13 ms·

Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

200 points by acalderaro 9y ago

Let's include meetings/email as job related.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
Do you count meetings as "work", or as "not work"? (I don't spend much times in meetings at my current job, thankfully, so it doesn't change the question for me.) Honestly, my best guess is 50%, or close. I still get my work done as fast as everyone else, though. No complaints on performance reviews.
- acalderaro 9y ago
  Eh, let's assume that it's work in that you're not able to just freely browse HN or work on a side project. What would your % be then?
justrudd 9y ago
Hm. Given an average week, probably on average 35% of my day is not working. Average being a reasonably interesting bug and/or project to sink my teeth into. Somedays I'll work 10 hours. Others I'll work 4 to 6. Unlike most people, if I finish my work in 5 hours, I go home. If I'm not going to be working, I'd rather not be working at home. I've never had any complaints about work quality or throughput. I have had one complaint about not being seen in the office. [edit] clarified the 35% bucket
- tucaz 9y ago
  How do you assess "finished my work"? Unless you are working on tickets that might stop coming in is really hard to be "out of work", specially in projects. I ask this because I see a lot of people saying the same but there's always more work to do, being testing something that should be working, fixing bugs, refactoring that old piece of junk you left behind due to times constraints, etc.
  - justrudd 9y ago
    For me, it starts during sprint planning. I know what work is going into the sprint, and what work is being assigned to me (we don't run sprints in the natural way of grabbing the next card that's free. I disagree with it, but it is what it is). So I plan out what I need to do on a day-to-day basis to finish that amount of work. For a normal sprint (i.e executing on plans and agreed upon designs) I try to plan the day to be ~6 hours of coding work a day. Sometimes my estimates are long and I finish in 4 or 5 hours. Could I start on the next card? Absolutely. And if I finish all my work early, I'll pull something from the backlog. But in general, I find it more sustainable to just go home after I finish in 5 hours because I know there are going to be times that I work 10 or 12 hours (or a Saturday). Also, for me, depending on the next card, it might take an hour or so to get going at the end of a day. So I'm now at 7 to 8 hours which is when I normally leave. Was that hour or two wasted? No. I retain the knowledge till the next day. But again for me, I've found that coming in and starting a new task fresh reduces that one or two hours to less and gives me a singular focus for the day. If I finish in 2 or 3 hours, I always move on to the next task. That would be silly to go home after 2 hours (most days). I adapt this style for wherever I work. It has worked for me at start ups as well as BigCo. [Update] For the side things (refactoring messy code, flakey tests, automating a tedious process, etc.) - I create cards/tasks for them and get them into the sprint. I know this makes me sound like a "terrible" employee. But it allows me to give my best on a more sustainable basis. And if it is something that truly needs to be done in a month, I'll work those 10 or 12 hour 7 day work weeks...
    - tokenizerrr 9y ago
      How do your coworkers feel about you only being a few hours at the office?
      - dilemma 9y ago
        They probably make snide remarks because they don't understand that someone executing according to plan, consistently over several years and projects, working 5 hours per day, is more valuable than someone working 8 hours in a less organized manner and sometimes missing deadlines.
donatj 9y ago
It really depends on the day. Sometimes I've got basically nothing to do whereas other times I'm overloaded and there basically isn't a moment I'm not. It's hard to figure an average.
slizard 9y ago
Pre-, during, or post-burnout?
- goodoldboys 9y ago
  the real question
5_minutes 9y ago
Days at the office mean meetings and socializing. Its not really working but hey I get paid. Working from home is getting things done.
9erdelta 9y ago
Some days almost the entire day. I'll read, watch videos, do some tutorials. But its offset because usually when I do this it's because I'm hung up on something and it just isn't going to get solved unless the ole brain has time to do its subconscious thing.
- 1_player 9y ago
  Letting the subconscious work through a hard problem while doing something else is a truly underrated trick. Taking a shower or going for a walk also works wonderfully.
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    I've solved a bug while eating a cup of yogurt while walking around outside the office. Definitely worthwhile.
  - wingworks 9y ago
    I used to take hour long lunch breaks, which I'd spend about 35mins walking to get food and finding a nice spot to sit outside, most days I done this I would come back into the office refreshed and often fix the issue I was working on shortly after coming back. But the hour-long break was always founded upon, which is why I ended up leaving. (it was also the only break I took each day, but the culture in the team I was in was to take no more than 30mins break)
    - 9erdelta 9y ago
      30 minute breaks? Sounds unbearable! Plus knowing that you're being judged creates a pressure that doesn't help solve problems.
- naspinski 9y ago
  I figure out so many problems while lifting weights! With the added bonus that now I can now bench, deadlift, and squat well over 300 lbs.
throw832649 9y ago
Throwaway for maximum honesty: I am pretty sure I spend at least 75% of my time "at work" not working. HN, Reddit, messing around with side projects or learning a new language or framework. This has been the case for my entire working life. I seem to get as much done as other people (sometimes better) so part of me wonders if I'm not as unusual as I feel. Part of me wonders if I should get evaluated for ADHD, since I find it such a struggle to focus on my work. And part of me is just frustrated with myself, that theoretically I could spend like 3 good hours at work each day, get more done, and have more quality time to myself.
- yoodenvranx 9y ago
  > I seem to get as much done as other people (sometimes better) Perhaps all the other people are also as unproductive as you? ;)
  - knodi123 9y ago
    Yes, that's what he said, in the second half of the sentence you quoted: "so part of me wonders if I'm not as unusual as I feel"
  - lazythrowawayd 9y ago
    Or they're "productive" in a different way. There's one developer on our team who spends large portions of his day creating diagrams, documents and largely unneeded JIRA tickets. It's busy work, but since he has nothing else to do, he just creates document exhaust.
- barsonme 9y ago
  The best way to describe ADHD is: The TV is always on, but you don't get to choose the channel. Some things are easy to focus on—I can sit down to program for a bit and lose track of time for 5 hours. On the other hand, if something is boring, it's mind-numbingly boring. It was the worst while I was in school, since teachers and professors just thought, "oh, he's unmotivated" when in reality it was more along the lines of, "I'd rather cut my toenails with a rusty butter knife than write the paper." (Okay, perhaps that's a slight exaggeration.) Anyway, if it affects your life and managing it yourself isn't working (give it an honest effort, of course) definitely speak with a doctor. While too many parents think their kids have ADHD when the kids are really just, well, kids, trying to cope with ADHD without some sort of guidance sucks. A lot. It's amazing how much more productive you can be if you get some help coping with it. Just my $0.02.
qrybam 9y ago
Busy day = only when I go to the toilet Quiet day = maybe half my time Most of my days are busy; if I'm not busy with my main work then I'll be busy making the more mundane aspects of my job disappear into the background. edit: formatting
jpindar 9y ago
It depends on how talkative my coworkers are that day.
- deleted 9y ago
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dylanha 9y ago
Developer here. Going by my time Rescuetime logs, 62.5% of my time is spent outside of the IDE or any other work related application. I do not enjoy this work and spend a lot of time walking around/thinking about the problem/surfing non work sites.
- tomatohs 9y ago
  Thinking about the problem is working.
iLoch 9y ago
I'd like to see where people are from if they're replying to this thread. I wonder how cultural norms affect effectiveness (do Americans work less at work because of the work-oriented culture which requires them to stay at work longer for no reason?)
- natoliniak 9y ago
  I work in the USA and i would say I'm about 30-40% productive, maybe less. My productivity is strongly related to the density of meetings throughout the day: My productivity killers are relatively short gaps between meetings (<45m) during which i am completely unable to focus because of the anticipation that i will soon be completely distracted. So if I have three 1hr meetings with 45minutes gaps between them, my daily productivity plummets to nearly 0. Open office plan also doesn't help with staying focused.
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  > do Americans work less at work because of the work-oriented culture which requires them to stay at work longer for no reason? I don't think US workplace culture is extreme in that regard. I usually look at East Asian work culture when it comes truly weird workplace norms and traditions. My family lived in Japan for a short period, and my father told me that he and his colleagues had to wait for their boss to leave every night before they could leave work. Now that's extreme.
milkytron 9y ago
I recently started my first full time job associated with my career. I'd say I spend between 65-80% either doing my work or something related to it such as training or reading documentation (which take up about 20% of my time at the moment).
decasia 9y ago
