In general it's around 4 hours at most, although occassionally I can manage double that if I work in the morning, take the afternoon off, then work into the nig

In general it's around 4 hours at most, although occassionally I can manage double that if I work in the morning, take the afternoon off, then work into the night from about 10pm - 2am. One of my most productive weeks ever was when I accompanied my wife on a work trip from London, UK, to Savannah, Georgia, which is 5 hours behind. Even though I was looking after my young daughter I go a huge amount done because my work day was: First thing: Answer emails from the UK morning. Morning: General admin. Lunchtime: Answer emails from the UK afternoon. Afternoon: A beautiful stretch of uninterrupted coding time while my daughter amused herself bum-shuffling around the room. Even though I'm pretty good about closing my email client while working, just the knowledge that emails weren't piling up while I was coding gave me real peace of mind. I think a huge amount of the stress of coding work is knowing in the back of your mind that there's a huge amount of crap piling up in the background that you're going to have to deal with afterwards. It reminds me of that Walter Benjamin piece about Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus: "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."