I use wakatime.com for tracking IDE time. Generally I spend between 4 and 7 hours in an IDE. My best days, I can hit 9-10 hours IDE time - but generally when I

I use wakatime.com for tracking IDE time. Generally I spend between 4 and 7 hours in an IDE. My best days, I can hit 9-10 hours IDE time - but generally when I hit that, it's because I've spent the evening working on my own stuff. It's incredibly difficult (and undesirable) to hit that number working entirely on my main job. Diminishing returns come in fast. Switching contexts to a project I'm personally interested in is critical. I think the better approach to being productive is to aim for ~4 hours of IDE time, maximizing deep work as much as possible. I use codestats.net for tracking code volume (measured in "XP"), dividing it by the IDE time in a spreadsheet to get the hourly code volume each day. XP/hour a very noisy signal* , but not useless. For me, it usually varies between 400 and 2000 XP/hour - a very rough proxy for deep work when averaged out over long periods. I'm always trying to improve on the mean. *e.g. debugging time yields a far lower XP/hour than greenfield development.