Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?

Those are closed price projects, they do use hours for reports and all but its really a fixed payout for a fixed amount of features.

> It really comes down to how industrious and conscientious you are rather then how smart and happy you are.

I get it that industriousness and conscientiousness are important, but I disagree that "it" (whatever "it" is) comes down to those rather than being happy.

(I also disagree that being smart or working smart is less important, although it's true that just being smart without any of the former two doesn't allow one to accomplish much. Of course if you value the idea of being busy and doing a lot as an end in itself, that's another story.)

If your economical circumstances, the surrounding society or other realities dictate that you have to be particularly industrious in order to survive and to meet your basic needs, wants and goals, it makes sense to have that as your central value. But if you're already getting what you need, why on Earth would industriousness rule over happiness or satisfaction?

I guess this is pretty much a matter of values, and if you get that satisfaction from being and feeling industrious, that kind of answers the question. But if you don't, it doesn't make much sense -- in that case the former is just a means to the end.

> Most people don’t have this luxury, work very long hours in completely shitty jobs (think cleaning toilets) and never burn out and lead happy life.

Well, you can kind of toil away in a non-thinking job, and if it suits your personality, that's fine. It can still be exhausting particularly if you need to do it in a hurry, but I wouldn't expect you to burn out if you can keep doing pretty much the same thing every day and it suits you.

However, I think a lot of people on HN are the kinds of people who get satisfaction from more than just getting their basic job done, and the ability to be creative and to maintain the kinds of cognitive abilities required e.g. for tech jobs does actually require a balance, at least for most people.

But yeah, it's a matter of values in a sense I guess. Doing what fits your values gives satisfaction.

I spend the first 70% of the work day on hard problems and things I absolutely have to get done. For me this 70% ends at 4pm.

At 4, I step out for a coffee, stroll around the block and grab a cookie. Then I come back to my table and reply to annoying emails and tackle the easy stuff till about 6-6:30.

I never start working on a tough problem after lunch, because if things go wrong, I end up working long hours and can't get it out of my head even when I go back home.

By the way, I'm really impressed that many people commenting here can work 6-10 hours at a stretch. I need to stretch every 45 minutes to 1 hour lol.

In this past job which was the first one that didn't track time at all, I still wrote down my hours every day and still tried to balance it to +/- 0 at the end of the week, if not possible then end of the month. After a while (months?) I did what everyone else seemed to do. Just eyeball if it's either roughly 40 hours per week or if the last days/week was very stressful tread a little more careful, or if nothing seemed to work and I was distracted make a mental note to catch up next week.

That said, I enjoyed most of my time there very much and often would be doing exploratory stuff that I might have done on my own time anyway, so sometimes I took some extra time to evaluate one more possibility and used some spare time. Other times I just did some private stuff only veeery distantly related to actual work stuff and chalked it up as "learning".

So yeah, probably not a really helpful answer. But if you're having fun and are learning a lot a few more hours won't hurt. If a fun evening of spare time does not include programming (which I guess is true for at least 50% of programmers) then don't put in extra time. I think I've mostly done "I have a guilty conscience if I leave a lot sooner" but I also try really hard to not slack off during my 8 hours and count them as working hours. And yes, if you have that "Today I achieved more in 6 hours than the whole last week" then absolutely stop working, it's probably true.

Beautifully put.