3 ms·

A 2-4 hour chunk of work is 1 day of work. By that measure, ideally each engineer would hit 5 points per week. Managers like to think, if an engineer can do 1

A 2-4 hour chunk of work is 1 day of work. By that measure, ideally each engineer would hit 5 points per week. Managers like to think, if an engineer can do 1 point in 4 hours, then they should be able to do 2 points in 8 hours. But that's not how it works. The average office worker is only productive for about [3 hours a day](https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-productivity https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-product...). The upper bound is [4-5 hours a day](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/productivity-focus-work-tips/2021/05/31/07453934-bfd0-11eb-b26e-53663e6be6ff_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/productivi...). More than that is unsustainable and leads to burnout. This is why people prefer remote work. Seeing coworkers in person is nice, for sure. But management still assumes people work 8 hours a day, meaning office workers spend most of their day trapped in the office pretending to work, which is a huge waste of time.

burlesona 4y ago
I've found this isn't true for myself and for many others. If you are getting good, deep focus time then you can generally get one productive stretch in the morning, take a good long break, and then do one more productive stretch in the afternoon. We can be pedantic about it and say "well the sum total of truly deep focus time was probably not more than 4-5 hours" and that may be true, but it's also not a realistic take on the context switching and ramp up time that it takes to get into that flow in the first place. Also don't underestimate how many shallow tasks there are that somebody has to do to keep the lights on. We try and eliminate as many of these as we can, but it's just not cost effective to eliminate the entire long tail. So it's pretty common to have the morning focus session be true "deep work," and the afternoon session be a batch of minor stuff like small bug fixes, updating dependencies, running some tests, etc.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  In my experience, the breakdown is something like: - 3-4 hours of deep work - 1-2 hours communication, in the form of meetings, emails, writing wikis, etc - 1-2 hours teamwork, like CRs, impromptu whiteboarding, pair programming, etc - 1 hour misc, like coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, walking between meetings, etc I think a lot of managers fail to account for everything else employees have to do, so “four hours of deep work per day” doesn’t sound right… even if it is. Of course, a lot of managers also just push their team into working more than 8 hours per day.

burlesona 4y ago

I've found this isn't true for myself and for many others. If you are getting good, deep focus time then you can generally get one productive stretch in the morning, take a good long break, and then do one more productive stretch in the afternoon. We can be pedantic about it and say "well the sum total of truly deep focus time was probably not more than 4-5 hours" and that may be true, but it's also not a realistic take on the context switching and ramp up time that it takes to get into that flow in the first place. Also don't underestimate how many shallow tasks there are that somebody has to do to keep the lights on. We try and eliminate as many of these as we can, but it's just not cost effective to eliminate the entire long tail. So it's pretty common to have the morning focus session be true "deep work," and the afternoon session be a batch of minor stuff like small bug fixes, updating dependencies, running some tests, etc.

zmgsabst 4y ago
In my experience, the breakdown is something like: - 3-4 hours of deep work - 1-2 hours communication, in the form of meetings, emails, writing wikis, etc - 1-2 hours teamwork, like CRs, impromptu whiteboarding, pair programming, etc - 1 hour misc, like coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, walking between meetings, etc I think a lot of managers fail to account for everything else employees have to do, so “four hours of deep work per day” doesn’t sound right… even if it is. Of course, a lot of managers also just push their team into working more than 8 hours per day.