Ask HN: Developers, how many hours do you feel you are productive in a day?

I had emotional discussion with my boss and I couldn't convince him that 40h in a week and 8h in a day is not always the most productive approach. So please share your feedback and based on that I'm going back to my boss - https://guaana.com/quiz/how-many-hours-do-you-feel-you-are-productive-in-a-day

I agree with your boss, 40h work weeks are the right way to do things. It's up to you to find the discipline to focus during the day to make it truly productive, not just feel productive.

Finding a good workflow for what you do is the hard part. A good workflow will include timeboxed sessions between 50-90 minutes with regular breaks after each session to keep your mind fresh and focused. A lunch session away from the PC, take a walk. And a firm commitment to sticking to a true 8h work day, the real mental strain happens when one tries to exceed this daily limit.

And most important factor required to only working an 8h day, is to keep the messaging and social media use to outside work hours. These nasty distractions will destroy productivity and focus likely causing you to "work" and +8h day. All the chatting and social media can wait until you are home, life will carry on. Every distraction you give into will cause you to take 20 minutes to rebuild focus.

> messaging and social media [are] nasty distractions [that] will destroy productivity and focus

I have talkative people behind me, CTO to my left (on the phone a fair bit), sysadmins to my right (frequently desk-meeting with people), and a row of project managers over the minimal partition. Trust me when I say that there are far bigger problems for some people's focus than messaging and social media.

On your quiz, the average answer is "3-5 hours," and this squares with recent research suggesting that in an 8-hour day, mind workers are doing actual work about 3 1/2 hours on average. The rest of the day is spent on snacking, gossiping, Facebook, etc.

I'm a highly motivated independent developer and writer, and I've been studying my own work habits to try to become more productive. I use toggl — https://www.toggl.com/ — to track my time throughout the day. I'd work 12 hours a day if I could, but I can't. I run out of gas after 2 hours, 3 hours — and sometimes 8 hours. My limit on tedious, fussy, boring tasks is about 2 hours, after which I'm not much good for anything. My limit when I'm writing a book is 3 to 4 hours. If I'm building something out of code or working in Photoshop, sometimes I get addicted, and then I can go 8 hours. Addiction seems to be the only thing that gets me close to being as productive as I'd like to be. Sadly, I can't choose to focus only on the types of tasks that I'm addicted to.

My sense is that most people — probably including your boss — have never measured how much cognitive work they themselves can do before their brain is fried. I'm talking about real work, not meetings. Meetings use almost no brain glucose at all, so are a way to pad "working" hours without increasing fatigue substantially. I'm convinced this is why meetings are so popular in corporate America.

As long as no one is measuring, it's easy for everyone to kid themselves that they're good for 8 hours and that everyone else should be, no matter how unrealistic that may be.

Depends on the project. If I'm on an intense project, easily 7-8. If I'm not on a project, maybe 1-3. If I'm unemployed and left to my own devices (pursuing projects/freelance or furthering my education), probably 4-5.