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Most advice about productivity assumes everyone works the same way. It’s built on the idea that you can divide the day into neat little boxes, each filled with a task to be completed. This works great if you’re what I call a “Soldier” — someone who thrives on routine and can power through work regardless of how they feel. But there’s another type of person out there. Let’s call them “Surfers.”
Surfers don’t move to the rhythm of the clock. They move to the rhythm of inspiration, energy, and flow. A Surfer’s productive periods come in waves, and when they hit, they can produce an astonishing amount of work. But between these waves? They might seem maddeningly unproductive to the outside observer.
I’ve been mentoring a lot of software engineers lately, and I’ve noticed something: many of them are Surfers struggling to fit into a Soldier’s world. They beat themselves up for not being productive from 9 to 5, especially now that so many are working from home. But here’s the thing: trying to force a Surfer into a Soldier’s routine is like trying to surf on a parade ground. It just doesn’t work.
The 9-to-5 workday is a relic of the industrial age, designed for assembly lines and offices where work was largely about being present. But for creative work — programming, writing, design — presence doesn’t equal productivity. A Surfer might spend days doing seemingly nothing, only to work through an entire weekend in a burst of inspiration and productivity that outstrips weeks of steady plodding.
This isn’t laziness. It’s a different way of working. Surfers are often better suited for creative, ambiguous tasks that require lateral thinking and novel approaches. They excel at the kind of work that’s increasingly valuable in our knowledge economy. Soldiers, on the other hand, are the backbone of any organization that needs consistent, reliable output.
The problem is that our work culture is still built around the Soldier model. This can be particularly challenging for Surfers working from home. In an office, they could at least maintain the illusion of steady productivity. The facade of progress created by regular hours in an office environment provided a kind of psychological comfort. But at home, faced with the stark reality of their fluctuating productivity, many Surfers are struggling.
So what’s a Surfer to do in this Soldier’s world? The key is to understand and embrace your working style. Here are a few strategies:
1. Learn to recognize your waves. Pay attention to when you’re most productive and what triggers these periods. Is it after a good night’s sleep? After exercise? When you’ve built up a certain amount of context and knowledge about the problem at hand?
2. When you catch a wave, ride it for all it’s worth. These are your most productive periods. Protect them fiercely. Turn off notifications, decline meetings, do whatever it takes to stay in the flow.
3. Don’t waste energy fighting the flat periods. If you’re not in a productive mood, don’t sit at your desk for hours accomplishing nothing. Instead, use this time for other activities that might indirectly contribute to your work: read, exercise, pursue hobbies. Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to stop thinking about it for a while.
4. Communicate your working style to others — easier said than done though. Help your team understand that your apparent inactivity is part of your process, not a sign of laziness.
5. If possible, try to arrange your work so that you have longer stretches of uninterrupted time. Surfers often need this to catch their waves.
The future of work isn’t about enforcing a one-size-fits-all model of productivity. It’s about understanding and leveraging different working styles. For Surfers, that means learning to ride your productivity waves effectively. And for the rest of us, it means recognizing that sometimes, the person staring out the window might be the most productive person in the room.