6 ms·

Ask HN: How much time in your working day do you spend in actual work?

22 points by wowsig 9y ago

marcos_placona 9y ago
Roughly 6 hours but that varies a lot
bouchardm 9y ago
Solution architect here, probably around 5 true productive hours. If you count all the time people ask me question, arount 8 hours per day.
xaedes 9y ago
As a research scientist: ~7 hours (after breaks), of which only 3h are programming. The rest is organizational stuff like meetings, writing research proposals, answering emails, making powerpoints, supervise students, etc...
- wowsig 9y ago
  So do you count your work hours as 3 hours or 7? And curious, if you try and optimise for more 'real work' time? I feel I'm quite hard on myself and consider it unnatural if I read an article or even browse randomly at work.
  - xaedes 9y ago
    A few months ago I had the feeling I get nothing done (programming), because of all the other stuff I had to do. That is why I started tracking my time consumption on a half hour base. "If you want to control something you need to measure it" was my thinking. The time tracking itself doesn't cost much time. Did it earlier for my private life for a few months. The first weeks my average programming time was only 1.5h! I slowly got it up to 3h now. But do I count it as 3h or 7h work? Hm - As a student I sure had more time for programming itself. But I actually get more work done now. I can much easier pursue multiple projects and delegate work to students. It is just that I didn't (have to) see all the organizational stuff that needs to happen beside the programming itself as a student. The other 4h I do valuable stuff. Some of it should imho be done by others, but we are currently a little bit short on staff..^^ It's a nice learning opportunity though. So to answer your question: I would count the whole 7 hours.
    - xaedes 9y ago
      But honestly all the work-related reading on the web (e.g. hackernews) I do should count as work time too. Then you can add some 4 hours or so.
      - ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
        How do you decide if it's work-related reading/browsing or not? So watching a music video on YouTube is clear but I'd say HackerNews is muddy, leaning towards entertainment. For example you need to sleep to work too, but that doesn't count. HN may provide general nourishment about latest tech news and have interested articles that elevate your general knowledge but hard for me to pin that down as hours worked. That's the problem with work today, it's not easily measurable, in the old fashioned way of thinking of work as putting caps on bottles I'm guessing most people do far less than they believe, I wouldn't be shocked if it was only a couple of hours for many.
        xaedes 9y ago
        Yea well you have to dig through a lot of trash to find the gems. But since it is part of the deal you need to take the time into account that you need to wander through the mud. Officially I won't count the hours that I use for this at home. But at least for me that is definitely work related.
      - Noumenon72 9y ago
        If you're not taking notes on it so you can access and use it later, it's likely just an idle interest. Reading's not the same as learning. Also if you would read it without getting paid, it's probably not work.
        xaedes 9y ago
        Not all things I read on the way are worth taking notes of. But the work related gems I find will be mailed back to work with keywords. For gems that are related to personal interests I have other knowledge base dumps.
spoonie 9y ago
Based on my time tracking, around 6 hours. Sometimes less with lunch, but on average I spend 1/4 of my day taking breaks.
hguhghuff 9y ago
10 hours or so mostly programming but also other work.
bemmu 9y ago
If "actual work" is running Candy Japan, about 2 hours per day this month.
- palidanx 9y ago
  Do you run Candyjapan.com? If so, how'd you get into this?
malux85 9y ago
As founder: about 12 hours, I take about 4 hours total breaks in the day to swim and often an hour or two nap in the middle, nap required because two 6 hour chunks is quite strenuous This is not rigorously followed - sometimes 3 hours then an hour break then 3, sometimes 6, I eat when I’m hungry and I sleep when I’m tired, I don’t have fixed meals or fixed schedules First ~6 hours normally admin, emails, proposals, reseller support, mentoring juniors Next ~6 hours is 100% coding Work from home so no commute, nothing else to waste time on Work 6 days a week, Sunday’s reserved for rest, reading and research
muzani 9y ago
Rescue Time puts it at about 2.5 hours/day of programming time. The max I've ever pushed for and recorded was 250 minutes. Even that left me too exhausted to drive back home.
Noumenon72 9y ago
I come from a factory background where it wasn't uncommon to spend the entire 8-12 hours working at the fastest safe pace I could. After a year of developing, I still spend almost no time on water-cooler talk and web browsing, the only things that are clearly not work. I don't see anybody else wasting time like that either. I wonder if the 'barely four hours a day' people would not count stuff like editing a wiki, investigtating a log, and so forth. My job isn't 100% programming by any stretch. But when I do have programming, I spend 8 hours straight. It doesn't seem to make me very productive, but I do spend it all hard at work.
SirLJ 9y ago
Not much - automate as much as possible and enjoy the freedom, but be available when the crisis strike :-)
- muzani 9y ago
  Living the dream.
  - SirLJ 9y ago
    Absolutely, the bad side is I cannot retire early, love the job and every year I am postponing...
luckydude 9y ago
I'm semi retired so not that much, certainly nothing like I used to work. When I was a kernel engineer at Sun, there were stretches where I worked around 14 hours per "day". "day" had a different definition for me, I worked on about a 34 hour "day". Which meant that my day time hours were constantly shifting. A coworker put a clock on my door that said "where's larry?" and it showed when I'd be in next. I think it was a joke but some people said they liked it. The reason I did this was I would be working on stuff where it could take ~8 hours just to regain the state I had in my head when I stopped working the previous day. So if I did 8 hour days I'd never make any forward progress. So you do 8 hours to page in the state and then you go as far as you can go to move things forward. I didn't have much of a social life back then but I didn't care, I was getting stuff done at Sun and loved it. It was a super productive time of my life.
- lamansion 9y ago
  >> it could take ~8 hours just to regain the state I had in my head Sounds interesting, can you please share more details about what you were working on?
  - luckydude 9y ago
    It was almost always performance stuff. I'd get stuck with stuff like "Oracle's cluster database sucks on our systems, can you find out why?" and then you have to go figure out where it is slow (find the hot spot) and then figure out why we were slow. That meant keeping all of the hardware in your head, the kernel in your head, and the app in your head. If you didn't have all that state it was super hard, maybe impossible (for me at least), to figure out the problem.
JoeAltmaier 9y ago
Contractor, currently with a large ag company, remote. I work 1 or two hours out of 8. The rest spent waiting for their antique tool chain to get stuff done. Read a butt-ton of HN the last month. Previous contracts - I worked an hour for every hour I billed, moving their project forward. Usually 5 or 6 hours a day. The rest spent working on more contracts etc.
Top19 9y ago
4 hours total of pure undeniable work throughout the whole day (so wake up to sleep). K. Anders Ericsson, a professor on the study of “expertise”, notes that the best violinists in the world top out at 4 hours of practice. So I don’t feel guilty after 4 hours. Another thing Ericcson noticed, the violinist who practice the most and are the best take midday naps.

