Ask HN: How many hours do you work? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work?

#31

Post by tonyedgecombe » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 7:28 AM UTC

About 15 hours a week. I sometimes ramp it up if I've got a new project that I'm excited about but over the long term it always drifts back down again.

When I look back to my employee and contracting days although I was on site for eight hours a day I wasn't really doing any more than three or four hours worth of work.

Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work?

#32

Post by rcarmo » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 8:24 AM UTC

I actually wrote about that yesterday: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2020/07/11/1830

I’m doing roughly four hours of 30m calls a day (which completely destroys any real productivity I have), plus around two hours of actual “focus time”. The overhead and fragmentation implied pushes this to a 10-12h daily range, which is becoming a serious issue as I can’t find the time to plan or do quality work right now.

Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work?

#33

Post by senectus1 » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 8:53 AM UTC

that's fairly close to what i typically do :-/

probably around 48-55

Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work?

#34

Post by switch11 » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 8:57 AM UTC

10 to 14 hours a day

HOWEVER

A) Around 4 hours of this is on 'must do and not very productive work'

B) So in effect there is just 6 to 10 hours of work a day on vital stuff

Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work?

#35

Post by theodric » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 8:57 AM UTC

Only as many hours as are necessary to get the work done. I'm done trying to use my own graft as a means of getting ahead, which is why I'm a manager.

Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work?

#36

Post by trykondev » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 9:04 AM UTC

I spend about 4-6 hours a day (M-F) in meetings or doing focused work, and probably another hour or so per day doing less taxing things like organizing my notes & responding to emails.

I've definitely had busier times throughout my career where I've worked 50-60 hours a week, and I know others who work those hours pretty regularly, so OP's schedule is "normal" for some situations or types of people -- but definitely taxing enough to cause burnout and not a schedule I'd recommend maintaining long term if there's any way to reduce those hours.

I agree with the other responses in this thread suggesting that you can really only get ~4 hours of focused work done in a day.

OP, if you can cut some of your low-impact hours where you're working but not really getting much done, that's probably a good place to start.

Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work?

#37

Post by amriksohata » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 9:45 AM UTC

6-8 hours a day, rarely productive more than that and actually only hands on 4-5 hours max

Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work?

#38

Post by blablabla123 » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 10:04 AM UTC

throwawaystress wrote: post #19

rafaelvasco wrote: post #16

Used to work (IT, game/web development) 40h max a week. And could barely handle it. As I grow older (33) the tolerance is going down. My body asks for more exercise and less sitting (or standing doesn't matter) hours. So 40h a week is too much now. I'm at 25-30h tops. So I try to make the most with that time. Of course I must say that I have a condition, since I was a kid, that makes me feel terrible if I sit for too…

Can you elaborate on how you learned to be that effective? I’d much rather work less, but I find I can’t get work done in 40 hours, and my coworkers doing the same work can. I often need to put in some extra hours here and there.

I'm also working part-time, although I had a lot of full-time jobs with varying intensity. I noticed for me most time gets eaten by tasks that I'm either stuck on or that progress really slowly for various reasons. E.g. something I do all the time is too slow like the editor, the build/test cycles or finding the reason for an exception because there are no logs. Usually I always make myself time to also optimize these things and also communicate that in meetings. And when planning of tasks happens, I try to get involved, understand what kind of work that would mean and discuss that. (Estimation is undervalued I think) And of course get a deep as possible understanding of the core technologies, that makes work also more fluent in the long-term. This way you also have increased idle times between tickets/pull request and it's possible to put more time into such general optimizations.

At least that's my strategy. It's definitely not a career-booster but the results are good.

Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work?

#39

Post by burntoutfire » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 11:02 AM UTC

Probably 20-30 hours per week? I'm paid for full-time. Company is very happy with me. I wish I could give them more, but that's pretty much my maximum.

Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work?

#40

Post by throwawaystress » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 11:10 AM UTC

rcarmo wrote: post #32

I actually wrote about that yesterday: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2020/07/11/1830 I’m doing roughly four hours of 30m calls a day (which completely destroys any real productivity I have), plus around two hours of actual “focus time”. The overhead and fragmentation implied pushes this to a 10-12h daily range, which is becoming a serious issue as I can’t find the time to plan or do quality work right now.

I feel the same way! I don’t know how to get work done when there are so many meetings and random events, and yet my employer expects us to get it all done within 40 hours (and will be concerned if you can’t).