Arguably, time spent reading HN is a legitimate part of becoming/remaining a good developer. Certainly, spending time socializing with coworkers is a required part of work, many places. Spending some amount of time unwinding at the office is arguably required for mental health and therefore a functional component of remaining a worker -- does that count as working? "Working" is an ambiguous category, it seems to me. One definition of work (call it "productivist") says that we're only working when we're literally producing something valuable. A more organizational view might hold that "work" is whatever you're socially (often implicitly) required to do to keep your job (whether measurably productive or not). And a third more holistic definition would include stuff like exercise or professional development that are not always directly "required" by anyone, but that you might go crazy without doing...
- austenallred 9y ago
  I'll be honest; I don't think using HN is anything close to what I would consider "working." At best it's marginally optimized random browsing.
  - rl3 9y ago
    While it isn't work, reading technical articles regularly on HN can be very beneficial. In fact, the first thing I tell aspiring developers is to start reading HN on a regular basis if they already aren't. It confers a sort of broad awareness of various stacks and ecosystems over time that's hard to obtain otherwise.
    - jrs235 9y ago
      Depending on what articles one is reading, this activity could fall within "sharpening the ax" (which is also beneficial for the company).
      - scorpioxy 9y ago
        Absolutely and if keeping up with technology is not work then what it is "work"? Is it just typing out the code? What about when your IDE auto-completes your code? It's a little silly to think about it this way. I try to keep my distractions to a minimum level but I've often encountered comments and articles on HN that have been of great benefit to my work and my clients. Things like a service I've never heard of, a library being used in a way that I haven't seen before or even just personal experiences. Hell I even use HN to minimize distractions such as reading only the comments section about some new product Google/MS/Apple released(or is killing) just to get an idea of what's out there in the market and if it is of any use to me.
brentm 9y ago
My number are all over the place but according to WakaTime about 152 hours last month was spent in the IDE.
nickrivadeneira 9y ago
I'm surprised by the responses here. I didn't think it was as prevalent as comments suggest. At the beginning of my career it was probably around 50%, though after spending two years at a consulting company, it's dropped to 5-10% maximum. I find that reducing interruption and having music going keeps me engaged.
CGamesPlay 9y ago
According to RescueTime, I spend around 83% of my screen time on "productive" things. My total screen time averages about 25 hours / week, whereas my at-work time is roughly closer to double that. I'd say that 67% of my off-screen at-work time is "productive" meetings and the other third is things like lunch, walks, etc. Putting this all together, I spend 37.5 hours / week productively and 12.5 hours / week at work slacking off (or doing human things like eating and pooping). So call it 75% productive time. I generally enjoy my job. I've counted writing this post / assembling this data as "not productive" time.
fatherofone 9y ago
Depends what you mean by work? I'm reading an article on Async with C#, that's not coding but is work. I watch some videos on latest tech, thats work too.... Only thing that matters is if have I completed tasks in my sprint or are there any critical issues
jonahrd 9y ago
Unfortunately I'm paid hourly and remotely, so while getting settled, checking an email or two, getting coffee, etc are all things I would do as part of a normal workday, I don't tend to log those hours or get paid for any of it
deleted 9y ago
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lazythrowawayd 9y ago
I probably spend half my time not working. I'm burnt out though. After a few years at my current position, I just don't care. Why is this? I've had a few promising projects languish because my manager is slow or hesitant to allocate resources. That's a bit demoralizing. When I'm on a path to production for a functioning system I get caught up in the devops meeting vortex. That's a waste of time and it takes several weeks to get any sort of resolution. In these cases my time is mostly spent looking for workarounds and not "working". I feel there are a lot of politics and favoritism in the company, and my manager (and our team) is not on the right side. It's demotivating to have your work ignored because you're not a priority. I don't know how anyone stays for more than a year. Edit: In the first few months I worked on random on-going projects, but was quickly made lead on some new projects. It was good at first, but after about 9 months I'd say most (90%) weeks I don't put in anywhere near 40 hours of work. The sad thing is I've always gotten a raise (double digit in two cases) and full bonus every performance cycle. I've finally started looking for another job. Does anyone have recommendations? I'm really looking for a company that enables their individual contributors (engineers) to actually get shit done.
- robind2 9y ago
  Work for a startup, preferably one that is already somewhat profitable. I have worked for this type company my whole career and this "devops vortex" you speak of is a foreign concept. I run a small IT dept and we have one 30 min staff per week plus a one-on-one for each dev. And they code and solve other problems all day, and of course surf the web or socialize to break up the day too.
  - lazythrowawayd 9y ago
    I'm already in talks with two well known pre-IPO startups (<500 employees). The devops vortex is a new animal to me as well. I've never had so many problems moving systems into production than I have at this company. Edit: I've talked with many in my professional network and they describe similar meeting loads (~1 hr/week) as you do. I'd estimate I spend on average 3 hr/week in meetings. And most of these meetings don't result in action items. They're essentially pointless.
hfourm 9y ago
Reasonably ~5 hours of coding, maybe sometimes less on days with a lot of meetings. Rest of time on HN, reading, or admin type stuff (planning, ticket & branch management), and of course meetings
callesgg 9y ago
Depends how you want to define work. I think of stuff that is beneficial to the company in one way or another like 95% of the time. Re structuring thoughts, digesting ideas.... talking to others to understand how they think. But if someone that did not know me came and looked at what i did during work hours and did not get to ask questions to me. I would assume they would think that i only worked 20-25% of the time. Things are not always what they seem.
neal_jones 9y ago
I have recently gone freelance/self-employed and I have quickly missed the reality of being able to not have to question if I'm actually getting work done every minute of the day. The truth is, I can't do brain-intensive work for more than maybe 5 or 6 hours.
- steveax 9y ago
  I worked for myself for about a decade (web dev) and always considered getting 6 billable hours in a good day.
  - convolvatron 9y ago
    as much as keeping the pipe full and working for organizations that...have such internal problems they have to hire contractors does kinda suck. working when you feel like you can contribute, billing exactly those hours, and filling the rest of your time with activities of your choice feels very honest and liberating. if i feel like i can't get things done because of the environment then i don't work, and i don't bill. if i finish a job and they have no more work for me then i say, thanks, keep me in mind, let me know if you have any problems. not really a capitalist, but the transactional nature removes all the festering emotional complications. and you can be a lot more straightforward about where things are broken.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
It is an interesting question which, in my opinion, hinges entirely on a fairly puritanical notion of 'work.' One of my 'problems' is that I can't "not work" in the sense of a laborer who is no longer building widgets. As a person who is asked to solve complex problems with a high degree of dimensionality inside of an arbitrarily constrained solution space, much of the 'work' I do consists of turning the problem over and over in my head while I explore the solution space. A good example of this was an early review I got at Intel by my manager (a really solid EE type guy). He added some criticism of my time management (considered a 'ding' in the vernacular) for a embedded compiler/assembler/driver thing I wrote as part of the evaluation of a graphics processor. He said I had 'sand bagged' the time estimate. When I asked him to describe that a bit more he explained that I had told him it would take 6 months to do, and it was 2 weeks late, and I had spent 5 months "goofing off and not working" and then about 6 weeks doing the work. So my estimate should really have been '8 weeks' and if I had started on time it would have been done two weeks earlier than that. I thought about that for a long time. And explained to him the for five months I had no idea what the best way to write the software was, and in that five months I had learned about 8 different technologies that all came together into the final solution. I had to learn how to write device drivers in Xenix, how to map I/O space memory into the kernel, design a language which was human understandable and could be compiled into the odd little RISC instruction set of the Graphics chip. And until I had figured out all of that precursor information, I didn't have a clue how it would be written, but then after figuring out that information actually writing the code was fairly mechanical. In this one case the problem was that hardware has so many great milestones you can call out, parts captured, schematics done, netlists verified, layout started, design rule verification, first films, films checked, first boards, boards checked, first assembly. Bringup in stages 1, 2, and 3 etc. All along the way there are pleasant milestones to say "this is done" now on to the next thing. But software is never like that for building something that nobody has ever built before. And it is even rarely like that when you have the same software but you are building it on a different system. The linkages, the entanglement between the system and the software (and now the network and the services) makes each new implementation its own special snowflake, with its own kinds of problems. Have you ever woken up and "knew" the solution to a tricky software issue? Or had an idea for a change to an existing system that might make it better? That happens to me all the time when I'm designing stuff. And a case could be made that I'm working even when I'm asleep! Not because I'm sitting there typing in lines of code but because I'm going through the solution space, somewhere in my subconscious, looking for clues to places that hold better answers than the answer that is currently checked into the git repository. As a result I tend to measure my own productivity by 'solutions over unit time' versus 'hours typing into employer owned equipment'. It still bites me from time to time when a supervisor needs a constant stream of 'still flying' type status messages to feel comfortable.
