What's the biggest time waste on your workday?

Useless meetings.

The worst is where some middle manager or project manager or business analyst calls in 20 different people into an hour long meeting. 5 people might actually get some meaningful benefit from the meeting, let alone actually utter a single word.

You try to skip it, but then said organizer pings you asking why you aren't present.

The same meeting is scheduled daily, because reasons. Never mind that there has been no meaningful progress or update to the project during the last 24 hours.

The general distractions of the web/news/life.

One thing I recently realized is the secondary effect of gmail being open in a browser tab.

I like to be aware of my email in real-time so I can respond to pressing situations, therefore I keep gmail open in my browser's first tab. However, the secondary effect is that my browser is always open, and the distractions of the internet are just one new tab away.

I recently started using TwoBird as my gmail client, which now keeps my email and my web browser separated. Yes, everyone who's been using a stand-alone email application has known this for years, but it's new to me.

I'm happy that I can now live/work/breathe without having a web browser open at all times.

All project management tools introduce enormous overhead for me. All of them, they're clunky to use, either too general purpose or too specific, and when you need that bit of info you never know where exactly your colleague put it. Trello, Jira, Notion, even searching for something in Google Docs is a massive context switch and just feels dreadful with those sluggish single page applications that make laptop fans spin in five second bursts while they load.

So I have my own todo.txt with a plain old bullet list that I keep open in tmux+vim, and at the end of the day if there's some time left I update all the other tools.

I would have a lot fewer distractions and get much more done if we could just drop the pretext of "working" full time.

The "wasted" part of my day is simply being extremely inefficient and dicking around simply because it's expected to be in the office or available online. I would get much more done if my job was to hit milestones and goals (perhaps with some designated "office hours"). And then I have the rest of my time to do what I need to. Fortunately the "dicking around" involves taking online courses, personal "stretch" projects, etc.. but still.

I don't want to sound bitter. I have flexibility when I start/end my work day. On any given day I can peace out at 1pm or show up at noon (so long as I'm not blowing anyone off). But that's on _any given day_, not _every day_. And so the repeated, iterated game that's going on between me and employer reaches a nash equilibrium where I do just "enough" that I'm advancing my career in the organization and little enough that I have enough lax time in the day to do whatever I can online for my personal life (coursework, shopping, personal tech projects/experiments, enrichment reading, etc).

Contextual switches.

I work on a variety of development projects with sometimes entirely different technology stacks, goals, people, etc. Sometimes there's overlap, often there's not. It can be daunting jumping between entirely different sets of technical challenges, goals, and conceptual framing of problems.

I'm working for a big aerospace company and a lot of it (tech-wise) feels like/is a huge time waste, even more so the last four months where I've been working remotely.

1) Turn-on the computer, log in Windows, enter the overcomplicated encryption software password, launch IE6 to go to a webpage which will launch the VPN native app. (at least 5 minutes)

2) Opening Microsoft Project takes ages since the Project Server is in Europe. Then there's some kind of macro that has to run which in the end fails because I'm not on-site. You pick a plan to open it, it takes another 30 seconds, another macro/prompt/check fails. The whole process takes a good 3-5 minutes until you can actually work on it and I have 18+ plans to manage.

3) You can run reports of said Project plans and export them in Excel format but the formatting is all junky. You have unused columns, titles, hidden columns. I had to create a macro to import the exported file, import all the data, and creating a pivot table automatically instead of doing it manually X times a day.

4) We're still using Office 2010 while working a lot with Excel. The limitations of the 10 years old software is a real pain. Do you want to manage two Excel files in two separate instances of Excel? You'll have to open a separate instance first then open a file. You also can't use all the new formulas or enjoy the improvement made on the ones that already exist. I get that Office licences are not cheap and the "Fix What’s Broken, Don’t Break What’s Working " motto but the time wasted on all this by everyone working for the group worldwide must be way higher.

5) Enterprise network is slow on-site, it's even worse on a VPN. Opening up a simple Excel/PPT file takes a good five minutes.

6) We're still using Lync, it's easier to send a screenshot/file via email than using this nightmare of a software.

7) IE6 is the "default" browser for everything

8) With the COVID-19 situation, we're not allowed anymore to use conference tools while being connected on the VPN. You have to save all the files you need for the call locally, log off the VPN, join the call, and then re-upload everything on the network.

Constant/Regardless Of Lockdown:

- Filling out timesheets and the stress behind the feeling of having to meet a minimum number of hours each month.

Before the lockdown:

- ~2-2.5hr daily total for commute. Includes 20min walk to and from subway, and 40-60min to and from subway ride. Add on the stress of dealing with noise, obnoxious people, putrid smells on the subway, etc and it's especially mentally/emotionally draining.

- Useless meetings that only add to the charade of an organizer trying prove their value/that they are "working". 90% of the time it's a waste of everyone's time.

- Small talk disruptions. Tend to last at a minimum 20min and throw off flow. Not always a negative, as sometimes the conversations can be fun.

- Being targeted by petty politics. FYI, I keep to myself and get my shit done. I don't like getting wrapped up in unnecessary things of the sort. Hard to quantify in terms of time waste, nonetheless it's soul sucking and results in lowering my productivity and me ruminating on ways to leave the company/become self sufficient.

- Office noise. Lowers productivity.

- Indoor air quality/"sick building". Lowers productivity/cognition/health.

- Using personal device for tethered internet access for personal laptop. Slower connection, but is clear of employer's snooping on traffic and communications. And with using my own laptop there's no dealing with sudo/admin restrictions and having to place tickets to packages everytime a package requires permissions.

- Job hunting.

Post Lockdown (much more productive, at ease, and content with work life):

- Giving attention to my overly social, going blind, much loving (though it gets overwhelming lol) street cat.

- Cooking home meals/meal prep

- Checking in on family and loved ones.

- Working on assignments/projects/research/building tools. Not a problem/time waste though. I actually enjoy the work I do and the client projects. The projects are 90% of the the time for the benefit of society. So imo, the work has meaning and it doesn't weigh in my conscience.

Poorly defined and incomplete functional requirements with mare hints of the expected non functional requirement

Leads to: - Frustrated developers who thought they were done and were doing good - Frustrated QA engineers who can't certify the feature as written - Frustrated product owners who were assured the feature was "done" - Frustrated management who is told it will take longer than promised

The biggest time waste for me is the distraction caused by working in a cubicle without a door.

Slack semi-async back-and-forth exchanges for hours about things that could be solved in 5 mins with a sync voice call.

The build time for my app, if I run all the unit tests and checks is really long. In the order of 5 minutes I think. This is a real pain, so usually I try to tackle a quick TODO (like an easy code review) while the build is running, but...

... context switching is also a real pain. Slack is a killer for that because I obsessed over seeing the little dot on the icon. "What if it's really important? What if someone needs support to get unblocked now?", so I always check incoming messages. This one is probably mostly on me having some mild OCD or something.

I follow the “ski-rental problem” rule on automation - if it takes 12 hours to automate something I will wait till I have wasted 12 hours of manual labor doing it, and the automate the beejezus out of it.

It’s not an exact rule but it removes anxiety and doubt which are a lot more damaging than the manual labor itself, freeing up the mental cycles for what really matters.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ski_rental_problem

The biggest one is repeated meetings to go over things with people who are not capable of written communication. It's particularly egregious now, when everyone is 100% remote.

It's not that much extra work to grab a few screenshots and write a paragraph or two. Then it also becomes permanent, and not ephemeral. Bonus points if you can take the extra minute to mark up a screenshot or draw a sketch.

Next to no unit or local testing.

It's a Java monolith multiple teams work on at once and someone several steps removed from our team decided to set maven-surefire-plugin to fork for every test and not reuse forks in the POM all our projects inherit from in 2014. That causes a ~1s delay per test (even @Ignore'd ones) where they used to take less close to a millisecond, and I've tracked down the "business exception" commits in our projects that came in the months after that disabled the test phase entirely, in order to overcome the build time delay. The rest is history. Now we've got projects where 98% of the tests laying about in the repo are dysfunctional lies.

Couple that with using Spring across multiple independently built modules multiple teams commit to and you're looking at one or more hours between committing a change and finding out whether or not the latest build deployed to an environment successfully starts so you can test your change.

To limit meetings, and unnecessary, distracting conversations, one way that I've found that individual contributors (engineers, artists, writers etc.) can segment their day is by splitting it between hours where they'll work on their individual tasks, and hours where they'll assist others.

For example, in practice this would look like: If your team has a project manager, then explain the situation to them... tell them that you won't take meetings after 12pm unless it is for some kind of an major emergency. Similarly, tell your teammates that you won't go to meetings after 12pm unless they are stuck on a problem. Ask everyone to schedule time on your calendar if they want to talk to you - and it'll have to be before 12pm.

If you don't control your own time, then other people will.

Fuzzy interfaces with my product team

No one can agree on the definitions for the following regarding features and bugs: in production, ready for development, ready for QA, blocked, cannot reproduce. Jira simply exacerbates this problem by giving the appearance of the opposite.

