5 ms·

Ask HN: How much productive work do you average per week?

29 points by baalimago 7y ago

With "productive work" I mean work which somehow yields personal growth and future professional success. Followup question: for how long have you kept this work up and where has it brought you?

notomorrow 7y ago
16 pomodoro
- astazangasta 7y ago
  I was going to answer in this vein. What are the units of productive work?
sethammons 7y ago
Most of my day is productive usually. Sometimes I'm not, and this is when I'm blocked, usually on a build system or similar (I actively avoid multitasking as it is a good way to do multiple things poorly). If I'm blocked for a short while and can do very cognitively light work, I will likely work on it. If it will be longer, I can usually pivot to something else that needs to be worked on. I think it might be easy to be myopic with your definition though. If I'm pushing the company goals further, I'm being productive, even if I'm not learning. It might not give me more technical expertise, but it will help on my next review. And that helps with success. Helping others with their stuff might not help my learning either, but it also helps them and the company move forward. Meetings are an opportunity to distill and communicate information for target audiences. Scrum ceremonies are opportunities to similar, but also to find ways to balance business and team needs. Now, not all meetings are productive use of time, but I think people will tend to overly discount them. I feel I'm mostly productive for most of the day. I also spend some time reading and learning about things on the edges of what I know. I've done this for about a decade within one company. I've approximately tripled my salary and earned a lot of equity. I started with some poor knowledge of php and MySQL to many years later a principal developer influencing the designs of our distributed, scalable, and highly available systems. I also have introduced new technologies, strategies, and systems here. I've learned to work with others throughout the organization at different levels in different disciplines. I did not do any of this in a vacuum. I've had great peers, great managers, and others who are knowledgeable that I could learn from. No official mentors, just kind of the village to raise a child kind of thing. I'm on mobile and should get out of bed now. Hopefully. This stream of consciousness is a bit coherent and doesn't have too many typos and someone gets something out of it.
tmaly 7y ago
I get between 1-2 hours a week on long term big picture goals. I am working on increasing this through better techniques such as pre-planing, mini habits, reflecting
karmakaze 7y ago
> personal growth and future professional success This is a very *unique" defifition of 'productive". I would normally consider productive work to be anything that adds value to a product used by users of said product. Also include amortized benefits like reducing tech debt. V2 rewrites are often not productive--wait until v3 or later when you actually know what big changes are needed.
welder 7y ago
> I mean work which somehow yields personal growth and future professional success I average 4 hrs of productive coding per day according to WakaTime[1]. When working on well-defined projects/features and not having meetings it goes up to 8 hrs coding per day, but that environment is difficult to create. Also there's the debate whether being productive means spending less time coding, or spending time towards the right problem (revenue, impact, team initiatives, etc). I also find the language and framework I'm using makes a huge difference in how much I accomplish given the same amount of time. When you're not sure if cranking out code is actually productive it's best to start measuring work in output velocity. For myself, I just assume when I'm coding in 2 of my projects I must be coding towards some goal, so I assume my time spent coding in those 2 projects is always productive. That's why I set a wakatime goal to code at least 4 hours per day in those 2 projects. 1: https://wakatime.com https://wakatime.com (Personal profile: https://wakatime.com/@alan https://wakatime.com/@alan)
baalimago 7y ago
To clarify: writing "productive" i wanted to include reading studies, studying, networking (to some degree) and so forth, basically everything which isn't "watching the latest tv-show while having a beer". Even working out could qualify, but somewhere around there I draw the line. If it's beneficially for you professionally: I deem it productive.
kyllo 7y ago
For the last 6 months or so I've been tracking my time with org-mode in Emacs, and I typically get about 4-5 hours of productive time a day. The rest is taken up by meetings, e-mails, chat, coffee breaks, and task switching overhead. The time tracking is just for me, I don't share my logs with anyone else. So far I believe it's kept me focused on achieving specific work goals and not getting distracted, leading to more concrete achievements I can cite in my annual performance review.

