If "actual work" is running Candy Japan, about 2 hours per day this month.
Do you run Candyjapan.com? If so, how'd you get into this?
Ask HN: How much time in your working day do you spend in actual work?
21–26 of 26 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much time in your working day do you spend in actual work?
#22I'm semi retired so not that much, certainly nothing like I used to work. When I was a kernel engineer at Sun, there were stretches where I worked around 14 hours per "day". "day" had a different definition for me, I worked on about a 34 hour "day". Which meant that my day time hours were constantly shifting. A coworker put a clock on my door that said "where's larry?" and it showed when I'd be in next. I think it wa…
>> it could take ~8 hours just to regain the state I had in my head
Sounds interesting, can you please share more details about what you were working on?
Re: Ask HN: How much time in your working day do you spend in actual work?
#234 hours total of pure undeniable work throughout the whole day (so wake up to sleep). K. Anders Ericsson, a professor on the study of “expertise”, notes that the best violinists in the world top out at 4 hours of practice. So I don’t feel guilty after 4 hours.
Another thing Ericcson noticed, the violinist who practice the most and are the best take midday naps.
Re: Ask HN: How much time in your working day do you spend in actual work?
#24Not much - automate as much as possible and enjoy the freedom, but be available when the crisis strike :-)
Living the dream.
Re: Ask HN: How much time in your working day do you spend in actual work?
#25Re: Ask HN: How much time in your working day do you spend in actual work?
#26I'm semi retired so not that much, certainly nothing like I used to work. When I was a kernel engineer at Sun, there were stretches where I worked around 14 hours per "day". "day" had a different definition for me, I worked on about a 34 hour "day". Which meant that my day time hours were constantly shifting. A coworker put a clock on my door that said "where's larry?" and it showed when I'd be in next. I think it wa…
>> it could take ~8 hours just to regain the state I had in my head Sounds interesting, can you please share more details about what you were working on?
It was almost always performance stuff. I'd get stuck with stuff like "Oracle's cluster database sucks on our systems, can you find out why?" and then you have to go figure out where it is slow (find the hot spot) and then figure out why we were slow.
That meant keeping all of the hardware in your head, the kernel in your head, and the app in your head. If you didn't have all that state it was super hard, maybe impossible (for me at least), to figure out the problem.