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At 3 hours a day, you work as much as everyone else does. [0] [0] https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this
by MattGaiser 5y ago
At 3 hours a day, you work as much as everyone else does. [0]
[0] https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...
- cm2012 5y agoI did an HN poll, how many hours per day do you work including meetings and etc, and the answer was a normal distribution around 6 hours a day. https://imgur.com/qdSltlM https://imgur.com/qdSltlM The left axis is years of seniority.
- phkahler 5y agoFor a lot of people "meetings" aren't productive work. They may be necessary for communication but they are not actual work for a lot of people. It's entirely different if you're a manager or someone else whose main job is largely communication.
- MattGaiser 5y agoAt least with work from home, I generally do not consider my meetings part of my work because I can go and do work in my meeting.
- cm2012 5y agoHere's how I phrased the question: https://strawpoll.com/47x15cf1 https://strawpoll.com/47x15cf1
- manmal 5y agoDid you segment this for presentation purposes, or were there only 3 ranges to choose from? I‘m asking because the latter could also mean that most people work 4h. Deducing [4;8] = 6 would not really work.
- mylons 5y agoi don't think you have enough data to be linking this as if it has meaning. N=104 is not a large sample size.
- phreeza 5y agoIt depends what you are measuring. It looks like the rough distribution is robust across seniority strata, hinting at the sample size probably being adequate.
- phaemon 5y ago104 seems enough to be meaningful. Might have a fair margin of error but that's ok. Why do you think otherwise?
- renewiltord 5y agoOut of curiosity, what is the math you used to determine it's not a large sample size?
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoN=104 is a fine sample size for some things - especially given how much comfort you have for error. This isn't a great study in general, because, realistically, there isn't a large range for the work hours. And the majority of them were grouped into one bucket => 4-8 hours. That's the biggest problem. The second biggest is that - presumably - not all of the respondents work 5 days per week. The third is that - without a large sample size - your margin of error is going to cover a pretty big chunk. If your finding is 6 hours +/- 1 hour, 95% CI - that's pretty unsurprising. You need a large sample size because there are ~115M workers in the US. What are the odds these 104 people are a decent representation of all ~115M voters?? If there's only 10,000 people this applies to that read HackerNews, then - if you fixed everything else - your CI wouldn't be super low.
- koonsolo 5y agoIt all depends on how you count your hours. When you are a developer, and you only count the minutes that you are at your computer coding, I highly doubt many would reach 3 hours per day.
- Gengar 5y agoI can't remember the last time I worked more than 3 hours, being done by lunch time everyday is great. If I work in the afternoon it is just mandatory meetings.
- an_opabinia 5y agoIf I’m your boss, sitting next to you and in full view of your screen, and I’m there for 8 hours working, will the average person work a real 8 hours?
- soperj 5y agoIf you're my boss and doing this, then you're getting none of your own work done.
- goodpoint 5y agoIf you're my boss and doing this, then you're going to see me leave the company.
- jaegerpicker 5y agoThat's me also. Maybe not fair as I'm more likely to be the boss since I have 20+ years of experience but no way am I working under those constraints.
- csa 5y ago> If I’m your boss, sitting next to you and in full view of your screen, and I’m there for 8 hours working, will the average person work a real 8 hours? You probably get a few weeks of “real 8 hours” before your best employees find somewhere less oppressive to work and leave your micromanaged company. Your bad employees will stay because they don’t have better options.
- mylons 5y agoif you're doing this I'm quitting and going to work in one of the thousands of firms where this doesn't happen, and potentially for better pay?
- bigbillheck 5y agoIf you're my boss watching me that closely, I'm going to be reading up on the OSS workforce sabotage manual.
- 5y ago
- youerbt 5y agoWhich is the best argument for WFH, really. At 3h a day + 1h commuting, it's 6h a day wasted for being in an office, crazy.