We'd have much less pieces from Mozart if he had followed such advice
Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)
11–20 of 81 posts
Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)
#12I am going to try this. I found that boxing my self is far more productive than anything else, and it leaves me time to do whatever other thing I want.
Ha!
It's the opposite for me. I work productively only when the duration is open-ended. That is, at night, when I can stay up as long as I feel comfortable or over the weekend when none bothers me.
A slightest deadline in sight or an upcoming meeting break the flow.
Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)
#13[flagged]
Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)
#14The headline doesn't reflect the reality - I think what is really going on here is that 3 hours are spent doing what is considered 'work' by the outside world (sitting in front of the machine and writing the code that people believe is what the job is).
However, creative stuff like programming doesn't tend to fix in such a neat box, and the preparation, or creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problems tends to benefit from spending time doing something else - your brain is still whirring on the problem whilst you are out walking, exercising, cooking etc.
If you add on the time spent working through problems, you'll probably come to the same conclusion that I have that I spend 24 hours a day thinking about the problems i'm tackling. I often come up with great solutions whilst i'm asleep, and bad nights sleep is often correlated with a gnarly problem i've still not worked out.
I personally don't get hung up on how much time I spend actually coding. Some days it's full on, other days I seem to achieve next to nothing, or if anything go backwards. I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right.
Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)
#15This completelly ignores the inner and outer world that are somewhat or completelly out of your control in given context. For example, you might be immonologically or psychologically compromised, there might be a lot of noise in environment for some period of month, you got a baby etc. If you are alone, it might be a lot easier, but with family, any schedule that is not dynamic is failure.
Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)
#16Not convincing to me. I do agree with the general notion that working 8 productive hours everyday does not work long-term. But assuming that you could work three hours completely productively every day, that does not imply that the remaining five hours would be completely worthless. In a normal work week, I am sure you could get more out of the remaining 5x5 = 25 hours than the six hours at the weekend. Especially th…
Pretty much. Near-everything aside from "one man project hacking" will have some amount of "office hours" just used to coordinate with co-workers, plan, code review, or frankly just doing stuff like reading the docs or specs.
Even assuming "you can only do 3 productive hours a day" (which is a lie with appeal to authority mixed in. "Look that guy that made shitty web framework did it, it must be good!"), that does apply only to coding, there is more to being developer than just programming
> Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day.
I'd even call that advice outright idiotic. You wasted time to get in the zone only to throw it away
I feel like any recommendation of "do X hours of this" is a delusion. We're not robots, we have better or worse days and more or less engaging tasks. If task is "here are API docs, make a bunch of code and tests for it" I can do it whole day without much slowdown.
Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)
#17I am going to try this. I found that boxing my self is far more productive than anything else, and it leaves me time to do whatever other thing I want.
Ha! It's the opposite for me. I work productively only when the duration is open-ended. That is, at night, when I can stay up as long as I feel comfortable or over the weekend when none bothers me. A slightest deadline in sight or an upcoming meeting break the flow.
I think it depends on the kind of work you need to do.
For creative stuff, I do the same, but I am also trying to reduce the number of hours at work.
When being in the flow, I just let it continue without breaking.
Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)
#18We'd have much less pieces from Mozart if he had followed such advice
Saying that OP's point doesn't/wouldn't/shouldn't apply to an extremely exceptional case is a tautology (and this is even assuming that Mozart didn't already follow OP's advice in the first place, which you haven't exactly established).
Here's a more interesting example, which at least shows that it doesn't apply to a much larger category of jobs than genius composer: If Amazon warehouse workers'd follow such advice, much fewer packages would get shipped.
Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)
#19Sounds like a plan. How does one get such a job?
> I am an indie iPhone developer
Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)
#20The headline doesn't reflect the reality - I think what is really going on here is that 3 hours are spent doing what is considered 'work' by the outside world (sitting in front of the machine and writing the code that people believe is what the job is). However, creative stuff like programming doesn't tend to fix in such a neat box, and the preparation, or creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problem…
> I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right.
And how many unproductive hours of work do you spend per day? I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day. When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours.