Following up on my recent post on Tactics against burnout, I'd like to shed some light on the aspect of working hours. In the tech space, it seems popular to boast with insane work durations. "Mine is longer than yours", anyone? Rob Ashton disagrees with this behaviour, as do I. What he describes in his article "A note on working hours and working at home" is basically an example of what is called "ROWE", a Results-Only Work Environment. (You can read all about ROWE in the book "Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution".) In short, work should always be about the results you generate, not about the time you are (seemingly) busy. If you can finish your tasks within 5 hours, there's no sense in doing 8 more just to impress someone (whom anyway?). I can't see any contradiction in his approach to the Github article with which he "passionately disagrees", though. The article is even titled "Hours are bullshit" and in it, Zach Holman explains: "When you're in the right mindset, your best day of coding can trump weeks of frustrated keyboard-tapping. Again, it's not about how long you're busy but how effective you are. Both guys also have similar conclusions: Zach: "By allowing for a more flexible work schedule, you create an atmosphere where employees can be excited about their work." Rob: "When I decide what I'm doing with regards to work (when summer hits), I find it hard to believe I'll be working at any company who is enforcing 9-5, or have some rigidly described "flexi-time" as part of their contract in an effort to seem cool." Okay, one sentence in Zach's post might be easily misunderstood: "Ultimately it should lead to more hours of work, with those hours being even more productive." In my experience, having the freedom to decide when to work often actually leads to more time spent working than in a normal 9-to-5 frame. Nobody is productive all the time, right? When I start to feel tired at 15:30, I don't have to spend the remaining time mindlessly staring at my screen or scrolling through Google Plus for another 90 minutes, just to leave as soon as the clock strikes 5. In the long run, this just makes people hate their job. Instead, I take a break, go for a walk or maybe even spend some time at home with my family. Rob obviously handles this similarly. Now, if I don't have other important things, I'll continue where I left off later. I might now work for another 90 minutes, but maybe also for 120 or 180. Because I'm working at a time that's right for me and because my efforts have a visible effect. Which lets me keep loving my work. Yes, this blurs the line between work and the other important things in my life. Because my work is actually one of them. And I think that's what Zach meant with "Working weekends blur into working nights into working weekdays, since none of the work feels like work." Work isn't something evil that keeps me from enjoying life, it's an integral part of it. Or as Markus Cerenak puts it in "Warum das Konzept “Work-Life Balance” ein Irrtum ist." -- "Why the concept of work/life balance is a falsity": "When you follow your passion, you don't have a need for balancing."

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I'm a stoic. Have been for a long time, will ever be. "Love it, change it, or leave it." That's my motto. I hate listening to people complain. Complain about their job, complain about their neighbours' kids, complain about their car mechanic, complain about the economy, complain about the weather. Please stop it. STFU. Fortunately, D. Keith Robinson wrote "A Short Manual" on how to effectively stop ineffective complaining. It comes down mostly to being honest with yourself and with the people around you.

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Being an entrepreneur in the tech space means working 60 to 80 hours a week and hustling from one opportunity to the next. That's what many people think. That's what many entrepreneurs in the tech space think. It's what I thought, too, when I started freistil IT in 2010. The temperature started rising. It felt like a fever. And I mean that in the literal sense. One busy day, my body started heating up and I started to feel weary and devoid of energy. It felt similar to a flu, but I had no other flu symptoms on top of the 40 degrees. I remembered that I had experienced this before. Back then, I went to a doctor and had blood samples taken. No conclusive results at all. Now that it happened again, I started to recognize a pattern: This was how my body alerted me that I was hitting my limits. So I dropped what ever I was sweating about, went straight to bed and switched to private mode completely. No email, no phone calls, no pondering business issues. Soon, the fever vanished and I slowly got into business again, carefully ramping up my workload. Since then, it never happened again because I've become much more aware of what drains me of energy and motivation, and because I learned how to replenish my mental fuel. Andrew Dumont describes his experience with this issue in his blog entry "Avoiding Burnout". These are his tactics to stay in good shape: Morning Workouts An Evening Walk Fiction Reading A Day A Week Intellectual Hobbies Small Wins A Healthy Diet Limiting Decisions Yearly Unplugs While I'm doing many of these myself already, the yearly unplugging is something of which I still need to make a habit. When work -- even hard work -- is fun and fulfilling, it's sort of addictive. But Andrew is right in that work as an entrepreneur needs to be more than just hard: It's taken me years to realize that overnight success is fictional. Overnight success comes after years of hard, sustainable work.

