Environment makes a huge difference for me: recently bought myself one of those SAD lamps and switched to working 08:00-16:00 rather than 09:00-17:00 and my general mood has increased 10x; leading to a significant productivity/motivation boost.
I'm not saying that a new lamp will fix your problems but try to be mindful of your working environment and conditions and see what changes you can make to make yourself generally more comfortable.
Other examples include finding a way to further compartmentalise your work, for instance by becoming uncontactable on your work channels outside of work hours.
Further, improve your general health: drink more water and less coffee, make sure you see the sun for at least half an hour a day, take vitamins, socialise more, do more exercise; all the usual health-nutjob advice in as large a dose as you can stand - all of these things have tangible effects on mood which is a huge player in motivation.
You said sleep has a big impact so try getting really strict about your bed time and waking up on time. Try anything and everything and don't be put off when 90% of the new habits you try to cultivate don't stick. You'll figure out what is important to maintaining your mental health by experimentation and observation.
Concentrated mindfulness and a rigid attitude towards work/life separation have done more for my executive dysfunction than any revolutionary to-do list app or task organising framework.
If you take the view that rights are granted by society and not inherent then you are technically correct that rights don't really exist. But then neither does money or law. This kind of nihilistic reductivism isn't particularly useful.
What I mean by "rights" are those that are taken to be so by common consensus - e.g. those in the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes the right to life; to deny someone shelter is to threaten that right.
To withhold shelter from people and then rent it back to them is a racket, plain and simple: safety in return for money, underwritten by a threat of violence.
I thought the whole deal with this society thing was a collective endeavour for the common good; structures that hold private interest above common good seem blatantly counter-productive.
> I guess the only answer, as some others have mentioned, is a predictable organization system for the documentation, which crucially is actually taught to newcomers.
Precisely - just as you'd on-board new hires with information about codes of practise for development (code styles, nuances of internal git practice, etc.) you ought to at least have a "Contribution Guidelines" or similar doc that sets out how to structure and record information in the docs.
There are two sides to the coin with not being able to find things - sometimes it is, as you say, because you are bad at searching for things, but sometimes things haven't been made in an easily searchable way. To name just three:
- sections with ambiguous names;
- multiple sections with the same name; or
- information is split across separate sections/pages.
Worst case is that there is detailed documentation but it's all in the comments of twenty different Jira tickets.
I do agree that user docs and dev docs should be separated though, as should specifications and development logs.
As the only person on my team who routinely documents my work (or at least who does so in a place visible to others), I definitely agree. I get very tired of people asking me things about my work where the reply is "it's in the docs, please check here: <link>." Makes me feel like a directory.
Designers to design, draughtspeople to draught, archivists to archive.
Engineering entails a lot of secretarial work that has been "streamlined" by expecting engineers to do it themselves rather than employing professional secretaries to do so. The end result is that it is often left un-done.
The "enforcers" you talk about are basically secretaries, no? Trained individuals with enough understanding of the work at hand to record and file it in a context-aware manner.
Reminds me of the "surgical team" model from The Mythical Man Month [1] wherein there is a suite of people provided to every engineer to minimise their work outside of design and implementation. (At least that's how I remember it, it's a few years since I read it)
It doesn't bother me particularly and I must admit I barely noticed it (hence no original CW) but there is more to other people than I could ever understand; if I can take thirty seconds of my time to prevent someone seeing something that makes them uncomfortable (especially given it is not exactly expected in this context), why not do so?
It costs me so little and could benefit others so much, the same as most other good manners in our culture, like saying "please," and "thank you."
That is a very reasonable point and I have been trying hard to be objective and avoid "grass is greener" thinking.
From the short periods when I have worked in offices in-person, you are correct that the lion's share of the time is spent working alone on projects just as it is when working from home. However, where I did internships, I made friends among my colleagues and would eat lunch with them (and Fridays everyone went to the pub for a longer lunch); further, people would talk to each other in passing while we were working and there was a distinct feeling of "collective enterprise" and solidarity that helped to push through the inevitable tedious aspects of the work. Even though the socialisation wasn't often at all work-related, it made the work easier and more enjoyable. I do accept that this argument is dependant on working in a company whose social culture is suited to you, which is not easy to find.
All that said, there is nothing that can compare to WFH for "deep work," where you know what you are doing and just need time to get on with it withoug anyone breathing down your neck. For that reason, I don't think I could ever work full-time on-site and would always aim for a balanced hybrid model, if given the choice.
