andyouthink

I think the difference is that some of us need a little more structure. By providing a method and a repetitive activity, by the 21st day or so (3 weeks they say), it will become habit. After that point, making a point of solving problems for a particular purpose everyday will be much easier, and you'll be making more progress.

A few stories to illustrate:

1. I had a few friends that made it a point to learn a new technology every day of the month and blog about it. In the end, the friends had learned quite a bit, and even though they only had cursory knowledge of the subject, the structure allowed them to succeed at their goal to have a more general knowledge in their discipline.

2. I have another friend that started writing an application with the point for it to be the central product of a great new startup. This friend is not only intelligent, but very capable in the whole stack, self-organized, and I would have expected him to succeed. However, he lost interest in the end before go-live. there were competitors, and I think he lost the vision that he had in the beginning. He could still finish the product, but now he has another job. I credit this to lack of structure, which is not his fault; I've gotten no where near as far as he did on a myriad of ideas for products.

I loved this story! The only parts that need a little work were: 1. His background, because he didn't just go from zero to book writer, 2. How in the heck Nick Gauthier decided to co-write with him on a topic Chris previously knew nothing about, 3. Usually "I'm awesome!" is just asking for a humility check... but I think that the point is that you can be awesome.

Did you miss this part: "The Pragmatic Programmers"?

Great to hear that. So you say most of you take a lunch hour, and then say you only take 30-45 mins. So, some work 32 hours, some work 33.5-34 hours a week, and others work 36, so that's 4 to 4.5 days a week, depending on who you talk to on the team. When I'm talking about flex time, I'm not talking about a long lunch, I'm talking missing hours in the morning or afternoon because your wife or kid is sick or is in a play at school and making up those hours on Friday. My point is not that Treehouse isn't a great place to work or that a 4 day work week can't work, but that there are a ton of startups that have flexible 40 hour weeks that allow telecommuting, and that flex time and telecommuting add to the complexity, which makes it just as much if not more of a feat to be profitable- and that is my point: it is laudable, but just isn't that big of a difference. If everyone in the office did 32 hours with no extra time and have flexibility to take care of their family as needed and work from any location they want as much as possible if they desire as long as they get the work done, and still be a profitable startup, then that would be impressive to me personally.

First off, this is great. I applaud the fact that you can be profitable working fewer hours, and hopefully paying more than competitive salaries with good benefits.

But, that said, I'm surprised that no one has mentioned here that M-Th, 9-6 isn't a 4-day week, unless you include a required lunch hour, which most don't. So, since you didn't mention that, and I'm fairly sure that you work through lunch as many do including myself, then 9-6 M-Th is 36 hours, which is 4.5 "normal" 8-hour workdays.

I challenge you to be profitable working 32 hours a week (the equivalent of 4 8-hour workdays), preferably using flex time (so people can work those hours whenever they wish) and allowing telecommuting whenever the employee desires, and still be profitable.

> including those that may be on tape.

Seriously? So you reuse all tapes after 60 days? That wouldn't be a smart thing to do if you really care about retention, and I don't mean solely retaining deleted mail, but just retention of data in general. Regardless of stated policies, I don't believe you. Business critical data like that would not only be stored for 60 days- not in Google.

Great article on 2-factor auth. I didn't understand how easy it was, so I'm switching to it now. However, if you use a mail client and generate app-specific passwords that last forever, can't the hackers just hack via IMAP login instead which won't be 2-factor?

It seems like it would be better to use private keys on the client with 2 factor auth for authentication recovery. That way as long as you have the right private key locally that your mail client uses, you are set- otherwise you have to both provide a password and an SMS delivered code in order to use a different private key on the client.

And you think that Google actually deletes email when you tell it to? More likely they just mark it as deleted and retain it, in which case every email you ever received regardless of whether you think it has been deleted may be available. If you want better privacy, install and manage your own mail server and encrypt everything.