workthrowaway19 9y ago
Probably 25% on the average day. Occasionally 0%. There are entire days that I'll spend working on nothing but side projects, but our company is getting big so no one notices or cares. Sometimes I work from home just so I don't have to do anything other than be around for a couple meetings. The bigger we get the more lawyers and compliance people we ad, and the less noticeable it is that I'm not doing shit.
- shouldbworking 9y ago
  I find this brutal honestly hilarious
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
You're almost certainly getting a sampling bias by asking this question at ~2pm Pacific Time on a weekday.
hardworkerthrow 9y ago
Over the first 15+ years of my career as an engineer and engineering manager, I've repeatedly surveyed colleagues and friends in engineering roles about this question. I've asked it of people I consider low-performing, all the way to folks I'd consider 10x developers. I have never met a single software developer who, when pressed to give an honest assessment and when "working" is defined along the lines of "actively defining, coding, or debugging a feature", self-identifies as working more than 50% of the time. There are occasional stretches of 12+ hour working sessions, but they are very rare. I'd say I've asked this of over a hundred people. This isn't to say these people only do 4 hours of work a day. Often, peers have described how they hit a wall at work, go home, and then work on personal projects in the evening. I've come to the conclusion that is generally impossible to do mentally intensive tasks for more than 4 continuous hours over the long term.
- nubbins 9y ago
  Thats interesting because 4 hours is exactly the limit I've seen cited by researchers as the max for highly focused work but even that much is a kind of skill that has to be developed, so a beginner might have much less concentration.
  - veddox 9y ago
    Can you give a reference for that number? Sounds intriguing...
    - antognini 9y ago
      This article also references about four hours as the limit that a creative professional can work every day: http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/darwin-was-a-slacker-and-you-should-be-too http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/darwin-was-a-slacker-and-y...
      - veddox 9y ago
        A fascinating article, thank you for sharing!
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IAmGraydon 9y ago
I spend around 90% of my time at work doing real work. There are often days where that number is nearly 100%. At past jobs that number was closer to 50-60%, but I've moved into a lead role (Marketing Director) where slacking means getting buried. I don't mind it one bit, either. I'm helping to steer the company and that's very rewarding, even if it is a lot of work.
MileyCyrax 9y ago
At least 90%. If I'm at work and not working, I'm usually working on one of my own projects.
1_player 9y ago
99% of my 5 hour day. Because I discovered I can't usually stay in flow mode for more than 5 hours, so I get in the office around 12pm and leave around 5.30pm
- triangleman 9y ago
  So that's your working time?
  - 1_player 9y ago
    Yes. When I sit at the desk I start working and time tracking and I don't slack off till I leave, except maybe to browse some music on Spotify to keep me concentrated. When I was spending 9 hours/day as an employee, I'd be slacking off a cumulative 2/3 hours every day.
glennsantos 9y ago
I only spend around 5-15% of my time at work, not working. Work in my context is time spent on things I planned to do and want to do, including the small breaks I take to recharge and socialize.
swah 9y ago
60% or more :( But there are SOME DAYS that I work 150%! ("in the flow") So how to achieve flow consistently? One of the few things that works for me is to get started working first thing in the morning: no news, no HN, until 10am, etc. When I can do this, I know I'll have a productive day.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Does this cause a productive mental state, or is it merely a symptom of it? I suspect it's causal (based off what I know of brain chemistry), but I could definitely be wrong on that part. Like, "get assigned bullshit work, can't focus on it because it's bullshit, end up on HN" is definitely also a plausible story to me.
throw110 9y ago
I spent 60-70% of my time not working because even though I'm working with interesting technology, it's stuff that won't get used by almost anyway, my peers don't seem interested, my manager is absent and the requirements are all over the place (symptom of nobody caring, whatever is done is okay as long as it impresses, for some random definition of "impresses)... ... so it needs to be done to check an item in a list but nobody cares. If nobody cares, I don't care either, which makes me think I'm wasting my time, which leads to depression, feeling burnt out, procrastinating even more, etc.
ajmurmann 9y ago
Not counting lunch break, I'd say I probably spend ~90-95% working.
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ivrrimum 9y ago
0%. I work as a upwork freelancer. More precisely by hourly rate and upwork desktop app takes screenshots at random times, so i can't really browse HN and other sites. But I will tell you honestly, i don't want to go back to normal work. I get shit done( there is also that "gambler" feeling, when you see how much money you earn each week ) and in good quality( I get reviews from my clients, so i can't code bad either ). So yeah, a hour paid is a hour worked.
throw112358 9y ago
I sit in a cubicle and I update bank software. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
- deleted 9y ago
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- csorrell 9y ago
  I had a job like that for a while and would work on project Euler problems just to pass the time. It was maddening.
- alltakendamned 9y ago
  I would go crazy in less than 6 weeks. Simply for the fact that I have to be present, but with nothing to do.
mikekchar 9y ago
I have a follow up question: For the time that you spend "not working" would you prefer to "work"? For me the answer is "absolutely!!!". Reading through some of the responses, it really seems that people are mixed. Either their "non-working" time is spent with side projects/training or they have become demotivated by problems with the work flow on their team. For me the latter is by far the biggest problem. I was just thinking the other day that, as programmers, we need a kind of statement that indicates what we expect from the organisations we are in. To be honest, I really want to work instead of write stuff on HN, so I'll leave this as an exercise to the interested. As an example, I think it is reasonable to expect to be able to spend whole days writing code (which means that someone else has to go to the meetings, and someone else has to clarify requirements, and someone else has to prioritise). There should be some clear resolution of differences of opinion (whether that be in technical direction, or whatever) -- a programmer shouldn't have to spend time arguing. A programmer should expect to have spaces both for interacting with groups of people and for quiet contemplation. I sure there are other (and better) ideas, but that's what I have off the cuff.
- jrs235 9y ago
  I got sick of feeling like I am wasting my life away at work not working, so I submitted my resignation. Time to get on doing my own things so I don't feel I'm wasting my little yet precious time alive. After a few meetings, I am not quitting yet. I have been re-classed from salary to hourly and I will be able to have fewer and more flexible "hours" so that I can get out and do my own thing and side projects (which require business hour meetings/calls/etc).
KerryJones 9y ago
When I worked for other companies I would say I worked around 70% of the time I was "working". When working for myself I think I am putting 60-80 hours of real work in a week.
smilesnd 9y ago
100% of the time, because I do what I love.
rstuart4133 9y ago
Does depend on what you call "working". I deem the time I spent on tech sites like HN as working. So does my boss. He similarly considers the time I spend at the odd tech conference working. There are good reasons for this - I drive change around here, and most of that change originates from exposure to ideas from those sources. If you could that (and I do), I'd say at least 75% of my time is spent working.
mattbgates 9y ago
Definitely depends on the day.. some days I'm working the entire shift, other days I get paid to just sit here and work on my side projects. I work for for a project-based department and with that comes deadlines that could mean I have to be done within 3-6 hours which can be stressful. While our company goes with the rest of the world, I wish the company would consider 10 hour days 4 days a week, with half the department working in the earlier part of the week, and the other half working the later half of the week instead of all of us working the traditional 8 hour days 5 days a week. So I make the best of it and enjoy those days where I do mostly nothing the entire time. But I'm never not doing anything.. I build web apps and run a popular website, so I'm always kept busy.
Jemaclus 9y ago
I consider myself rather productive compared to most devs I've worked with. On a good day, I spend 75% of my day "working". On a normal day, it's closer to 50/50. I'm a tech manager, though, so the "good" days are when I'm really busy all day long, and the "normal" days are when I spend most of my time coding. Like others have said, it's really difficult to do more than 4 hours of solid coding in a day, particularly if you're interrupted frequently like I am. That said, I don't necessarily care that much about the hours my employees work, so long as they meet the deadlines and are reasonably productive. I have a good idea of how long a task takes, so if they take too much longer than that, we'll have a chat. Otherwise, I just want to make sure they're happy and not burnt out and staying as productive as possible.