29 points by baalimago 7y ago

With "productive work" I mean work which somehow yields personal growth and future professional success. Followup question: for how long have you kept this work up and where has it brought you?

notomorrow 7y ago

16 pomodoro

astazangasta 7y ago
I was going to answer in this vein. What are the units of productive work?

sethammons 7y ago

Most of my day is productive usually. Sometimes I'm not, and this is when I'm blocked, usually on a build system or similar (I actively avoid multitasking as it is a good way to do multiple things poorly). If I'm blocked for a short while and can do very cognitively light work, I will likely work on it. If it will be longer, I can usually pivot to something else that needs to be worked on. I think it might be easy to be myopic with your definition though. If I'm pushing the company goals further, I'm being productive, even if I'm not learning. It might not give me more technical expertise, but it will help on my next review. And that helps with success. Helping others with their stuff might not help my learning either, but it also helps them and the company move forward. Meetings are an opportunity to distill and communicate information for target audiences. Scrum ceremonies are opportunities to similar, but also to find ways to balance business and team needs. Now, not all meetings are productive use of time, but I think people will tend to overly discount them. I feel I'm mostly productive for most of the day. I also spend some time reading and learning about things on the edges of what I know. I've done this for about a decade within one company. I've approximately tripled my salary and earned a lot of equity. I started with some poor knowledge of php and MySQL to many years later a principal developer influencing the designs of our distributed, scalable, and highly available systems. I also have introduced new technologies, strategies, and systems here. I've learned to work with others throughout the organization at different levels in different disciplines. I did not do any of this in a vacuum. I've had great peers, great managers, and others who are knowledgeable that I could learn from. No official mentors, just kind of the village to raise a child kind of thing. I'm on mobile and should get out of bed now. Hopefully. This stream of consciousness is a bit coherent and doesn't have too many typos and someone gets something out of it.

tmaly 7y ago

I get between 1-2 hours a week on long term big picture goals. I am working on increasing this through better techniques such as pre-planing, mini habits, reflecting

karmakaze 7y ago

> personal growth and future professional success This is a very *unique" defifition of 'productive". I would normally consider productive work to be anything that adds value to a product used by users of said product. Also include amortized benefits like reducing tech debt. V2 rewrites are often not productive--wait until v3 or later when you actually know what big changes are needed.

welder 7y ago

> I mean work which somehow yields personal growth and future professional success I average 4 hrs of productive coding per day according to WakaTime[1]. When working on well-defined projects/features and not having meetings it goes up to 8 hrs coding per day, but that environment is difficult to create. Also there's the debate whether being productive means spending less time coding, or spending time towards the right problem (revenue, impact, team initiatives, etc). I also find the language and framework I'm using makes a huge difference in how much I accomplish given the same amount of time. When you're not sure if cranking out code is actually productive it's best to start measuring work in output velocity. For myself, I just assume when I'm coding in 2 of my projects I must be coding towards some goal, so I assume my time spent coding in those 2 projects is always productive. That's why I set a wakatime goal to code at least 4 hours per day in those 2 projects. 1: https://wakatime.com https://wakatime.com (Personal profile: https://wakatime.com/@alan https://wakatime.com/@alan)

baalimago 7y ago

To clarify: writing "productive" i wanted to include reading studies, studying, networking (to some degree) and so forth, basically everything which isn't "watching the latest tv-show while having a beer". Even working out could qualify, but somewhere around there I draw the line. If it's beneficially for you professionally: I deem it productive.

kyllo 7y ago

For the last 6 months or so I've been tracking my time with org-mode in Emacs, and I typically get about 4-5 hours of productive time a day. The rest is taken up by meetings, e-mails, chat, coffee breaks, and task switching overhead. The time tracking is just for me, I don't share my logs with anyone else. So far I believe it's kept me focused on achieving specific work goals and not getting distracted, leading to more concrete achievements I can cite in my annual performance review.