22 points by wowsig 9y ago

Roughly 6 hours but that varies a lot

Solution architect here, probably around 5 true productive hours. If you count all the time people ask me question, arount 8 hours per day.

xaedes 9y ago

As a research scientist: ~7 hours (after breaks), of which only 3h are programming. The rest is organizational stuff like meetings, writing research proposals, answering emails, making powerpoints, supervise students, etc...

wowsig 9y ago
So do you count your work hours as 3 hours or 7? And curious, if you try and optimise for more 'real work' time? I feel I'm quite hard on myself and consider it unnatural if I read an article or even browse randomly at work.
- xaedes 9y ago
  A few months ago I had the feeling I get nothing done (programming), because of all the other stuff I had to do. That is why I started tracking my time consumption on a half hour base. "If you want to control something you need to measure it" was my thinking. The time tracking itself doesn't cost much time. Did it earlier for my private life for a few months. The first weeks my average programming time was only 1.5h! I slowly got it up to 3h now. But do I count it as 3h or 7h work? Hm - As a student I sure had more time for programming itself. But I actually get more work done now. I can much easier pursue multiple projects and delegate work to students. It is just that I didn't (have to) see all the organizational stuff that needs to happen beside the programming itself as a student. The other 4h I do valuable stuff. Some of it should imho be done by others, but we are currently a little bit short on staff..^^ It's a nice learning opportunity though. So to answer your question: I would count the whole 7 hours.
  - xaedes 9y ago
    But honestly all the work-related reading on the web (e.g. hackernews) I do should count as work time too. Then you can add some 4 hours or so.
    - ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
      How do you decide if it's work-related reading/browsing or not? So watching a music video on YouTube is clear but I'd say HackerNews is muddy, leaning towards entertainment. For example you need to sleep to work too, but that doesn't count. HN may provide general nourishment about latest tech news and have interested articles that elevate your general knowledge but hard for me to pin that down as hours worked. That's the problem with work today, it's not easily measurable, in the old fashioned way of thinking of work as putting caps on bottles I'm guessing most people do far less than they believe, I wouldn't be shocked if it was only a couple of hours for many.
      - xaedes 9y ago
        Yea well you have to dig through a lot of trash to find the gems. But since it is part of the deal you need to take the time into account that you need to wander through the mud. Officially I won't count the hours that I use for this at home. But at least for me that is definitely work related.
    - Noumenon72 9y ago
      If you're not taking notes on it so you can access and use it later, it's likely just an idle interest. Reading's not the same as learning. Also if you would read it without getting paid, it's probably not work.
      - xaedes 9y ago
        Not all things I read on the way are worth taking notes of. But the work related gems I find will be mailed back to work with keywords. For gems that are related to personal interests I have other knowledge base dumps.