iamben 9y ago
I record my time pretty religiously. 5 hours seems to be a standard "working day" of actually solid in the flow (face buried in a screen) work, assuming I'm sat at a desk for 7/8. That said, if I'm rolling and happy it can be way more, if I'm tired/struggling to hit the flow/not creative - way less. I can get an awful lot done in a day (or few days) if I push, but doing that long term becomes counter productive. On a regular day, I'll also get a bunch of smaller 'work' done, but it's mostly the admin-y stuff. Sales, email, help, calls, networking. Sometimes that can be my whole day - I suppose it depends how important those things are at the time (sales!) as to how much they're considered 'work'. Edit: Just to add, decent headphones are a godsend.
jarboot 9y ago
90%, not including lunch. The other 10% is making tea and drinking some, usually looking out the window or chatting with someone.
truebosko 9y ago
In all honesty, I try to stay full throttle at work. Important breaks I do take: Coffee walk (unfortunately on some busy days I simply can't make it out), Quick chats with the team, and Pomodoro-timed walks to stretch/ease the mind. I usually eat lunch at my desk, which annoys me, because I always want to socialize and be better at that. I don't find it easy to do this since the days are so busy. I'm a product manager, so I spend much of my days in meetings that are a mix of working sessions, scoping exercises, communications with external clients, and team-focused meetings. On the days I don't have any meetings (they do exist), I zone out and get some work done. Lately I've been focusing on the DevOps for our team.
ivm 9y ago
Working from home. Last month I tracked 270h on my Mac workstation: 190 hours (70%) were productive, 24h (9%) neutral tools, and 56h (21%) distracting (mostly chats with friends). I also spend 1-2 hours a day on my "leisure laptop" (for example reading HN from there but also some useful RSS feeds). So it feels like 65% would be a correct productivity score. Tracked with https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/ https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/ of course, most of the productive time was spent on its development and marketing. :]
- smartfin 9y ago
  Also use that app. But because of single machine for job and everything else my stats is around 45-50% productive, another ~10% neutral.
nunez 9y ago
These days less than 10%. I take lunch and a coffee break or two though. I used to read reddit and hn to saturation on many days before getting into consulting; these days, i hardly read anything until before or after my core hours, not because i can't but because there is more interesting work to do
throwaway184827 9y ago
Reading this thread has made me feel a whole lot better about myself. Been struggling with burnout and have been working on side projects a good 50% of the time while I overestimate projects to give me larger buffers. I just don't give a fuck anymore. I thought I was alone. (Yes, I know it's wrong and I want to be more productive, but I hate the work I do and I hate the culture here. So I want to start my own thing.)
throwaway_jazze 9y ago
(Throwaway for honesty) Significantly less now that I work remotely, on my own schedule, and at a reasonable company. I get 6+ hours a day of real work in, usually more, but try not to overdo it. (For awhile I was becoming a bit workaholic without the boundary between work and not-work, spending 10+ hours at it.) I take breaks and do spend a little time on HN or Stack Exchange to clear my head, but I don't do Reddit, webcomics, facebook, or any random sites during work. That's my relax after work stuff, done on a different PC. So in terms of productivity, I'd say around 75-85% work, 15-25% slack most days. I previously worked an 8:30-5:30 where management measured productivity by the butts-in-seats metric, scheduled a lot of meetings, and was quite anal about punctuality. I was lucky to get 4 hours of serious work in most days (between all the interruptions, bureaucratic stuff, and having to work based on my manager's sleep schedule). Sometimes I ended up doing more work at home at night than I did while 'at work'. Maybe 50% productivity, often less. Before that I worked at a 9-5 where we had to record our time per task so specifically that we even had a task to enter the time spent filling out the timesheet. I could have done better there about focusing on solving problems and improving business if I wasn't constantly distracted by the clock ticking and all the estimating and meetings about estimates and deadlines and timesheets. Maybe 50% productivity.
krystiangw 9y ago
I believe I'm productive for about 70% of the time. I'm most distracted when I'm swiching to other project. I need to re-focus again.
superasn 9y ago
Speaking as a solopreneur, I work only 3 hours a day, more like 3 x 50 minutes laps with 15 min breaks in between. Also each lap is dedicated to one activity, first is manufacturing where I work on my project (the actual coding part), second is traffic (this is the dreaded marketing/outreach part) and finally is the optimization part (seo, increasing conversion rates, improving design, etc). I've seen that the diversity of this work prevents you from getting bored and also is very good for your sites because if you keep working on just coding your sites seldom make any money. The 3 hours limit is because after that i can happily watch tv, spend time with my family or just work on my other hobbies besides computers guilt free. P.s. When you try to do as much work as you can, i believe you still only get 3 hours of work done - yet you feel guilty of not doing enough which causes unhappiness.
- 0wl3x 9y ago
  Sorry is this is rude but how do you make a living only working 3 hours a day? Are you products already established?
  - superasn 9y ago
    No it isn't rude at all. Yes, some sites are already established but I also launch at least one new site every month to add to my income. 3 hours is a lot of work if done without distraction. I think the key is to make your work more mechanical and less creative. I have a system that I have perfected over the years which helps me do this[1]. It's like a stupid step by step list where each item links to a document which is another stupid step by step list that I follow like a "Robot" for these 3 hours. When you do it this way, it makes it quite easy and 3 hours daily is more than enough to launch a small to medium size project in a month (I think there are less than 200 items in total and about 50% of it you can easily outsource). [1] http://i.imgur.com/i1oBM2t.png http://i.imgur.com/i1oBM2t.png
    - tasuki 9y ago
      That's great - mind sharing the other tabs as well? :)
douche 9y ago
If I have to go to the office: maybe 2 hours a day of actual productive work. If I work from home: usually 4-6 hours of productive work. Going to the office adds up to a ten-hour day, with the commute. Working from home is usually a 6-7 hour day, and I get to stay in my pajamas, take the dog for a walk, take a break to do some housework, and be in a comfortable environment. I don't work from home enough anymore.
webjac 9y ago
I've been an employee for like 20% of my career and a the rest I've been a freelancer. I never worked more than 4 hours (of real work a day). There's the occasional super productive day where I have done over 8 hours of productive work, but that's the exception, not the rule. I usually work around 3-4 hours of productive work daily. Heck I'd even say 20%-30% of that time is not even productive (meetings, emails and necessary yet unproductive things). When I worked for companies doing 9 to 5, I wasted a looot of time doing nothing: reddit, fb, and stuff. I also recognize that I need that distraction to do some real productive work. I'm very fast and productive when it comes to actual work, but if I don't get the procrastination time then I just become a blurry mess of a brain and take 10 times longer to do the same things.
- philipyoungg 9y ago
  same.
- IpV8 9y ago
  How do you bill? Are you project based? Are you only billing 4 hours a day?
- imarg 9y ago
  I think procrastination time is also important and necessary. I just completed a course on Coursera (Learning How to Learn - https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/ https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/). One of things mentioned is that our brain has a focused and diffused mode and both are needed for us to learn. So, I guess, something similar happens when we are working. You need both focus time but also a down time to achieve things. Of course, too much procrastination is also not a good thing.
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mdlap 9y ago
I use RescueTime. Productive time is about 90% each month. The reality is that 100% of my time, if meetings are included, is productive (excluding minimal breaks). I feel sorry for the people trying to run businesses with all of these employees not working. I'm a QA engineer. The most experienced QA engineer on a 3-person team (the other two have either more experience with testing but less with development, or vice-versa). I have waaaaay too much to do to get away with not working. I do empathise with those for whom maintaining a high level of productivity is impossible because of how demanding their work is. I'm fortunate that I have so many different tasks to perform that if I don't have the energy to concentrate on something demanding, I can switch to something fairly basic. I'm also fortunate in that, for me, problem solving activities are almost always energising. So if I feel like I'm getting burnt out I can dive into one of the tricky but non-urgent problems I hadn't got around to yet.
ubersec 9y ago
aderall keeps me going anyways. probably 2-4 hours depending on the day.
halis 9y ago
I have my days where literally ZERO gets done. On days like that, if I can put together a PR with two lines of code, it's a win. However, most days, probably 4.5 out of 5 on average, I am super productive, taking very few breaks aside from lunch. In a typical day I probably get 5-6 hours of solid work done. But there is a downside too. In order to achieve this, I sometimes skip meetings and ignore requests from other people. I am considered a high performer and seem to be an anomaly to most people.

