During the last 15 years of my career, give or take a meeting or two, I kept a detailed account of hours worked per day. My obsession was such that I even kept an SQLite database with minute details such as longest stretches of time worked, times during the day whether I was more likely to slack off (after lunch of course), and how cycling affected my ability to stay focused. I kept the data to myself, because I learned quite early that I could be very productive with just a handful of hours, and this made me feel guilty. It wasn’t until I stopped working that I realized that my behavior was unlikely to be different than most (in my field anyhow).

In 2002 I backpacked around the world, laptop in tow, and even managed meet all my deliverables. It was in Australia, where the time change was so drastic, that I realized I could work non-stop for 3-4 hours, call it a day, and crank out more code than I would have otherwised achieved in a full day of traditional work. When WiFi was not a thing, I would go to a public library, with no power cable, and work until the battery gave out– about 3.5 hours. At this point, I’d pack up, go back to the hostel, and find a victim to join me for Indian food. The time change worked in my favor, as did having 0 distractions because of the lack of internet.

I mentioned this to a few colleagues, and more than one called me a slacker. However, there was a very senior staff engineer who nodded and said… “no, no…that sounds about right… 3-4 hours of uninterrupted work”.

I carried this “habit” with me for the rest of my career. I would schedule blocks of 3-4 hours to get a ton of work done, and then kinda sorta slack off the rest of the day. I’d go on bike rides, meet friends for coffee, go for walks, etc etc. I won’t say there was no work done after these blocks, but if there was any work done it was likely to be mindless emails or meetings, nothing requiring much thought. Of course, there were exceptions– usually near fast approaching deadlines, but mostly it averaged out.

I felt guilty. Fast forward a few decades and most of my friends thought I was crazy to leave because “you hardly work”. But the reality was a bit more nuanced.

I stopped feeling guilty when I came back from paternity leave a month ago. After another finished deliverable and three months off to mentally flush any lingering responsibilities, I had a clean mental slate. However, on the second day back, the perennial pen and paper were back in my life. In a week, the notebook I kept by my desk was full of ideas, and problems that needed fixing. I could no longer go on a bike ride to reset– instead returning from a training ride involved writing down the inevitable action list I had accumulated, along with some ideas on problems I fixed mid ride. Even the enlarged prostate pees in the middle of the night ended up with writing stuff down. And leasure walks with the family involved staring into the sky pretending I was looking for shapes, when in reality I was trying to figure out if the pathological case in my last commit was O(log n) or most likely O(n^2).

It took me a while to realize that 3 hours of work is not really 3 hours. It’s only 3 hours if you neglect to include the endless hours thinking about work– on the way to the park, while drinking beers with friends, while spoon feeding your child, or sitting on the John. I quickly realized that when I was on at work, there were very few minutes in the day when I wasn’t thinking about work. I just wasn’t sitting down, and so it was easy to fake it with friends and relatives. And this, dear reader, is the main reason that 3-4 hours were still tiring and why I needed a break.

At the end of a day, I had very little energy to take on a hobby, let alone read anything but Jack Reacher novels. This became clear to me when on vacation with friends my wife once told them… “oh, he’s smiling and nodding, but he’s not really here…he’s probably thinking about work.”

p.s. You know who doesn’t take their work home? Firefighters! Here’s Mai visiting his auntie at work.