spoonie 9y ago

Based on my time tracking, around 6 hours. Sometimes less with lunch, but on average I spend 1/4 of my day taking breaks.

hguhghuff 9y ago

10 hours or so mostly programming but also other work.

bemmu 9y ago

If "actual work" is running Candy Japan, about 2 hours per day this month.

palidanx 9y ago
Do you run Candyjapan.com? If so, how'd you get into this?

malux85 9y ago

As founder: about 12 hours, I take about 4 hours total breaks in the day to swim and often an hour or two nap in the middle, nap required because two 6 hour chunks is quite strenuous This is not rigorously followed - sometimes 3 hours then an hour break then 3, sometimes 6, I eat when I’m hungry and I sleep when I’m tired, I don’t have fixed meals or fixed schedules First ~6 hours normally admin, emails, proposals, reseller support, mentoring juniors Next ~6 hours is 100% coding Work from home so no commute, nothing else to waste time on Work 6 days a week, Sunday’s reserved for rest, reading and research

muzani 9y ago

Rescue Time puts it at about 2.5 hours/day of programming time. The max I've ever pushed for and recorded was 250 minutes. Even that left me too exhausted to drive back home.

Noumenon72 9y ago

I come from a factory background where it wasn't uncommon to spend the entire 8-12 hours working at the fastest safe pace I could. After a year of developing, I still spend almost no time on water-cooler talk and web browsing, the only things that are clearly not work. I don't see anybody else wasting time like that either. I wonder if the 'barely four hours a day' people would not count stuff like editing a wiki, investigtating a log, and so forth. My job isn't 100% programming by any stretch. But when I do have programming, I spend 8 hours straight. It doesn't seem to make me very productive, but I do spend it all hard at work.

SirLJ 9y ago

Not much - automate as much as possible and enjoy the freedom, but be available when the crisis strike :-)

muzani 9y ago
Living the dream.
- SirLJ 9y ago
  Absolutely, the bad side is I cannot retire early, love the job and every year I am postponing...

luckydude 9y ago

I'm semi retired so not that much, certainly nothing like I used to work. When I was a kernel engineer at Sun, there were stretches where I worked around 14 hours per "day". "day" had a different definition for me, I worked on about a 34 hour "day". Which meant that my day time hours were constantly shifting. A coworker put a clock on my door that said "where's larry?" and it showed when I'd be in next. I think it was a joke but some people said they liked it. The reason I did this was I would be working on stuff where it could take ~8 hours just to regain the state I had in my head when I stopped working the previous day. So if I did 8 hour days I'd never make any forward progress. So you do 8 hours to page in the state and then you go as far as you can go to move things forward. I didn't have much of a social life back then but I didn't care, I was getting stuff done at Sun and loved it. It was a super productive time of my life.

lamansion 9y ago
>> it could take ~8 hours just to regain the state I had in my head Sounds interesting, can you please share more details about what you were working on?
- luckydude 9y ago
  It was almost always performance stuff. I'd get stuck with stuff like "Oracle's cluster database sucks on our systems, can you find out why?" and then you have to go figure out where it is slow (find the hot spot) and then figure out why we were slow. That meant keeping all of the hardware in your head, the kernel in your head, and the app in your head. If you didn't have all that state it was super hard, maybe impossible (for me at least), to figure out the problem.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago

Contractor, currently with a large ag company, remote. I work 1 or two hours out of 8. The rest spent waiting for their antique tool chain to get stuff done. Read a butt-ton of HN the last month. Previous contracts - I worked an hour for every hour I billed, moving their project forward. Usually 5 or 6 hours a day. The rest spent working on more contracts etc.

Top19 9y ago

4 hours total of pure undeniable work throughout the whole day (so wake up to sleep). K. Anders Ericsson, a professor on the study of “expertise”, notes that the best violinists in the world top out at 4 hours of practice. So I don’t feel guilty after 4 hours. Another thing Ericcson noticed, the violinist who practice the most and are the best take midday naps.