200 points by acalderaro 9y ago

Let's include meetings/email as job related.

Do you count meetings as "work", or as "not work"? (I don't spend much times in meetings at my current job, thankfully, so it doesn't change the question for me.) Honestly, my best guess is 50%, or close. I still get my work done as fast as everyone else, though. No complaints on performance reviews.

acalderaro 9y ago
Eh, let's assume that it's work in that you're not able to just freely browse HN or work on a side project. What would your % be then?

justrudd 9y ago

Hm. Given an average week, probably on average 35% of my day is not working. Average being a reasonably interesting bug and/or project to sink my teeth into. Somedays I'll work 10 hours. Others I'll work 4 to 6. Unlike most people, if I finish my work in 5 hours, I go home. If I'm not going to be working, I'd rather not be working at home. I've never had any complaints about work quality or throughput. I have had one complaint about not being seen in the office. [edit] clarified the 35% bucket

tucaz 9y ago
How do you assess "finished my work"? Unless you are working on tickets that might stop coming in is really hard to be "out of work", specially in projects. I ask this because I see a lot of people saying the same but there's always more work to do, being testing something that should be working, fixing bugs, refactoring that old piece of junk you left behind due to times constraints, etc.
- justrudd 9y ago
  For me, it starts during sprint planning. I know what work is going into the sprint, and what work is being assigned to me (we don't run sprints in the natural way of grabbing the next card that's free. I disagree with it, but it is what it is). So I plan out what I need to do on a day-to-day basis to finish that amount of work. For a normal sprint (i.e executing on plans and agreed upon designs) I try to plan the day to be ~6 hours of coding work a day. Sometimes my estimates are long and I finish in 4 or 5 hours. Could I start on the next card? Absolutely. And if I finish all my work early, I'll pull something from the backlog. But in general, I find it more sustainable to just go home after I finish in 5 hours because I know there are going to be times that I work 10 or 12 hours (or a Saturday). Also, for me, depending on the next card, it might take an hour or so to get going at the end of a day. So I'm now at 7 to 8 hours which is when I normally leave. Was that hour or two wasted? No. I retain the knowledge till the next day. But again for me, I've found that coming in and starting a new task fresh reduces that one or two hours to less and gives me a singular focus for the day. If I finish in 2 or 3 hours, I always move on to the next task. That would be silly to go home after 2 hours (most days). I adapt this style for wherever I work. It has worked for me at start ups as well as BigCo. [Update] For the side things (refactoring messy code, flakey tests, automating a tedious process, etc.) - I create cards/tasks for them and get them into the sprint. I know this makes me sound like a "terrible" employee. But it allows me to give my best on a more sustainable basis. And if it is something that truly needs to be done in a month, I'll work those 10 or 12 hour 7 day work weeks...
  - tokenizerrr 9y ago
    How do your coworkers feel about you only being a few hours at the office?
    - dilemma 9y ago
      They probably make snide remarks because they don't understand that someone executing according to plan, consistently over several years and projects, working 5 hours per day, is more valuable than someone working 8 hours in a less organized manner and sometimes missing deadlines.

donatj 9y ago

It really depends on the day. Sometimes I've got basically nothing to do whereas other times I'm overloaded and there basically isn't a moment I'm not. It's hard to figure an average.

slizard 9y ago

Pre-, during, or post-burnout?

goodoldboys 9y ago
the real question

5_minutes 9y ago

Days at the office mean meetings and socializing. Its not really working but hey I get paid. Working from home is getting things done.

9erdelta 9y ago

Some days almost the entire day. I'll read, watch videos, do some tutorials. But its offset because usually when I do this it's because I'm hung up on something and it just isn't going to get solved unless the ole brain has time to do its subconscious thing.

1_player 9y ago
Letting the subconscious work through a hard problem while doing something else is a truly underrated trick. Taking a shower or going for a walk also works wonderfully.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  I've solved a bug while eating a cup of yogurt while walking around outside the office. Definitely worthwhile.
- wingworks 9y ago
  I used to take hour long lunch breaks, which I'd spend about 35mins walking to get food and finding a nice spot to sit outside, most days I done this I would come back into the office refreshed and often fix the issue I was working on shortly after coming back. But the hour-long break was always founded upon, which is why I ended up leaving. (it was also the only break I took each day, but the culture in the team I was in was to take no more than 30mins break)
  - 9erdelta 9y ago
    30 minute breaks? Sounds unbearable! Plus knowing that you're being judged creates a pressure that doesn't help solve problems.
naspinski 9y ago
I figure out so many problems while lifting weights! With the added bonus that now I can now bench, deadlift, and squat well over 300 lbs.

throw832649 9y ago

Throwaway for maximum honesty: I am pretty sure I spend at least 75% of my time "at work" not working. HN, Reddit, messing around with side projects or learning a new language or framework. This has been the case for my entire working life. I seem to get as much done as other people (sometimes better) so part of me wonders if I'm not as unusual as I feel. Part of me wonders if I should get evaluated for ADHD, since I find it such a struggle to focus on my work. And part of me is just frustrated with myself, that theoretically I could spend like 3 good hours at work each day, get more done, and have more quality time to myself.

yoodenvranx 9y ago
> I seem to get as much done as other people (sometimes better) Perhaps all the other people are also as unproductive as you? ;)
- knodi123 9y ago
  Yes, that's what he said, in the second half of the sentence you quoted: "so part of me wonders if I'm not as unusual as I feel"
- lazythrowawayd 9y ago
  Or they're "productive" in a different way. There's one developer on our team who spends large portions of his day creating diagrams, documents and largely unneeded JIRA tickets. It's busy work, but since he has nothing else to do, he just creates document exhaust.
barsonme 9y ago
The best way to describe ADHD is: The TV is always on, but you don't get to choose the channel. Some things are easy to focus on—I can sit down to program for a bit and lose track of time for 5 hours. On the other hand, if something is boring, it's mind-numbingly boring. It was the worst while I was in school, since teachers and professors just thought, "oh, he's unmotivated" when in reality it was more along the lines of, "I'd rather cut my toenails with a rusty butter knife than write the paper." (Okay, perhaps that's a slight exaggeration.) Anyway, if it affects your life and managing it yourself isn't working (give it an honest effort, of course) definitely speak with a doctor. While too many parents think their kids have ADHD when the kids are really just, well, kids, trying to cope with ADHD without some sort of guidance sucks. A lot. It's amazing how much more productive you can be if you get some help coping with it. Just my $0.02.

qrybam 9y ago

Busy day = only when I go to the toilet Quiet day = maybe half my time Most of my days are busy; if I'm not busy with my main work then I'll be busy making the more mundane aspects of my job disappear into the background. edit: formatting

jpindar 9y ago

It depends on how talkative my coworkers are that day.

deleted 9y ago
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dylanha 9y ago

Developer here. Going by my time Rescuetime logs, 62.5% of my time is spent outside of the IDE or any other work related application. I do not enjoy this work and spend a lot of time walking around/thinking about the problem/surfing non work sites.

tomatohs 9y ago
Thinking about the problem is working.

iLoch 9y ago

I'd like to see where people are from if they're replying to this thread. I wonder how cultural norms affect effectiveness (do Americans work less at work because of the work-oriented culture which requires them to stay at work longer for no reason?)

natoliniak 9y ago
I work in the USA and i would say I'm about 30-40% productive, maybe less. My productivity is strongly related to the density of meetings throughout the day: My productivity killers are relatively short gaps between meetings (<45m) during which i am completely unable to focus because of the anticipation that i will soon be completely distracted. So if I have three 1hr meetings with 45minutes gaps between them, my daily productivity plummets to nearly 0. Open office plan also doesn't help with staying focused.
Cyph0n 9y ago
> do Americans work less at work because of the work-oriented culture which requires them to stay at work longer for no reason? I don't think US workplace culture is extreme in that regard. I usually look at East Asian work culture when it comes truly weird workplace norms and traditions. My family lived in Japan for a short period, and my father told me that he and his colleagues had to wait for their boss to leave every night before they could leave work. Now that's extreme.

milkytron 9y ago

I recently started my first full time job associated with my career. I'd say I spend between 65-80% either doing my work or something related to it such as training or reading documentation (which take up about 20% of my time at the moment).

