Know agile. Not habit. (जानामि Agile न च मे प्रवृत्तिः)

I have seen many complain about working too hard. They complain about not able to spend time with family. Most of them have these complaints: No work life balance. Too many distractions at work. Lot of time spent on meetings. Working over time. .... Most of the time issue is focus on work. If you go through this blog it highlights how people spend their time. Data in the link is collected by a tool called RescueTime.  https://www.rescuetime.com/ This tool continuosly checks what you are doing. It classifies the work as productive and non productive. It measures how much time you spend in the computer and on what you spend the time.  If you want to improve your life and your work probably you can use this tool. They do provide a free version. You will know immediately how much of time you are spending on actual work. If you are complaining about spending lot of time at work then probably you can use the data collected by this tool to ask a raise with your manager. If tool...

How many times you are told this feature need to be completed by this weekend. Did you ever checked when it went live? Or did you follow up if the hard work you put to complete that feature, was really necessary? Most of the time these deadlines are set without any solid reason. They are set because there is a need to set a deadline. In the command chain of software development where developer is the last cog does not have the luxury of questioning the reason for the deadline.  I have burned midnight oils many times to complete features which went live after 3 or 4 months. Most of the time I did not know because nobody told me. But some times because of the nature of software, features do not work production environment. Early in my career I had a rude shock. We had worked hard for a week spending long hours in office to complete a release which had a deadline that weekend. We completed all the tests and delivered within deadline. We even celebrated. After four months we get call i...