keyed in on that, although the point of the calendar could be to be more focused and productive, the problem in the post is tracking billing. It's not about structuring your day to be more productive (but maybe we go all 4 hour work week on it).
A record in a calendar is what you need for billing. Put the record in the calendar, try to adjust it when it gets overrun by fire drills so it is accurate, and stop worrying so much about what minutes go where.
Maybe this Process is to reduce that Process, while providing a log for people above so it is defendable?
I was going to say that organizing your week is a form of work, and that he shouldn't be doing it on Sunday, because that's working outside of work hours, which ought to be discouraged if not outright forbidden. But then I realized he was scheduling his social life with it as well. That's OK, but the scheduling on Sunday should just block off M-F 8-6 or whatever as "Commuting:Work:Commuting" with a hour block at some point in the week to fill in the work schedule for the subsequent week.
The thing I find daunting about making (and keeping) a schedule like this is that I still have no real sense of how long a task will take me. "Grade 10 papers" is anywhere from 2 to 5 hours. "Prep lecture slides" can be 15 minutes or 3 hours. "Write section of paper" can be from 10 minutes to a week. And those are discreet tasks! It's even worse for something like"review new literature on X for next term's syllabus", although I suppose breaking a task like that into 2 hour chunks does make sense.
Some of the uncertainly about task length is due to procrastination, of course, but lots of it isn't.
This may actually be quite pertinent to my interests soon. Apparently the company which bought us recently, which is primarily a fintech company, is very much into logging work done in minute detail.
I scheduled this time for writing an Unfogged comment. Hurray! I got it done in time!
In my experience discretion takes a lot more work than indiscretion.
28: Sure, if we imagine that it's all fiction except for the number that gets billed to a client, this is a lot easier to imagine. It's also a lot less interesting and meaningful.
And how do you bill it? Unrecordable by definition.
34: Oh, absolutely. Billing allocation is about as mundane as you can get. The deep underlying truth to billing allocation is way way more interesting! My underlying truth is that this isn't really about productivity, though, it's about removing a headache and the reasoning for it. Fortunately that would be billable (and so would Sunday work)!
For what it's worth, I find calendars a very poor tool for keeping track of billable time.
These day's I don't need my calendar nearly as much - but at a couple of points I have worked in positions where a fully utilized calendar was a very necessary defensive tool. Both to have any time at all for important but not urgent work to move forward, and to keep the meeting time below, say 30h-40h a week. For a brief shining moment I even had someone to manage the calendar etc. for me which had actually a huge impact (at obvious cost). At that point it wasn't unusual to get triple booking requests, and having help with triage really smoothed things out.
also, 25. I didn't see that somehow.
I still have to bill my time in so far as I'm performing a task that is billable, but the good news is that I no longer have to account for every moment of my work day. There is always a certain element of fiction in my timekeeping, but when I was having to account for every minute of the 7.5 hours at my office, I might as well have been writing Harry Potter fan-fic.
I think you mean 22.5 hours.
My wife worked for the phone company as a supervisor in operator services back when it was still New England Telephone. Every week they planned out their next week in 15 minute blocks, down to including the times they would spend performing the planning/time allocation activity. It was not a great personality-job requirements fit for her. But I guess the highly structured routinization made sense for a mature monopoly with > 1 million employees (if you disregard turning those employees into routinized zombies) but no doubt was part of the reason that the AT&T former parent and the new baby Bells all basically tanked once ATT was split up and faced market competition.
Every week they planned out their next week in 15 minute blocks, down to including the times they would spend performing the planning/time allocation activity.
I do like the idea of an infinite series where you spend a block of time of length t_1 planning your week, a block of length t_2 planning your planning, a block of length t_3 planning your planning of your planning, and hopefully the series converges. Zeno's corporate structure.
I've never had to track billable hours, but I have had to allocate my time to different project codes and it's definitely tricky to estimate. Currently I just have to allocate my time spent on different utility sectors (and administrative/overhead), which is simpler but still a very rough approximation. Almost all of my work is on the same sector, so it's mostly a matter of estimating the balance between that and admin time. I can't imagine doing the kind of scheduling ogged's manager does.
You aren't yet powerful enough to manage ogged. You'd need to turn your mind into a weapon before that could happen. Or, you'd have had to have been born rich.
I'd probably need to either get an MBA or learn to code. No thanks.
tracking billable hours was an interesting shift when working as an independent, because it made pretty explicit the amount of time I wasn't doing anything particularly useful with.
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Last summer Kai brought home a bunch of salamanders from day camp (shouldn't have, did). He's been dutifully caring for them for months, but they've been slowly dying off. We were down to 3.
Kai was keeping them in 2 separate containers because 1 was larger than the others. AB was tired of having the 2 containers (she semi-often would have to change their water, a tiresome, but brief, job), so she combined them, even though Kai was certain this would result in the large one killing a smaller one.
You see where this is going, right?
He's downstairs bawling, including, "I told you this would happen!", and frankly, A. I'm pretty pissed at her, and B. she is not apologizing remotely adequately. She doesn't sound sorry at all. I'm just staying out of it, but this is pretty shitty. Just had to get this off my chest somewhere anonymous(ish).
PS I never would have let him bring them home, so AFAIC this is her problem--she wasn't willing to put her foot down in August, and is now reaping the whirlwind.
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You see where this is going, right?
Actually, I thought it was going in the opposite direction, to produce a lot of baby salamanders.
That's was my thought also. I figured it was going to end with a basement full of amphibians.
This One Weird Trick will tell you if you're an Optimist or a Pessimist.
Not sure if being one step closer to being free of salamanders, or being able to start an illegal salamander breeding mill, is the optimistic position.