decasia 9y ago

Arguably, time spent reading HN is a legitimate part of becoming/remaining a good developer. Certainly, spending time socializing with coworkers is a required part of work, many places. Spending some amount of time unwinding at the office is arguably required for mental health and therefore a functional component of remaining a worker -- does that count as working? "Working" is an ambiguous category, it seems to me. One definition of work (call it "productivist") says that we're only working when we're literally producing something valuable. A more organizational view might hold that "work" is whatever you're socially (often implicitly) required to do to keep your job (whether measurably productive or not). And a third more holistic definition would include stuff like exercise or professional development that are not always directly "required" by anyone, but that you might go crazy without doing...

austenallred 9y ago
I'll be honest; I don't think using HN is anything close to what I would consider "working." At best it's marginally optimized random browsing.
- rl3 9y ago
  While it isn't work, reading technical articles regularly on HN can be very beneficial. In fact, the first thing I tell aspiring developers is to start reading HN on a regular basis if they already aren't. It confers a sort of broad awareness of various stacks and ecosystems over time that's hard to obtain otherwise.
  - jrs235 9y ago
    Depending on what articles one is reading, this activity could fall within "sharpening the ax" (which is also beneficial for the company).
    - scorpioxy 9y ago
      Absolutely and if keeping up with technology is not work then what it is "work"? Is it just typing out the code? What about when your IDE auto-completes your code? It's a little silly to think about it this way. I try to keep my distractions to a minimum level but I've often encountered comments and articles on HN that have been of great benefit to my work and my clients. Things like a service I've never heard of, a library being used in a way that I haven't seen before or even just personal experiences. Hell I even use HN to minimize distractions such as reading only the comments section about some new product Google/MS/Apple released(or is killing) just to get an idea of what's out there in the market and if it is of any use to me.

brentm 9y ago

My number are all over the place but according to WakaTime about 152 hours last month was spent in the IDE.

nickrivadeneira 9y ago

I'm surprised by the responses here. I didn't think it was as prevalent as comments suggest. At the beginning of my career it was probably around 50%, though after spending two years at a consulting company, it's dropped to 5-10% maximum. I find that reducing interruption and having music going keeps me engaged.

CGamesPlay 9y ago

According to RescueTime, I spend around 83% of my screen time on "productive" things. My total screen time averages about 25 hours / week, whereas my at-work time is roughly closer to double that. I'd say that 67% of my off-screen at-work time is "productive" meetings and the other third is things like lunch, walks, etc. Putting this all together, I spend 37.5 hours / week productively and 12.5 hours / week at work slacking off (or doing human things like eating and pooping). So call it 75% productive time. I generally enjoy my job. I've counted writing this post / assembling this data as "not productive" time.

fatherofone 9y ago

Depends what you mean by work? I'm reading an article on Async with C#, that's not coding but is work. I watch some videos on latest tech, thats work too.... Only thing that matters is if have I completed tasks in my sprint or are there any critical issues

jonahrd 9y ago

Unfortunately I'm paid hourly and remotely, so while getting settled, checking an email or two, getting coffee, etc are all things I would do as part of a normal workday, I don't tend to log those hours or get paid for any of it

deleted 9y ago

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lazythrowawayd 9y ago

I probably spend half my time not working. I'm burnt out though. After a few years at my current position, I just don't care. Why is this? I've had a few promising projects languish because my manager is slow or hesitant to allocate resources. That's a bit demoralizing. When I'm on a path to production for a functioning system I get caught up in the devops meeting vortex. That's a waste of time and it takes several weeks to get any sort of resolution. In these cases my time is mostly spent looking for workarounds and not "working". I feel there are a lot of politics and favoritism in the company, and my manager (and our team) is not on the right side. It's demotivating to have your work ignored because you're not a priority. I don't know how anyone stays for more than a year. Edit: In the first few months I worked on random on-going projects, but was quickly made lead on some new projects. It was good at first, but after about 9 months I'd say most (90%) weeks I don't put in anywhere near 40 hours of work. The sad thing is I've always gotten a raise (double digit in two cases) and full bonus every performance cycle. I've finally started looking for another job. Does anyone have recommendations? I'm really looking for a company that enables their individual contributors (engineers) to actually get shit done.

robind2 9y ago
Work for a startup, preferably one that is already somewhat profitable. I have worked for this type company my whole career and this "devops vortex" you speak of is a foreign concept. I run a small IT dept and we have one 30 min staff per week plus a one-on-one for each dev. And they code and solve other problems all day, and of course surf the web or socialize to break up the day too.
- lazythrowawayd 9y ago
  I'm already in talks with two well known pre-IPO startups (<500 employees). The devops vortex is a new animal to me as well. I've never had so many problems moving systems into production than I have at this company. Edit: I've talked with many in my professional network and they describe similar meeting loads (~1 hr/week) as you do. I'd estimate I spend on average 3 hr/week in meetings. And most of these meetings don't result in action items. They're essentially pointless.

hfourm 9y ago

Reasonably ~5 hours of coding, maybe sometimes less on days with a lot of meetings. Rest of time on HN, reading, or admin type stuff (planning, ticket & branch management), and of course meetings

callesgg 9y ago

Depends how you want to define work. I think of stuff that is beneficial to the company in one way or another like 95% of the time. Re structuring thoughts, digesting ideas.... talking to others to understand how they think. But if someone that did not know me came and looked at what i did during work hours and did not get to ask questions to me. I would assume they would think that i only worked 20-25% of the time. Things are not always what they seem.

neal_jones 9y ago

I have recently gone freelance/self-employed and I have quickly missed the reality of being able to not have to question if I'm actually getting work done every minute of the day. The truth is, I can't do brain-intensive work for more than maybe 5 or 6 hours.

steveax 9y ago
I worked for myself for about a decade (web dev) and always considered getting 6 billable hours in a good day.
- convolvatron 9y ago
  as much as keeping the pipe full and working for organizations that...have such internal problems they have to hire contractors does kinda suck. working when you feel like you can contribute, billing exactly those hours, and filling the rest of your time with activities of your choice feels very honest and liberating. if i feel like i can't get things done because of the environment then i don't work, and i don't bill. if i finish a job and they have no more work for me then i say, thanks, keep me in mind, let me know if you have any problems. not really a capitalist, but the transactional nature removes all the festering emotional complications. and you can be a lot more straightforward about where things are broken.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

It is an interesting question which, in my opinion, hinges entirely on a fairly puritanical notion of 'work.' One of my 'problems' is that I can't "not work" in the sense of a laborer who is no longer building widgets. As a person who is asked to solve complex problems with a high degree of dimensionality inside of an arbitrarily constrained solution space, much of the 'work' I do consists of turning the problem over and over in my head while I explore the solution space. A good example of this was an early review I got at Intel by my manager (a really solid EE type guy). He added some criticism of my time management (considered a 'ding' in the vernacular) for a embedded compiler/assembler/driver thing I wrote as part of the evaluation of a graphics processor. He said I had 'sand bagged' the time estimate. When I asked him to describe that a bit more he explained that I had told him it would take 6 months to do, and it was 2 weeks late, and I had spent 5 months "goofing off and not working" and then about 6 weeks doing the work. So my estimate should really have been '8 weeks' and if I had started on time it would have been done two weeks earlier than that. I thought about that for a long time. And explained to him the for five months I had no idea what the best way to write the software was, and in that five months I had learned about 8 different technologies that all came together into the final solution. I had to learn how to write device drivers in Xenix, how to map I/O space memory into the kernel, design a language which was human understandable and could be compiled into the odd little RISC instruction set of the Graphics chip. And until I had figured out all of that precursor information, I didn't have a clue how it would be written, but then after figuring out that information actually writing the code was fairly mechanical. In this one case the problem was that hardware has so many great milestones you can call out, parts captured, schematics done, netlists verified, layout started, design rule verification, first films, films checked, first boards, boards checked, first assembly. Bringup in stages 1, 2, and 3 etc. All along the way there are pleasant milestones to say "this is done" now on to the next thing. But software is never like that for building something that nobody has ever built before. And it is even rarely like that when you have the same software but you are building it on a different system. The linkages, the entanglement between the system and the software (and now the network and the services) makes each new implementation its own special snowflake, with its own kinds of problems. Have you ever woken up and "knew" the solution to a tricky software issue? Or had an idea for a change to an existing system that might make it better? That happens to me all the time when I'm designing stuff. And a case could be made that I'm working even when I'm asleep! Not because I'm sitting there typing in lines of code but because I'm going through the solution space, somewhere in my subconscious, looking for clues to places that hold better answers than the answer that is currently checked into the git repository. As a result I tend to measure my own productivity by 'solutions over unit time' versus 'hours typing into employer owned equipment'. It still bites me from time to time when a supervisor needs a constant stream of 'still flying' type status messages to feel comfortable.