I guess a lot of it comes down to solitude vs loneliness: the line between the two can be distressingly thin.
For sure! Why can't it be "we have updated/created X policy, please find it here: <link to document in policy repository>" ? Is that so much harder?
Most document management systems have a notification system built-in so that you can automatically email your all-staff mailing list when there is an update. It's very much a solved problem.
My current workplace culture (at least in the HW dept) is much more towards zero-documentation than anything I have experienced before and it has been a nightmare as a relatively new employee.
I waste so much time in reviews because I have done something non-standard despite having checked the standards docs but it turns out the standards have changed and no one bothered to update the docs. We don't even write specifications for products before we start work on them; if I make some architectural changes during the design, there is nowhere to record it. Drives me insane.
IMO there are two things that should be documented about any project:
1. The product itself: at least its interfaces, features and general architecture
2. The process of design: what changes were made vs the original spec, why, and when
If you want to know anything contained in that set of information here, you have to know who worked on the project so you can ask them about it, and then they have to be able to remember. It's not uncommon that changes are suggested and discussed multiple times within a project, or that changes are made but the reasons why are forgotten before the project is even complete.
I often joke that projects here are more "observed" than managed.
Exactly as you say - emails/meetings are ideal tools for discussion and decision making but for lasting records, you need documentation.
Interestingly it has prompted some reflection on my part about the whole remote vs on-site work debate: my entire contact with my colleagues with the exception of rare days on-site is via the internet. This makes me wonder about how the continued lack of genuine, regular face-to-face interaction will affect the business long-term; I already feel a distinct social divide between those of us who were at the company long term pre-WFH vs those of us (including me) who joined afterwards.
I definitely notice I engage significantly more with project that require me to communicate more with my colleagues and I can only imagine how that is amplified if I was actually in the same room as them (I entered the workforce in late 2020 and have never worked full-time in an office longer than summer internships).
The same goes for hobbies - things such as outdoor persuits with an in-person social aspect (e.g. caving, cycling, climbing etc) are millions of times more fulfilling for me than those that are equally social but online only (e.g. weekly video games and TTRPG night with my university friends).
Particularly eye-opening for me because I have very much grown up online and I guess I just didn't notice the difference between socialising online vs in person until I began to socialise online significantly more than in-person.
So yeah this article really inspired some introspection on my part! As you said: good to recognise distraction vs engagement; artificial vs organic.
CW: gore in header image, about one page long. PgDn gets it out of view on a 1080p screen
Posted on HN a while back. It's slightly bleak in outlook but it was what finally pushed me to take serious steps to reduce my presence online. Got rid of all my apps that weren't strictly for comms and deleted most of my socials accounts. I already feel better for the change.
I agree with you in some ways and disagree in others. In yet more ways, I am undecided. However, I am convinced that this is probably not the best setting for a discussion like this that will achieve anything more than raising people's blood pressure - I hope you'll agree with me on that.
Oh yeah for sure I am not disputing that this is the way that the system works - the whole thing rests on the compromise point between the employer's margin and the employee's wage. Both need each other to some degree and so a compromise is reached which is the market value of labour.
That said, other models of system are available - worker coops and other models of employee-owned business can and do exist. They have their own merits and flaws though - nothing in this world is perfect.
This experience relies on there being other people of your age or others who have the same attitudes to online socialisation. I am the only person in my department younger than thirty and we all work fully remote; I feel a distinct genrational barrier when talking to colleagues online that is not at all present in person.
I'm not saying that a new lamp will fix your problems but try to be mindful of your working environment and conditions and see what changes you can make to make yourself generally more comfortable.
Other examples include finding a way to further compartmentalise your work, for instance by becoming uncontactable on your work channels outside of work hours.
Further, improve your general health: drink more water and less coffee, make sure you see the sun for at least half an hour a day, take vitamins, socialise more, do more exercise; all the usual health-nutjob advice in as large a dose as you can stand - all of these things have tangible effects on mood which is a huge player in motivation.
You said sleep has a big impact so try getting really strict about your bed time and waking up on time. Try anything and everything and don't be put off when 90% of the new habits you try to cultivate don't stick. You'll figure out what is important to maintaining your mental health by experimentation and observation.
Concentrated mindfulness and a rigid attitude towards work/life separation have done more for my executive dysfunction than any revolutionary to-do list app or task organising framework.