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Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

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Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

#131

Post by antognini »

veddox wrote: post #115
nubbins wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats interesting because 4 hours is exactly the limit I've seen cited by researchers as the max for highly focused work but even that much is a kind of skill that has to be developed, so a beginner might have much less concentration.

Can you give a reference for that number? Sounds intriguing...

This article also references about four hours as the limit that a creative professional can work every day:

http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/darwin-was-a-slacker-and-y...

Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

#132

Post by 0wl3x »

superasn wrote: post #111

Speaking as a solopreneur, I work only 3 hours a day, more like 3 x 50 minutes laps with 15 min breaks in between. Also each lap is dedicated to one activity, first is manufacturing where I work on my project (the actual coding part), second is traffic (this is the dreaded marketing/outreach part) and finally is the optimization part (seo, increasing conversion rates, improving design, etc). I've seen that the divers…

Sorry is this is rude but how do you make a living only working 3 hours a day? Are you products already established?

Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

#133

Post by ferentchak »

austenallred wrote: post #38
decasia wrote: post #17

Arguably, time spent reading HN is a legitimate part of becoming/remaining a good developer. Certainly, spending time socializing with coworkers is a required part of work, many places. Spending some amount of time unwinding at the office is arguably required for mental health and therefore a functional component of remaining a worker -- does that count as working? "Working" is an ambiguous category, it seems to me.…

I'll be honest; I don't think using HN is anything close to what I would consider "working." At best it's marginally optimized random browsing.

Anecdote: I found AWS had a hosted Elastic Search that had just been released. This knowledge enabled the team I led to solve a problem that was challenging my team with what was relatively a small amount of work. There is no amount of heads down work that would of attained this amount of benefit. We were not thinking about the search problem much and the one of our engineers just kept spending more and more time trying to enhance our failing custom solution.

Making sure you are informed about what other people are making is useful and is part of your job as an expert. Now if I can just find an application for the CRISPR enhanced crypto sea-monkeys that I learned about yesterday that should really help us out.

Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

#134

Post by Cyph0n »

jackgolding wrote: post #121
Cyph0n wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had similar symptoms to those caused by ADHD for quite some time now, but I'm not sure if visiting a doctor will help me much. The symptoms I've experienced are inattentiveness, boredom, lethargy, and poor time management. My question is: if I do get diagnosed by a professional, what kind of improvement can I expect from ADHD medication?

I was on ADHD meds from the age of 10 to 18. They helped but they had really nasty side effects (used to take 2-5 hours of lying in bed to get to sleep, everything seems super dull and its very hard to break the intense concentration which for the most part is focused on unproductive things like organising old photos instead of cleaning your room.) For a phase of my life after I stopped taking meds, I got quite depre…

Thank you for the informative reply! Yes, my next course of action is to start an organized exercise regimen and try to fit in a bit of meditation every day. I'll work on that a for a few months and see what happens.

Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

#135

Post by philipyoungg »

webjac wrote: post #129

I've been an employee for like 20% of my career and a the rest I've been a freelancer. I never worked more than 4 hours (of real work a day). There's the occasional super productive day where I have done over 8 hours of productive work, but that's the exception, not the rule. I usually work around 3-4 hours of productive work daily. Heck I'd even say 20%-30% of that time is not even productive (meetings, emails and n…

same.

Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

#136

Post by Cyph0n »

barsonme wrote: post #127
Cyph0n wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had similar symptoms to those caused by ADHD for quite some time now, but I'm not sure if visiting a doctor will help me much. The symptoms I've experienced are inattentiveness, boredom, lethargy, and poor time management. My question is: if I do get diagnosed by a professional, what kind of improvement can I expect from ADHD medication?

Depends on the meds. I've only had a 'downer' (strattera) that made me feel almost comatose. It helped me focus a lot, definitely. But only by kinda 'blurring out' or 'graying out' the rest of the world that would otherwise grab my attention. I've been med-free since high school. However, I know some people who've taken meds and it's helped immensely. Sorry I can't give a better answer! It's a question best left to y…

Thank you for sharing your experience. I will definitely need to follow up with a doctor first before I can make a decision.

Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

#137

Post by superasn »

0wl3x wrote: post #132
superasn wrote: post #111

Speaking as a solopreneur, I work only 3 hours a day, more like 3 x 50 minutes laps with 15 min breaks in between. Also each lap is dedicated to one activity, first is manufacturing where I work on my project (the actual coding part), second is traffic (this is the dreaded marketing/outreach part) and finally is the optimization part (seo, increasing conversion rates, improving design, etc). I've seen that the divers…

Sorry is this is rude but how do you make a living only working 3 hours a day? Are you products already established?

No it isn't rude at all. Yes, some sites are already established but I also launch at least one new site every month to add to my income.

3 hours is a lot of work if done without distraction. I think the key is to make your work more mechanical and less creative.

I have a system that I have perfected over the years which helps me do this[1]. It's like a stupid step by step list where each item links to a document which is another stupid step by step list that I follow like a "Robot" for these 3 hours. When you do it this way, it makes it quite easy and 3 hours daily is more than enough to launch a small to medium size project in a month (I think there are less than 200 items in total and about 50% of it you can easily outsource).

[1] http://i.imgur.com/i1oBM2t.png

Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

#138

Post by BoorishBears »

tedajax wrote: post #43
barsonme wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to describe ADHD is: The TV is always on, but you don't get to choose the channel . Some things are easy to focus on—I can sit down to program for a bit and lose track of time for 5 hours. On the other hand, if something is boring, it's mind-numbingly boring . It was the worst while I was in school, since teachers and professors just thought, "oh, he's unmotivated" when in reality it was more along the l…

Unrelated but I felt compelled to share a similar sentiment: > It was the worst while I was in school, since teachers and professors just thought, "oh, he's unmotivated" when in reality it was more along the lines of, "I'd rather cut my toenails with a rusty butter knife than write the paper." (Okay, perhaps that's a slight exaggeration.) Oh man I can relate so much. So many conversations with teachers asking why I w…

I've never seen someone describe my education so accurately, down to:

> went home to program and build side projects and was singularly focused on becoming a programmer in the game industry

Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

#139

Post by csorrell »

throw112358 wrote: post #62

I sit in a cubicle and I update bank software. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

I had a job like that for a while and would work on project Euler problems just to pass the time. It was maddening.

Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

#140

Post by SmellTheGlove »

barsonme wrote: post #31
throw832649 wrote: post #10

Throwaway for maximum honesty: I am pretty sure I spend at least 75% of my time "at work" not working. HN, Reddit, messing around with side projects or learning a new language or framework. This has been the case for my entire working life. I seem to get as much done as other people (sometimes better) so part of me wonders if I'm not as unusual as I feel. Part of me wonders if I should get evaluated for ADHD, since I…

The best way to describe ADHD is: The TV is always on, but you don't get to choose the channel . Some things are easy to focus on—I can sit down to program for a bit and lose track of time for 5 hours. On the other hand, if something is boring, it's mind-numbingly boring . It was the worst while I was in school, since teachers and professors just thought, "oh, he's unmotivated" when in reality it was more along the l…

> "I'd rather cut my toenails with a rusty butter knife than write the paper."

This statement really resonates with me too. Getting over the inertia to just start things that I don't really want to do is sometimes a multi-day effort, and then staying focused is hard beyond that. I've been thinking I should get evaluated, maybe I will.

I do have to ask, though, was that a Frank Reynolds toe knife reference?

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