I suppose it's too late to go steal another salamander? It's been below freezing for over a day.
Apparently, it's illegal to move a salamander around for fear of spreading disease. Probably should kill both and burn the bodies.
How old is Kai again? And, sorry if this is a dumb question, but AB is a co-parent of some kind and not an older sibling or something, right? Not to second-guess anyone but this seems like a weird situation.
Yes. Small animals should definitely not be fireproof.
I remember when I started at IBM in 1995, and was told that unless I worked on a government project, my hours-worked would be automatically calculated and filled in by a program that fed the "TOTALS" program on the mainframe (and of course, those hours would be 40/wk, regardless of what I actually worked). HOWEVER, if I worked on a government contract, I would have to manually fill those hours out in detail, with what I did during which time, etc, etc. The implication was made clear that if I wanted to have a calm and trouble-free work day, I should avoid at all costs working on government contracts.
I am currently keeping a pair of axolotls for a traveling sibling. They are in separate tanks because otherwise they would have a zillion offspring and then eat the offspring. Pessimism? Optimism? Narcissism? Gourmandism?
60. I have to bill in tenths of an hour (that's six minutes for those of you not on metric time), and each entry has to be to a specific charge code, usually a project code and sub-project code. There are people who get very obsessed about it, and there are apps you can use that will let you press a button when you start on something, and press again to finish (or something -- I don't use them). If you are working on multiple projects it can be hell.
You see where this is going, right?
Oh yes. Same thing once happened with my son's African dwarf frogs, which were kept in the same tank. Since they were both male, I figured, "What could go wrong?" I hadn't reckoned on some sort of alpha v. beta contest: One of them started hogging all of the food, got big and plump at the expense of the other one, which became all sad and skinny and scrawny. And then one day...
Poor Kai! That's upsetting for a kid.
42: Ah, this sounds like a job for that unforgettable classic, Bell System Practice 770-130-301, Sweeping, General:
http://www.long-lines.net/documents/BSP-770-130-301/BSP-770-130-301-p1.html
Not sure if being one step closer to being free of salamanders, or being able to start an illegal salamander breeding mill, is the optimistic position.
It's a thing. I used to know someone who smuggled them from Italy.
65. At what fraction of an hour do you think you spend more time working out your billing than providing a service? Because I'd think tenths would be getting close.
If I had a calendar like that, it would make me literally want to die. I found it stressful yesterday because one of the things on my calendar was "Cake at 3". That's too much pressure.
I found it stressful yesterday because one of the things on my calendar was "Cake at 3". That's too much pressure.
Gosh, Walt, you are a delicate flower!
My life is a blob of unstructured time with semi-regular interruptions dedicated to tasks like "feeding my family." I hack off chunks of time - usually late at night - to get done what I need to do to draw an income and feel productive. In general I stay ahead of the game but from time to time I have to go into crunch mode, which can last for weeks. Such times are highly productive, but leave me spent.
That can lead to high blood pressure. Have you tried ACE inhibitors?
The biggest downside is you need to avoid playing blackjack and may get a persistent cough.
75: WHY WOULD YOU TRY TO INHIBIT MY CHILD???
At the urging of the only worthwhile advisor I ever had as an undergraduate, I scheduled my time like that for about one semester in college. It was the most productive semester ever and I also read classic books at night before turning out the light (very confined social life at the time). I have never really done that again, though.
It's a thing. I used to know someone who smuggled them from Italy.
Heebieville is the proud home to a few species of salamander that are exclusive to our little springs and river.
Actually, now that I think of it, it might have been Spain. It was either Cantabria or Calabria.
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NW and other Harper's-readers, know that their newest article on Bay Area housing is hot garbage.
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The Habsburgs had that problem all the time.
Heebieville is the proud home to a few species of salamander that are exclusive to our little springs and river.
And there's another, better-known, in the pool-feeding spring a few towns over. I wonder if the aquifers and other water habitats were especially conducive to species differentiation.
I can't handle the stress of peep thinking I'm a delicate flower.
87: I was just kidding.
I hope that make you feel better.
Plus also I have learned that axolotls are endangered in the wild mostly because they're tasty, but not endangered as a species because they're easy to raise in captivity and much studied for their regenerative ability. I haven't looked up whether it's legal to raise them for food.
hi dairy queen!
OT: Three days of blood pressure medication and I'm very close to within the legal limits and am only rarely dizzy.
90: which one did they put you on?
Lisinopril. I'm still waiting to see if the coughing will get me.
92: My father takes that one. Several years ago, I came home for Xmas and he seemed to have developed a chronic cough, but the house was really dusty, so I thought it might be allergies. We cleaned everything, even had the curtains dry-cleaned, and then found the bottle.
Just after that visit, driving away, after AJ watched my father pour salt onto his plate and dip pieces of steak into it, he suggested perhaps Dad wouldn't need blood pressure meds if he laid off the salt a bit. (It didn't strike me as odd because he's been doing that my entire life.)
My dad had the same medicine and got the cough. I'm trying to watch my salt. I haven't had any fried potato product in like three weeks.
93: My husband took that and had weird tingling in his arm. Then his doctor switched him to an ARB (Losartan) which was mostly fine but his hand would fall asleep, so he's on a different class.
One doc I know likes to start with ARBs, so it's a bummer that the new syntheses led to contaminants in the products in some of the best ones. But my husband switched to a new drug.
I asked for a big bunch of Xanax and some Klonopin, but I guess you can't just treat the stress.
96: you could ask for an ssri and they might find that helpful. I know someone who did that. Tim felt weird itching on Lisinopril. Less well known side effect than the cough.
I have been itchier. I was blaming the cold, dry air.