workthrowaway19 9y ago

Probably 25% on the average day. Occasionally 0%. There are entire days that I'll spend working on nothing but side projects, but our company is getting big so no one notices or cares. Sometimes I work from home just so I don't have to do anything other than be around for a couple meetings. The bigger we get the more lawyers and compliance people we ad, and the less noticeable it is that I'm not doing shit.

shouldbworking 9y ago
I find this brutal honestly hilarious

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

You're almost certainly getting a sampling bias by asking this question at ~2pm Pacific Time on a weekday.

hardworkerthrow 9y ago

Over the first 15+ years of my career as an engineer and engineering manager, I've repeatedly surveyed colleagues and friends in engineering roles about this question. I've asked it of people I consider low-performing, all the way to folks I'd consider 10x developers. I have never met a single software developer who, when pressed to give an honest assessment and when "working" is defined along the lines of "actively defining, coding, or debugging a feature", self-identifies as working more than 50% of the time. There are occasional stretches of 12+ hour working sessions, but they are very rare. I'd say I've asked this of over a hundred people. This isn't to say these people only do 4 hours of work a day. Often, peers have described how they hit a wall at work, go home, and then work on personal projects in the evening. I've come to the conclusion that is generally impossible to do mentally intensive tasks for more than 4 continuous hours over the long term.

nubbins 9y ago
Thats interesting because 4 hours is exactly the limit I've seen cited by researchers as the max for highly focused work but even that much is a kind of skill that has to be developed, so a beginner might have much less concentration.
- veddox 9y ago
  Can you give a reference for that number? Sounds intriguing...
  - antognini 9y ago
    This article also references about four hours as the limit that a creative professional can work every day: http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/darwin-was-a-slacker-and-you-should-be-too http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/darwin-was-a-slacker-and-y...
    - veddox 9y ago
      A fascinating article, thank you for sharing!

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IAmGraydon 9y ago

I spend around 90% of my time at work doing real work. There are often days where that number is nearly 100%. At past jobs that number was closer to 50-60%, but I've moved into a lead role (Marketing Director) where slacking means getting buried. I don't mind it one bit, either. I'm helping to steer the company and that's very rewarding, even if it is a lot of work.

MileyCyrax 9y ago

At least 90%. If I'm at work and not working, I'm usually working on one of my own projects.

1_player 9y ago

99% of my 5 hour day. Because I discovered I can't usually stay in flow mode for more than 5 hours, so I get in the office around 12pm and leave around 5.30pm

triangleman 9y ago
So that's your working time?
- 1_player 9y ago
  Yes. When I sit at the desk I start working and time tracking and I don't slack off till I leave, except maybe to browse some music on Spotify to keep me concentrated. When I was spending 9 hours/day as an employee, I'd be slacking off a cumulative 2/3 hours every day.

glennsantos 9y ago

I only spend around 5-15% of my time at work, not working. Work in my context is time spent on things I planned to do and want to do, including the small breaks I take to recharge and socialize.

swah 9y ago

60% or more :( But there are SOME DAYS that I work 150%! ("in the flow") So how to achieve flow consistently? One of the few things that works for me is to get started working first thing in the morning: no news, no HN, until 10am, etc. When I can do this, I know I'll have a productive day.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Does this cause a productive mental state, or is it merely a symptom of it? I suspect it's causal (based off what I know of brain chemistry), but I could definitely be wrong on that part. Like, "get assigned bullshit work, can't focus on it because it's bullshit, end up on HN" is definitely also a plausible story to me.

throw110 9y ago

I spent 60-70% of my time not working because even though I'm working with interesting technology, it's stuff that won't get used by almost anyway, my peers don't seem interested, my manager is absent and the requirements are all over the place (symptom of nobody caring, whatever is done is okay as long as it impresses, for some random definition of "impresses)... ... so it needs to be done to check an item in a list but nobody cares. If nobody cares, I don't care either, which makes me think I'm wasting my time, which leads to depression, feeling burnt out, procrastinating even more, etc.

ajmurmann 9y ago

Not counting lunch break, I'd say I probably spend ~90-95% working.

deleted 9y ago

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ivrrimum 9y ago

0%. I work as a upwork freelancer. More precisely by hourly rate and upwork desktop app takes screenshots at random times, so i can't really browse HN and other sites. But I will tell you honestly, i don't want to go back to normal work. I get shit done( there is also that "gambler" feeling, when you see how much money you earn each week ) and in good quality( I get reviews from my clients, so i can't code bad either ). So yeah, a hour paid is a hour worked.

throw112358 9y ago

I sit in a cubicle and I update bank software. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

deleted 9y ago
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csorrell 9y ago
I had a job like that for a while and would work on project Euler problems just to pass the time. It was maddening.
alltakendamned 9y ago
I would go crazy in less than 6 weeks. Simply for the fact that I have to be present, but with nothing to do.

mikekchar 9y ago

I have a follow up question: For the time that you spend "not working" would you prefer to "work"? For me the answer is "absolutely!!!". Reading through some of the responses, it really seems that people are mixed. Either their "non-working" time is spent with side projects/training or they have become demotivated by problems with the work flow on their team. For me the latter is by far the biggest problem. I was just thinking the other day that, as programmers, we need a kind of statement that indicates what we expect from the organisations we are in. To be honest, I really want to work instead of write stuff on HN, so I'll leave this as an exercise to the interested. As an example, I think it is reasonable to expect to be able to spend whole days writing code (which means that someone else has to go to the meetings, and someone else has to clarify requirements, and someone else has to prioritise). There should be some clear resolution of differences of opinion (whether that be in technical direction, or whatever) -- a programmer shouldn't have to spend time arguing. A programmer should expect to have spaces both for interacting with groups of people and for quiet contemplation. I sure there are other (and better) ideas, but that's what I have off the cuff.

jrs235 9y ago
I got sick of feeling like I am wasting my life away at work not working, so I submitted my resignation. Time to get on doing my own things so I don't feel I'm wasting my little yet precious time alive. After a few meetings, I am not quitting yet. I have been re-classed from salary to hourly and I will be able to have fewer and more flexible "hours" so that I can get out and do my own thing and side projects (which require business hour meetings/calls/etc).

KerryJones 9y ago

When I worked for other companies I would say I worked around 70% of the time I was "working". When working for myself I think I am putting 60-80 hours of real work in a week.

smilesnd 9y ago

100% of the time, because I do what I love.

rstuart4133 9y ago

Does depend on what you call "working". I deem the time I spent on tech sites like HN as working. So does my boss. He similarly considers the time I spend at the odd tech conference working. There are good reasons for this - I drive change around here, and most of that change originates from exposure to ideas from those sources. If you could that (and I do), I'd say at least 75% of my time is spent working.

mattbgates 9y ago

Definitely depends on the day.. some days I'm working the entire shift, other days I get paid to just sit here and work on my side projects. I work for for a project-based department and with that comes deadlines that could mean I have to be done within 3-6 hours which can be stressful. While our company goes with the rest of the world, I wish the company would consider 10 hour days 4 days a week, with half the department working in the earlier part of the week, and the other half working the later half of the week instead of all of us working the traditional 8 hour days 5 days a week. So I make the best of it and enjoy those days where I do mostly nothing the entire time. But I'm never not doing anything.. I build web apps and run a popular website, so I'm always kept busy.

