The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Does anyone else feel guilt over not working the full 8 hours in a laptop job?
Even though I do something very provably useful, and bring in millions for the company while being paid basically entry level, doing something that requires (imo) rare talent, I still feel a lot of guilt that I tend to work only 4-6 hours a day.
Most people I’ve talked to fall into two camps, either telling me it’s fine and I should slack more, or that I have a fake email job and should join a startup instead. Sadly I did the startup path for many years and got burned pretty hard.
Anyway, seems like most others in my corporation also don’t work a full 40 hours but, I detest this sort of fakery most of us feel forced to do. I wish I could be honest about how I do the tasks I’m assigned, often going above and beyond, but it just doesn’t take me 40 hours.
Absolutely not
The entity you work for will happily extract every (measurement of choice) unit of value out of you. You should do the same. Something something that's what makes markets work!
If it helps, don't view your salary as a direct exchange of money for a given amount of your time. View it as a combo of "paying for time" and "retainer to have you hanging around to be available immediately when needed".
Yeah the latter view helps me quite a bit more. I know that cynically the former view is correct it just... feels terrible to actually live/think that way. Part of the reason labor is fundamentally disadvantaged in these relationships, I think.
Yeah this is true. It's not spiritually pure, that's for sure. Although it is also somewhat emotionally satisfying, humans love a tit for tat.
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I rarely work more than 2 hours. That includes Zoom meetings. I am in big corporate with amazingly terrible development process.
So do you feel guilty about it??
Absolutely not.
How come?
They decided to have a byzantine waterfall with absurd security policies that mean you are always waiting for someone else. Not me. It is not my job to educate the stupid while they pay me.
Hah that's fair. I suppose I have trouble seeing things in such a cynical light, but yeah.
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Getting paid by the hour is fakery no matter what, unless you literally keep pace with an assembly line or man a human-to-human interaction post for the entirety of your workday. I try to fulfill my obligations exactingly, putting in the hours specified and the effort to match...but what exactly is the expected level of effort? Nobody quantifies it. It's a nebulous "so long as deadlines are met, you did your part, and if not, then it's down to the quality of your excuses". Does it matter whether I do it in 4 hours or in 8? Does it matter whether I'm available to my co-workers for 8 hours a day? Does it matter whether I put effort in at a constant rate, or can it vary over the course of a day so long as the overall effort matches expectations? And again, how to quantify it? Are my colleagues shirking, faking their hours, when they do small-talk in the office? Am I shirking when I lean back, look outside the window and daydream? Are we all shirking when we take circuitous routes through the building to get a little exercise? OTOH, am I putting in overtime when I think about work in the shower, while driving, or in bed?
In the end, getting paid by the hour is a gross oversimplification, albeit perhaps a necessary one, and the only thing that matters is whether your superior is satisfied with your performance.
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My company is planning to adopt MS Team, any tips on gaming it so I appear more active than not?
Back in the day, I had a very lax job. I would click on my desktop, so no icons were selected, and put something heavy on my spacebar. This has worked on 3/3 of corporate laptops I've used.
You can also open a word/TXT file and do this, if for some reason the desktop doesn't work. But after a few hours it'll get really laggy.
These days, I work at a busier job with co-workers who don't seem to give a shit if I'm online or not, as long as things get done on time and I'm responsive to messages. This is infinitely better than the job where I worked 2 hours a day, but couldn't leave my apartment in case someone messaged me so I just played civilization for the other 6 hours but without being able to properly relax.
I thought that would be the life but it was awful, although I'm a neurotic striver so in retrospect, no shit.
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Any of the following:
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Get the app on your mobile phone so you can quickly respond (and/or buy time). While I'm a contractor I spend most of my time at home doing whatever I like unless someone needs doing. This might not work in larger company's that actually monitor mouse movements/keystrokes per hour or something.
If you have literally any prospects in your respective labour market you should immediately leave any jobs that do this. What a fucking nightmare.
Mine does that, and it's pretty harmless. When you don't interact with your laptop for a while, your MS Teams status goes to "absent", and that's it. AFAIK they don't record it.
lol I guess I should have qualified.
I assume teams yellow status is just the default. I'm so desensitized to its existence.
I had in mind call center tier metrics and associated oversight and punishment for not hitting metrics or having too much idle time, etc
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If you put meeting blocks on your calendar it takes longer to show you as idle.
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Mostly I feel bored and that I'm wasting my life on the days I don't put in a solid day of work. Why be here and put up with all the nonsense of being in an office if I'm not actually accomplishing something? I'd be better off doing a solid 4 and going home, but that's not an option.
Ahh yeah, I am blessed to work hybrid and be able to leave early. It's worth looking for a job like that, trying to pretend to be busy at the office is horrid.
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