Live data from Hacker News

In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

inc.com

21–30 of 52 posts

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#21
There's a trick in this clickbait:

> According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 8.8 hours every day. Yet a study of nearly 2,000 full-time office workers revealed that most people aren't working for most of the time they're at work.

The plain reading is that this article is based on BLS data. The BLS makes huge amounts of data available (and is friendly about answering questions), and the 8.8 hour figure is really theirs: https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/chart1.pdf

But the second sentence is about unrelated research not conducted by the BLS, even if you trust that it exists.

This data looks bizarre. 23 minutes of smoke breaks? Only 15% of Americans smoke (https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adul...), so if 85% of people spend 0 minutes a day smoking the other 15% spent 153 minutes per work day smoking. That can't be right, so this list must be the average time spent on an activity of all the people who reported engaging in it, which makes it pretty useless for understanding the overall situation it purports to talk about.

Assuming a study was done, this is probably self-reported data of a self-selected population. Ask 2,000 websurfers to break down their yesterday or last week of work and you're not going to get reliable data.

Without an accounting of methodology (or at least a citation), this article is an infohazard. People might read it an accidentally take it seriously, or remember these numbers but not remember they were completely unsupported.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#22
post #19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I read a couple of hours of news etc. at work. Here I am on HN. It's very individual, but I would not be surprised if it's true for most office workers that they work efficiently for 3-4 hours a day. And for a lot of people, some of that time is spent in a meeting...

And how do you justify your behaviour? oO? You could use your time you get paid for for better things. Doing something for the company you get paid from? Here have a read: http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity...

Thank you for the link.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#23
post #16

Bullshit. I'm not reading an hour Internet pages non work related. And if i would, i wouldn't count this as my working our. Not calling my partner every day for 18 minutes at work. What a crappy article.

Are you assuming that this article was written about you, personally? Because that is what your answer seems to imply.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#24

Since the article doesn't specify what types of professions were studied, thus I am skeptical of its conclusion. While this ~3hr/day productivity might be true for typical corporate/office workers, but they make up only a small percentage of the total work force! What about the productivity of bus drivers, doctors, cooks, masons, mechanics? Somehow I think that the average roofer doesn't spend ~2hrs/work day reading…

I see an awful lot of people these days talking like white-collar work is the default and blue-collar is some kind of weird outlier that doesn't really count.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#25
post #21

There's a trick in this clickbait: > According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 8.8 hours every day. Yet a study of nearly 2,000 full-time office workers revealed that most people aren't working for most of the time they're at work. The plain reading is that this article is based on BLS data. The BLS makes huge amounts of data available (and is friendly about answering questions), and the 8.8…

Yeah, very bizarre. She's claiming that the average American works spends 23 minutes a day on smoke breaks, and 26 minutes a day looking for a new job, and 17 minutes a day "preparing hot drinks", etc. Something is completely bogus here.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#26
post #2

This makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of the reactions I have berm getting since tracking my concentration meticulously with Toggl. I work as a remote consultant and track everything down to the second. "Filling out" timesheets and answering "how much I worked" a non issue. I've been getting accolades for how much work I accomplish... even when I clock only 3-4 hours a day.

Thanks for the Toggl suggestion. I use RescueTime but it's very unstable on Linux. I will try this out.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#28
post #21

There's a trick in this clickbait: > According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 8.8 hours every day. Yet a study of nearly 2,000 full-time office workers revealed that most people aren't working for most of the time they're at work. The plain reading is that this article is based on BLS data. The BLS makes huge amounts of data available (and is friendly about answering questions), and the 8.8…

Yeah, very bizarre. She's claiming that the average American works spends 23 minutes a day on smoke breaks, and 26 minutes a day looking for a new job, and 17 minutes a day "preparing hot drinks", etc. Something is completely bogus here.

> 17 minutes a day "preparing hot drinks"

This figure I can believe.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#29
post #21

There's a trick in this clickbait: > According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 8.8 hours every day. Yet a study of nearly 2,000 full-time office workers revealed that most people aren't working for most of the time they're at work. The plain reading is that this article is based on BLS data. The BLS makes huge amounts of data available (and is friendly about answering questions), and the 8.8…

Yeah, very bizarre. She's claiming that the average American works spends 23 minutes a day on smoke breaks, and 26 minutes a day looking for a new job, and 17 minutes a day "preparing hot drinks", etc. Something is completely bogus here.

One possible explanation for this is that people are supposedly spending time doing certain things, but in reality are doing different for things. For example, my mom used to talk about how people at her work were allowed smoke breaks, but no equivalent breaks were allotted to non-smokers, so people would pretend to smoke just to take a few minutes off.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#30
post #2

This makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of the reactions I have berm getting since tracking my concentration meticulously with Toggl. I work as a remote consultant and track everything down to the second. "Filling out" timesheets and answering "how much I worked" a non issue. I've been getting accolades for how much work I accomplish... even when I clock only 3-4 hours a day.

I've been using Qbserve [1] to track my productivity and it has been super helpful.

It divides your time up into Productive (iTerm, AWS...), Neutral (Email, Slack...) and Distracting (Reddit, Facebook...).

I've found if I get 5 productive hours in in a work day then it's been a very productive day.

[1] https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/

Post reply on HN