At the end of the day, progress is only made when engineers turn ideas into applications, so the buck ultimately lands with us each and every time. However, we are not experts on product development so any criticism we may have regarding the process is not only misinformed but detrimental to our team spirit ...

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

In work in medical devices so we have to do a lot of documentation. In order to stay “lean” we have only a few tech writers so at every project the engineers have to figure what docs to produce and then push them through various review processes. This takes a lot of time so the most senior engineers are spending way more time on the documentation process than they do thinking about technology. The tech almost feels like a side effect.

And in every project there is a ton of discussion about what regulatory process to use. Instead of figuring this out beforehand usually it holds up the whole development process for a long time. It can be really frustrating.

Our checkin process is abysmal. 2 hour regression that you can’t avoid. Several additional test suites that you have to run manually which, if you break them, you will hear about. Perforce version control is terrible compared to Git and makes branches difficult.

Tons of time wasted reverse engineering what the developers did, because they don’t document decisions and protocols between modules in any precise way.

Project planning is big show for management and ends up very disconnected from reality. So many status updates. Sigh.

Creating a complex, but exciting solution for a problem that doesn't exist. Sometimes I waste half year or more in a bad research direction that I shouldn't have taken.

If you are struggling with distractions consider this advice from Paul Graham:

I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room that I use to check mail or browse the web.

http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html

Responding to customer sales inquiries. I'm a hacker, not a salesperson, but working for startup means I have to switch hats and give a pitch 30% of my week. Why is it a waste? Because I suck at it. My company doesn't have real salespeople so we all pick up the slack. I realize it translates into putting food on my table, but I'm so bad at it that I consider it a waste.

First, I must admit, I'm reading some RSS feeds. At least the headlines. Sometimes it's unrelated to work, but mostly it's about tech somehow educating and inspiring. Personally I would say, it helped me to keep track of what is going on, what is trending and the best thing: Sometimes I find a nice piece of software that I haven't known about.

Back to things that I consider waste of time:

1. Bikeshedding Have you ever had a discussion about timezones with a solution designer? It's everytime the same: "We need localtime because system x is doing it and it's confusing to compare it" (no, you don't! You need to store them with timezone information and solve the human problem in presentation)

2. Discussing the need for bigger changes Yep. Your agile-developed system is running for some time and you see how it's being used and notice: It works, but it could be much better.

So you start a meeting others here describe as waste of time, because the result is "no" and the lasting result is, that somebody might keep the idea for later because there is potential (so not completely wasted).

But anyway, the time to prepare what you want to express in a way even managers can understand is annoying.

Coworkers often tell me, my ideas are inspiring and they would want to see them implemented. I feel it shatters because they are too big and sometimes cause efforts for other times because they have to change something so coordination is needed etc.

3. Finding workarounds for technical restrictions given by the company or project Development workspace is virtual and has a proxy with whitelisting for internet access. Things like Python's pip are useless. So you setup a proxy on your local machine and build up a reverse tunnel.

More common: Doing things on machines without root access. You have to figure out how you get information why something is not working but logs are not accessible. Nope. You have to ask someone with at maximum your understanding of the problem to assist you.

Closing: I consider myself as maybe 50% productive, but compared to results of others, I'm feeling much more effective, when I'm doing something. Not mentioning when I'm motivated and very concentrated. These are the moments where it feels like I'm getting the work for a whole week done in one day.

Thanks for reading

Slack is the most counterproductive tool ever for me. I cant turn it off or ignore it because my manager will be upset. Im spammed constantly with notifications from all the channels Im supposed to monitor and most the traffic isnpointless chatter. I really wonder if anyone at my company is even getting any work done.

Begging people to follow through on things they've committed to do.

I can't wait until I can afford better, reliable help.

Taking a 10 minute break to make coffee or see what my daughter is doing which inadvertently turns to 30 mins to 1 hour since she won't let me go back, and if I just happen to watch tv during that time I end up wasting nearly my whole day.

It's the reason why I work very late nights now.

Checking Hacker News>New multiple times a day and following all the interesting links.

As a developer, it's waiting to receive customer specs from management. Sometimes I think we should just get the specs directly.

Clicking "yes i accept the cookies" on average 150 times per day.

I'll take dealing with toxic, aggressive blowhards for $300, Alex.

Electronic medical record post-click data load time

Stand ups. (We are an SRE department)

Deploying my tests apps to heroku

Actually filling up workday.

Jira tickets beureucracy

Meetings, duh.

Underspecified tasks. Companies like to pretend that devs should "own the solution" but in reality there's a lot of coordination involved and you can't just make things up. Trying to find a way to get feedback from everyone just to get started is a huge waste that someone like a product owner should handle