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Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
31–40 of 84 posts
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#32About 12. I've optimized my life to a point where I have no outside disturbances beyond my work. I have 3 days left of my day job, then I'm taking my own business full time. I've been working 7am - 3pm at my day job, 4pm - 11pm at my side projects. Dropping the day job.
What are you working on?
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#33I average about 5.5 hours of focused coding per day. If I really really push hard, I can get to some 6.5, sometimes even 7. That's normal and I consider myself very productive. But here's the real question, how do you present this info to clients/bosses/entrepreneurs without them throwing a big hissy fit? This is a big problem when working with people who are heavily and directly invested in the business you're helpi…
I bet if you get them to REALLY think about it, they know they are not productive more than about 4-5 hours per day.
If they spend 20 minutes writing an e-mail, is that 20 minutes of productive time? I bet it's really only 5 minutes of what is considered 'productive', because they didn't write the e-mail for 20 minutes, they edited for 15, checked other e-mail, etc.etc. When they go to a meeting and it starts out with niceties, and talking about progress updates, etc. etc. Is that 'productive'? Necessary, yes, but productive? No.
We need to look at programming the same way. When I'm setting up my environment, I'm not being productive. When I'm researching a bug I'm fixing, I'm not being productive. When I try a fix and it doesn't work, I'm not being productive. When I'm looking up the most efficient way to write a method, I'm not being productive.
When I'm completely focused on coding, I'm at my most productive. I use a pomodoro timer, and if I really pay attention, I'm hopefully productive for 20 of the 25 minutes. If I get a few of those a day, I'm happy. That's the productivity of our job.
The sad trap I fall into is that if I've been productive for 4 hours in a day, I normally stop being productive, rather than continuing to push through, which I know I should do.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#34An option not listed here is that I think I have bursts of massive productivity that last a few days to a week where I get intensely productive work done with barely a break to eat. 12, 16 hours per day. Then I go a week or so just doing the bare minimum to keep things rolling, which sometimes is zero hours of productive work. That cycle repeats.
Something like this happens to me too. I have a week where I get massive work done, then 2-4 come, where I can't get up to do anything at all.
Do you think that's a sign of periodic depression? I've been going through a bit of a rough patch, and I was struck by how my mood could sap my motivation to the level where I felt like I couldn't bear to work. It was very revealing; I had often wondered how depression could actually prevent people from going to work, and now I feel like I've come to understand how much that state can interfere with the ability to function. (Not like I didn't already think it was a horrible condition.)
Anyway, not trying to armchair psych, just saying: I hear ya.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#35Where is 8-10 hours, and 12-14?
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#36I highly recommend RescueTime, which tracks exactly this - it looks at what software you are interacting with/what websites you are on, and reports many hours a week you were on your computer and how much of that was productive. For example, last week I was on my computer 30 hours (I had a lot of meetings) and I was productive 75% of that time, which averages to 4.5 hours of productive computer time per workday.
It's neat to track my productive hours per week over time - I can see clear cycles based on projects, number of meetings, and my general motivation level. Some weeks I'll average just 2-3 hours of productive time a day, others I can get close to 6. 5-6 hours seems to be a ceiling on how long I can spend coding in one day.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#37I highly recommend RescueTime, which tracks exactly this - it looks at what software you are interacting with/what websites you are on, and reports many hours a week you were on your computer and how much of that was productive. For example, last week I was on my computer 30 hours (I had a lot of meetings) and I was productive 75% of that time, which averages to 4.5 hours of productive computer time per workday. It's…
Seconded. RescueTime is extremely useful to help you drill down and see your actual productive time during any given day. It is self-reinforcing as well as you are more tempted to stick to high-value activities versus hanging out on twitter (HN!) or whatever else distracts you during the day. You'll quickly learn that 5-6 hours per day of actual productive time is really difficult to achieve on a continuous basis.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something like this happens to me too. I have a week where I get massive work done, then 2-4 come, where I can't get up to do anything at all.
Do you think that's a sign of periodic depression? I've been going through a bit of a rough patch, and I was struck by how my mood could sap my motivation to the level where I felt like I couldn't bear to work. It was very revealing; I had often wondered how depression could actually prevent people from going to work, and now I feel like I've come to understand how much that state can interfere with the ability to fu…
I thought about this too, then I quit my job.
Now, that I don't work anymore, I feel much better.
I sleep till I wake up, bike into the city, code for ~4h a day stuff in a café and drive home when I have enough.
But when I got a 40h/week job, the 1 week work and 3 week slack-off pattern was more common :\
Well, now that I feel better, I try to figure out how I can make money with work, that don't requires me to get paid per hour, hehe.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#39I feel like I get 4 hours of high quality coding per day. Then around 2 hours of lower quality coding. Anything more than that is usually futile.
After those hours, if I take a long enough break to clear my head, I can keep doing stuff.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#40If we are talking about getting into the "zone" where we "create" - I think people would be really, really shocked at how little productive work one can do in a day. I think 4 hours is a huge-over estimation. If you could find someone who did that over a long term, they would be a rock star.
I'd be ecstatic to average one "creative productive" hour a day, averaged over a year. 99% of my actual "new" productivity comes in these tiny little sprints of brilliance, the rest is just coasting, waiting for inspiration.
I'd guess I get about 2 1/2 - 3 productive hours in a good week. The rest is just doing things like research, diagnostics, administrative work, email, meetings, post-mortem reports, etc...
Thankfully, I have a job (network engineering), where a lot of the work also involves auto-pilot tasks, like configuring network equipment, doing simple triage/diagnostics, delivering/ordering equipment, helping people, teaching people, etc...
From the outside it appears to be "productive" - but in reality it's the sort of thing you can do in entirely reactive manner without having to engage any ueber-higher order brain functions - I could probably do it for 10 hours a day without having to exercise those brain functions.