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swissmiss: Ever wished you could easily find an animated GIF for a specific reaction? YES! This is quite wonderful. Claps.

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Sysadmins offen happen upon simple tasks for which there's no actual shell command. For example, you may want to run a command after a random delay of up to 3 minutes. Well, there's sleep and there's $RAND, so you'll probably quickly solve that problem. If you need to do this more often, you'll likely build some kind of script to make this task as easy as possible. Being an awesome sysadmin, Steve Kemp not only wrote a bunch of small sysadmin tools for frequent needs but also published them on Github: ago: Show how long ago a file/directory was modified in a human-readable fashion. dupes: Report on duplicate files, via a SHA1 hash of the contents, recursively. empty-dir: Indicate, via return code, whether a given directory is empty or not. maybe: In a similar vain to true and false the maybe command exits with a status code of zero or one, depending on a random number. multi-ping: Ping a host, regardless of whether it is an IPv6 or IPv4 host. mysql-slave-check: If the current host is a MySQL slave this script will test that the slave replication is still working. randpass: Generate a single random password via /dev/urandom. since: Show the new output since previously reading a file. This is useful for keeping track of logfile updates. splay: Sleep for a random amount of time, limited by the given max value. (Default is 5 minutes). ssl-expiry-date: Report the date, and number of days, until the given SSL certificate expires. timeout: Timeout allows you to run a command which will be killed after the given number of seconds. until-success: Repeat the specific command until it succeeds - run at least once always. which-shell: Identify the shell we're running under. with-lock: Run a command, unless an existing copy of that command is already running, via the creation of a temporary lockfile. Thanks, Steve!

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Being a leader in a growing business with all the duties and responsibilities is a challenge that requires me to learn new skills all the time. For every task that I get done, two new ones seem to grow back. I actually enjoy that. But I also realise the hidden dangers of losing focus and going into burnout. That's why I'm making it a habit to start my day with 20 minutes of mindfulness meditation. Concentrating on my breath alone and putting all the thoughts whizzing around in my head back to their waiting line (again and again and again...) helps me keep my peace of mind and trains my mental muscles. Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne lists "5 reasons as a CEO you should develop a habit of daily meditation": You will easily handle the inevitable ups and downs It will save you time, by reducing procrastination You will have bursts of creative genius You will feel alive and healthy and have better sleep It will make you happy and you’ll find meaning And If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This.

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Just a quick announcement that I'll be in Berlin Monday and Tuesday next week for DevOps Days. If you're going to be there too, feel free to leave me a comment or an email and let's have a chat (and probably some drinks) there!

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One of the utilities that I immediately install on every new Mac is TextExpander. It makes typing routine stuff so much easier. In a recent blog post, David Sparks wrote about his TextExpander snippets for date and time, describing two simple but effective use cases: Shortcuts like "xm8", which expands to "August" (why haven't I thought of this myself?), and date calculation snippets like "d--" that inserts yesterday's date. Using David's snippets on your Mac requires only three mouse clicks (on the link above, on the download link in his post and finally on the snippet file).

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Recently, I've had a discussion with my precious about the song "Clouds across the moon" and how the laws of physics make a phone call in the common sense between Earth and Mars impossible. Had I known that there is a website with an awesome visualisation of the distance to Mars, this would have been far easier! (via swissmiss)

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It's common knowledge that productivity means getting shit done, not fine-tuning your task management tools. Improving the usage experience from time to time may be necessary, though. I've been using OmniFocus for managing my tasks for years. In the company, we're now using Asana with great success, but for my personal stuff, I've kept using OmniFocus so far. I've got a bunch of customised perspectives that show me certain aspects of my workload. The most important ones sit in the tool bar and I'm happy to have happened upon a collection of icon sets that give the OmniFocus tool bar a consistent design. You can find them over at SimplicityBliss.

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