The Two-Hour Workday Experiment
One engineer’s reflection on maximizing productivity while minimizing online time
An unexpected visit
This past fall, my mother paid me a surprise visit from her home in North Carolina. She was working with a new client south of Vancouver, B.C., a couple of hours’ drive north from my home in Seattle.
So, naturally, she decided to fly out a few days early to spend some quality time with my brother and me. As a consultant, Mom had some down time between projects, and she took the second half of her workweek off as PTO.
I, on the other hand, worked at Meta. Like most Big Tech a.k.a. MAMAA companies, Meta has a reputation for sustaining a high-impact (read: high-pressure) environment. On such short notice, I did not feel that I could easily take time off from my ongoing projects for fear of their losing momentum.
After all, I had earlier that year been promoted to the revered “senior” tier of software development. Whether true or misguided, I felt at the time that, in my highly collaborative work environment, there were cross-functional partners and more junior developers dependent on me to hit creeping deadlines I could not push back.
