Flipped Work Days
At the Office at 6pm
Maybe you’re reading the subtitle of this and expecting me to expose my grindset.
“You like being at the office at 6pm? You crazy?”
When I was back in NYC, I remember going on a road trip to hike with some friends.
On the car ride there, a friend who worked as a ML engineer at a high-frequency-trading firm mentioned that, in order to incentivize people to be at the office, they offered free delivery dinner for anyone who was at the office past 6pm.
Another friend asked, “doesn’t that just incentivize everyone to just come into the office later?”
“Yeah, most people come in the office after 11a-12pm or even later. They don’t care what time you come in, just as long as you’re in the office at 6pm if you want free dinner,” he responded.
He went on to bring up that his firm avoided “meeting culture” and most people are encouraged to learn and experiment with whatever they want with that time back.
We didn’t linger on that topic too much, but it was something that I have thought a lot about since then.
Since about November, I’ve experimented with prioritizing being at the office at 6pm to do my technical work.
Usually in my mornings from about 7a-1p, I’ll journal, get everything out of my brain onto paper (about work or anything), sketch and outline problems I’m working on, take care of admin stuff, do all my meetings, maybe workout, etc.
Then from about 1-6pm I kind of leave it open for anything. Consumption, going out for lunch with friends, reading, watching youtube, podcasts, walking, side-projects, naps, catching up on rest, exploring the city, doing more work, dinner, etc.
But I’ve been diligent about being “back at the office” around 4-7pm.
No matter what, there is just a wind of energy that comes when I’ve sit down for this session knowing that I should have properly prioritized and taken care of everything else in my life.
There’s no bemoaning work because you’ve effectively told your brain to take care of whatever you need to for that day. And the focus during this session is insane, because now you are rewarded with ~2-8 continuous hours of quiet solo time without all of the usual open loops, meetings, and distractions that can zap your attention away.
I don’t know if the HFT-types knew something universal about this, or if I’m pumping my own experience on this too much… but the consistent flow state during this 6pm session has just been next level. And you go home feeling supremely accomplished.
Some elements of this experiment kind of reminds me of Paul Graham’s Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, without the manager part. Or Salman Khan’s “Flipped Classroom”, but instead call it the “Flipped Work Day.”
I recognize that I’m lucky that I have this flexibility and I’m not saying this specific schedule is going to work for everybody, but I think there’s elements here that you can play with: prioritizing taking care of yourself, closing open loops when you do your solo work, long continuous block of focus time, long continuous blocks of scratching your own itch, minimizing meeting culture, and so on.
The 9-to-5 schedule has been meme’d to shreds lately anyway, and I think there’s groups of knowledge workers that are further along on their thinking about this.
So why not experiment?
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Some notes:
“At the office” also doesn’t mean that you need to be at a literal office at 6pm, but in a quiet place where you can work and focus for a long period of time. Being at the office late in NYC did add to the fun though, because you kinda see other people in the city who are on the same energy.
This wasn’t something that I did every day, more like 1-3x per week. More-or-less resemble a 9-5 on other days.
I also thought about people with families while writing this, but I think having all of that flexible time up until 6pm could actually even work better than a 9-to-5? Could be wrong though.
You have to be okay with being seen working outside of the normal hours and chilling during usual hours. This may or may not bode well with people you’re normally surrounded with. I actually hope this is a norm that changes in my lifetime.
Inspiration from this is also drawn from this Marc Andreesen blog post on productivity
Another popular variation of this is waking up super early and taking care of yourself or getting your quiet work done. This has worked for me too, but has been a little bit less sustainable over time.