Spending max 50% of the time on maintenance⌗

What has been going on for the past few weeks is that I started working less. Less, but more quality.

Sure, I survive, but I don’t thrive.

I’d like to keep the same volume of work. Make it solid.

I want to work 4 hours per day, and spend them on surviving the week.

Then, I want to spend 4 more hours on thriving; on actually building stuff.

I take inspiration from Google’s Service Reliability Engineering practices:

The result of our approach to hiring for SRE is that we end up with a team of people who (a) will quickly become bored by performing tasks by hand, and (b) have the skill set necessary to write software to replace their previously manual work, even when the solution is complicated. SREs also end up sharing academic and intellectual background with the rest of the development organization. Therefore, SRE is fundamentally doing work that has historically been done by an operations team, but using engineers with software expertise, and banking on the fact that these engineers are inherently both predisposed to, and have the ability to, design and implement automation with software to replace human labor.

By design, it is crucial that SRE teams are focused on engineering. Without constant engineering, operations load increases and teams will need more people just to keep pace with the workload. Eventually, a traditional ops-focused group scales linearly with service size: if the products supported by the service succeed, the operational load will grow with traffic. That means hiring more people to do the same tasks over and over again.

To avoid this fate, the team tasked with managing a service needs to code or it will drown. Therefore, Google places a 50% cap on the aggregate “ops” work for all SREs—tickets, on-call, manual tasks, etc. This cap ensures that the SRE team has enough time in their schedule to make the service stable and operable. This cap is an upper bound; over time, left to their own devices, the SRE team should end up with very little operational load and almost entirely engage in development tasks, because the service basically runs and repairs itself: we want systems that are automatic, not just automated. In practice, scale and new features keep SREs on their toes.

Google’s rule of thumb is that an SRE team must spend the remaining 50% of its time actually doing development.

For me, these “ops” tasks are:

  1. Minimum satisfaction for part-time job (15 hours)
  2. Handling company outages (5 hours)

I want to leave my part-time job⌗

I want to leave my job because I feel better working on my company. I feel like I’m building something that I own and that will benefit me for years; rather than building something that will benefit someone else for years.

New day structure⌗

I will try it seriously this week.

15:00 - 16:00 (1h) - wake up
16:00 - 17:00 (1h) - FocusMate session or weekly stand up
17:00 - 20:00 (3h) - maintenance tasks

I will kill myself for this reason⌗

Hm… I’m stuck, now.

Because my family doesn’t have fixed hours for eating, I cannot know in advance if someone will ask me “HE CAN YOU HELP ME PUT THE TABLE” or “CAN YOU HELP ME MAKE SOMETHING TO EAT”.

It is very hard for me to work in these conditions, because I know that I will be interrupted at any moment.

I said it a lot… I HATE THIS. I fucking hate this. It makes me want to put my fist on the table super hard. I hate it. This makes me want to kill myself. Stop interrupting me. For the love of god. What I really hate, is when I get “softly” interrupted. “Oh, can you help me with this, for 5 minutes?”. Then I get back to work. Then “oh help me with that for 5 minutes?”. Then I get back to work. Etc…

I believe that I need to have very strict guidelines.

NO, I will not help you. I’m in a 1 hour block of work. Don’t ask me for help.

This is not practical, since I work in the living room.

The solution is to put myself in my room, and not getting out. If someone asks me, I explain the situation: “sorry I cannot go out, I am working. I am available in 25 minutes. Eat without me”.

Once I go out of my room every hour to take my break, I can evaluate the situation (do you need help with preparing the dinner?)

So, let’s get back to my dream day structure

15:00 - 16:00 (1h) - wake up
16:00 - 17:00 (1h) - FocusMate session or weekly stand up
17:00 - 20:00 (3h) - maintenance tasks

------- here: maybe eating. I will decide this by taking breaks and looking around. Once I finish eating, I help with cleaning everything, then, I go back to work

I will kill myself again⌗

The second thing that I hate, is the period after eating.

I CANNOT bring myself back to working “oh, I need to digest”.

And people ask me stuff. And there is the TV on. And blah blah blah blah. FUCK IT.

I will help get everything clean, and go straight back into my room.

This is not the evening for me, this is a day of work; I have no time for family living. I’m very sorry for both myself and my family. But I have no choice.

I have to choices, actually:

1 - continue working like this (3-4 painful hours per day), but still talk with my family. Ah, and I have no future perspective. I’m just surviving. 2 - work hard, in a new way (8 hours of focused hard work). No talk with family. Yes, sorry, this is not the weekend. I have a future, and I have a chance of slowly aligning myself with others’ working hours so that I have a agreeable life.

My decision is taken⌗

I will do my crazy work regimen.

I don’t care if I get called to eat.

No, my hours are not done.

I will not go out.

I am cleaning my desk⌗

RIGHT NOW! I want to change, now!

I don’t have time to wait anymore.

I have wasted enough of my life in pain already.

Getting a flat⌗

A miracle solution would be to get my flat, and use it all week long — I would live on my term.

Then, on the weekend, I can start living with others.

The obvious disadvantage with this is that I will die out of loneliness… Maybe. I might not really care.

How did the great men achieve their work? They seem to have isolation in common.

Another thing that I hate⌗

My desk is too high.

It’s literally causing me physical pain.

I want to destroy it.

I’m going for real!!!⌗

I’m going now, to get a clean working environment.

No more distraction.