Ask HN: How much time in your working day do you spend in actual work?

Roughly 6 hours but that varies a lot

As a research scientist:

~7 hours (after breaks), of which only 3h are programming.

The rest is organizational stuff like meetings, writing research proposals, answering emails, making powerpoints, supervise students, etc...

So do you count your work hours as 3 hours or 7? And curious, if you try and optimise for more 'real work' time? I feel I'm quite hard on myself and consider it unnatural if I read an article or even browse randomly at work.

A few months ago I had the feeling I get nothing done (programming), because of all the other stuff I had to do.

That is why I started tracking my time consumption on a half hour base. "If you want to control something you need to measure it" was my thinking. The time tracking itself doesn't cost much time. Did it earlier for my private life for a few months.

The first weeks my average programming time was only 1.5h! I slowly got it up to 3h now.

But do I count it as 3h or 7h work?

Hm - As a student I sure had more time for programming itself. But I actually get more work done now. I can much easier pursue multiple projects and delegate work to students. It is just that I didn't (have to) see all the organizational stuff that needs to happen beside the programming itself as a student.

The other 4h I do valuable stuff. Some of it should imho be done by others, but we are currently a little bit short on staff..^^ It's a nice learning opportunity though.

So to answer your question: I would count the whole 7 hours.

If "actual work" is running Candy Japan, about 2 hours per day this month.