Jemaclus 9y ago

I consider myself rather productive compared to most devs I've worked with. On a good day, I spend 75% of my day "working". On a normal day, it's closer to 50/50. I'm a tech manager, though, so the "good" days are when I'm really busy all day long, and the "normal" days are when I spend most of my time coding. Like others have said, it's really difficult to do more than 4 hours of solid coding in a day, particularly if you're interrupted frequently like I am. That said, I don't necessarily care that much about the hours my employees work, so long as they meet the deadlines and are reasonably productive. I have a good idea of how long a task takes, so if they take too much longer than that, we'll have a chat. Otherwise, I just want to make sure they're happy and not burnt out and staying as productive as possible.

iamben 9y ago

I record my time pretty religiously. 5 hours seems to be a standard "working day" of actually solid in the flow (face buried in a screen) work, assuming I'm sat at a desk for 7/8. That said, if I'm rolling and happy it can be way more, if I'm tired/struggling to hit the flow/not creative - way less. I can get an awful lot done in a day (or few days) if I push, but doing that long term becomes counter productive. On a regular day, I'll also get a bunch of smaller 'work' done, but it's mostly the admin-y stuff. Sales, email, help, calls, networking. Sometimes that can be my whole day - I suppose it depends how important those things are at the time (sales!) as to how much they're considered 'work'. Edit: Just to add, decent headphones are a godsend.

jarboot 9y ago

90%, not including lunch. The other 10% is making tea and drinking some, usually looking out the window or chatting with someone.

truebosko 9y ago

In all honesty, I try to stay full throttle at work. Important breaks I do take: Coffee walk (unfortunately on some busy days I simply can't make it out), Quick chats with the team, and Pomodoro-timed walks to stretch/ease the mind. I usually eat lunch at my desk, which annoys me, because I always want to socialize and be better at that. I don't find it easy to do this since the days are so busy. I'm a product manager, so I spend much of my days in meetings that are a mix of working sessions, scoping exercises, communications with external clients, and team-focused meetings. On the days I don't have any meetings (they do exist), I zone out and get some work done. Lately I've been focusing on the DevOps for our team.

ivm 9y ago

Working from home. Last month I tracked 270h on my Mac workstation: 190 hours (70%) were productive, 24h (9%) neutral tools, and 56h (21%) distracting (mostly chats with friends). I also spend 1-2 hours a day on my "leisure laptop" (for example reading HN from there but also some useful RSS feeds). So it feels like 65% would be a correct productivity score. Tracked with https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/ https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/ of course, most of the productive time was spent on its development and marketing. :]

smartfin 9y ago
Also use that app. But because of single machine for job and everything else my stats is around 45-50% productive, another ~10% neutral.

nunez 9y ago

These days less than 10%. I take lunch and a coffee break or two though. I used to read reddit and hn to saturation on many days before getting into consulting; these days, i hardly read anything until before or after my core hours, not because i can't but because there is more interesting work to do

throwaway184827 9y ago

Reading this thread has made me feel a whole lot better about myself. Been struggling with burnout and have been working on side projects a good 50% of the time while I overestimate projects to give me larger buffers. I just don't give a fuck anymore. I thought I was alone. (Yes, I know it's wrong and I want to be more productive, but I hate the work I do and I hate the culture here. So I want to start my own thing.)

throwaway_jazze 9y ago

(Throwaway for honesty) Significantly less now that I work remotely, on my own schedule, and at a reasonable company. I get 6+ hours a day of real work in, usually more, but try not to overdo it. (For awhile I was becoming a bit workaholic without the boundary between work and not-work, spending 10+ hours at it.) I take breaks and do spend a little time on HN or Stack Exchange to clear my head, but I don't do Reddit, webcomics, facebook, or any random sites during work. That's my relax after work stuff, done on a different PC. So in terms of productivity, I'd say around 75-85% work, 15-25% slack most days. I previously worked an 8:30-5:30 where management measured productivity by the butts-in-seats metric, scheduled a lot of meetings, and was quite anal about punctuality. I was lucky to get 4 hours of serious work in most days (between all the interruptions, bureaucratic stuff, and having to work based on my manager's sleep schedule). Sometimes I ended up doing more work at home at night than I did while 'at work'. Maybe 50% productivity, often less. Before that I worked at a 9-5 where we had to record our time per task so specifically that we even had a task to enter the time spent filling out the timesheet. I could have done better there about focusing on solving problems and improving business if I wasn't constantly distracted by the clock ticking and all the estimating and meetings about estimates and deadlines and timesheets. Maybe 50% productivity.

krystiangw 9y ago

I believe I'm productive for about 70% of the time. I'm most distracted when I'm swiching to other project. I need to re-focus again.

superasn 9y ago

Speaking as a solopreneur, I work only 3 hours a day, more like 3 x 50 minutes laps with 15 min breaks in between. Also each lap is dedicated to one activity, first is manufacturing where I work on my project (the actual coding part), second is traffic (this is the dreaded marketing/outreach part) and finally is the optimization part (seo, increasing conversion rates, improving design, etc). I've seen that the diversity of this work prevents you from getting bored and also is very good for your sites because if you keep working on just coding your sites seldom make any money. The 3 hours limit is because after that i can happily watch tv, spend time with my family or just work on my other hobbies besides computers guilt free. P.s. When you try to do as much work as you can, i believe you still only get 3 hours of work done - yet you feel guilty of not doing enough which causes unhappiness.

0wl3x 9y ago
Sorry is this is rude but how do you make a living only working 3 hours a day? Are you products already established?
- superasn 9y ago
  No it isn't rude at all. Yes, some sites are already established but I also launch at least one new site every month to add to my income. 3 hours is a lot of work if done without distraction. I think the key is to make your work more mechanical and less creative. I have a system that I have perfected over the years which helps me do this[1]. It's like a stupid step by step list where each item links to a document which is another stupid step by step list that I follow like a "Robot" for these 3 hours. When you do it this way, it makes it quite easy and 3 hours daily is more than enough to launch a small to medium size project in a month (I think there are less than 200 items in total and about 50% of it you can easily outsource). [1] http://i.imgur.com/i1oBM2t.png http://i.imgur.com/i1oBM2t.png
  - tasuki 9y ago
    That's great - mind sharing the other tabs as well? :)

douche 9y ago

If I have to go to the office: maybe 2 hours a day of actual productive work. If I work from home: usually 4-6 hours of productive work. Going to the office adds up to a ten-hour day, with the commute. Working from home is usually a 6-7 hour day, and I get to stay in my pajamas, take the dog for a walk, take a break to do some housework, and be in a comfortable environment. I don't work from home enough anymore.

webjac 9y ago

I've been an employee for like 20% of my career and a the rest I've been a freelancer. I never worked more than 4 hours (of real work a day). There's the occasional super productive day where I have done over 8 hours of productive work, but that's the exception, not the rule. I usually work around 3-4 hours of productive work daily. Heck I'd even say 20%-30% of that time is not even productive (meetings, emails and necessary yet unproductive things). When I worked for companies doing 9 to 5, I wasted a looot of time doing nothing: reddit, fb, and stuff. I also recognize that I need that distraction to do some real productive work. I'm very fast and productive when it comes to actual work, but if I don't get the procrastination time then I just become a blurry mess of a brain and take 10 times longer to do the same things.

philipyoungg 9y ago
same.
IpV8 9y ago
How do you bill? Are you project based? Are you only billing 4 hours a day?
imarg 9y ago
I think procrastination time is also important and necessary. I just completed a course on Coursera (Learning How to Learn - https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/ https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/). One of things mentioned is that our brain has a focused and diffused mode and both are needed for us to learn. So, I guess, something similar happens when we are working. You need both focus time but also a down time to achieve things. Of course, too much procrastination is also not a good thing.

deleted 9y ago

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mdlap 9y ago

I use RescueTime. Productive time is about 90% each month. The reality is that 100% of my time, if meetings are included, is productive (excluding minimal breaks). I feel sorry for the people trying to run businesses with all of these employees not working. I'm a QA engineer. The most experienced QA engineer on a 3-person team (the other two have either more experience with testing but less with development, or vice-versa). I have waaaaay too much to do to get away with not working. I do empathise with those for whom maintaining a high level of productivity is impossible because of how demanding their work is. I'm fortunate that I have so many different tasks to perform that if I don't have the energy to concentrate on something demanding, I can switch to something fairly basic. I'm also fortunate in that, for me, problem solving activities are almost always energising. So if I feel like I'm getting burnt out I can dive into one of the tricky but non-urgent problems I hadn't got around to yet.

ubersec 9y ago

aderall keeps me going anyways. probably 2-4 hours depending on the day.

halis 9y ago

I have my days where literally ZERO gets done. On days like that, if I can put together a PR with two lines of code, it's a win. However, most days, probably 4.5 out of 5 on average, I am super productive, taking very few breaks aside from lunch. In a typical day I probably get 5-6 hours of solid work done. But there is a downside too. In order to achieve this, I sometimes skip meetings and ignore requests from other people. I am considered a high performer and seem to be an anomaly to most people.