4-5 hours max. I let my boss know that my productivity takes a nose dive after 8 hours, and after 10 it actually goes negative (I'm going home or you will regret this later)
Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
41–50 of 84 posts
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#426 hours is pretty much for me. That is if there's no distraction. Being disrupted drives the productive hours way down.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just find these kinds of statements to be more self-justification than anything else. "No one should ever work more than 40 hours a week!" "Productivity beyond 4 hours a day is impossible!" Why must I shackle myself to these seemingly arbitrary limitations that other people have? If I'm having fun coding something for 8-10 hours a day, 5 days a week, and I feel I can sustain this output, why do I have to limit myse…
As someone who's been there done that: throttling yourself a little bit is a lot more productive in the long-term. I used to work to the point of exhaustion. Now I work to a clock I've come up with empirically. This means that instead of having bursts of super productivity followed by weeks/months of tiredness or simple "Meh, that's not interesting" I can trod along, putting one foot in front of the next, with a cons…
I am an orc. I do not stop. I do not tire.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#44Really depends on what kind of productivity I'm trying to achieve. "Hard" tasks - some kinds of system design, and the long tail of certain kinds of debugging - I may only squeeze out 1-2 hours per day of effective work.
OTOH, there's plenty more "straightforward" tasks which, if not interrupted, I'll be productive for the entire time with.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#45Averaged out I get about 6 hours of productive time a day at work. The project I am on I am one of the lucky ones. A couple of people on my team regularly spend all day in meetings and get maybe an hour to work on code.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#46I 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 wit…
as a former journalist, I have to disagree that editing is unproductive time. Saying exactly what you mean to say is extremely valuable, well-invested time. "I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time."
Concise emails really ease the workload by reducing inefficiencies.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#47I 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 wit…
"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."
All the activities you mentioned are part of what you're being paid for as a developer, so you should consider yourself to be productive while doing them. If your employer thought that setting up your environment wasn't an essential part of your job, they'd be paying someone else to do it for you. And if they don't want you to write crap code, then finding an efficient way to write a method is also an essential part of your job, and thus productive. And how can you possibly fix a bug without first researching it to figure out the exact conditions that cause it to occur? Even meetings are productive, provided that they allow people to come to an agreement on how to solve a problem (rather just being for status reporting that could be done better with an automated tracking system).
"When I'm completely focused on coding, I'm at my most productive."
What if that code turned out to be the solution to a problem that didn't actually exist? Would you still think you were productive just because you were completely focused on coding at the time?
Now, look at the other side: Let's say that during a meeting, you figured out that some piece of code that your company wanted you to write was completely unnecessary, and it saved them hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars. Wouldn't that be productive?
And if you refactor 1000 lines of code to do everything it did before with just 100 lines of code, is your productivity negative because you threw lines of code away?
As developers, we're paid to solve business problems, not just to generate lines of code.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#48I 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…
A more valuable question is: how do you make yourself more productive?
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wit…
"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." All the activities you mentioned are part of what you're being paid for as a developer, so you should consider yourself to be productive wh…
I completely agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I feel there is a difference between what I 'produce' and what I'm paid for. As you say, I'm paid to solve business problems, so any time that I dedicate to not solving those business problems or improving the business is essentially not productive.
I'm not suggesting we count lines of code, but I'm only actually producing when the code I write makes it into a final product. If I spend 5 hours writing code, and then throw it all away, I'm not productive. When I re-write a bit of code, was I productive the first time and not the second? Was I productive both times? Does it matter what has changed between the time I wrote them both, or why I'm making the change?
Using your example of refactoring 1000 lines of code, if the 1000 lines ends up doing the same as the 100 lines, how have I added value to the business? I may not have, and therefore, that time was unproductive, or I may have added value, and therefore the time was productive.
Interestingly, it seems the definition of productive may be up for debate itself.
Re: Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
#50I disagree with the fundamental idea that time spent on meetings can only be productive for the team but not for you. In fact meetings can (should) be a time to share ideas, learn new things and ultimately make your work more focused. If you're doing meetings right, they prevent you from wasting time on inconsequential details and keep you focused on what matters. If you are bored and the details of your work are not even addressed, you're probably just doing meetings wrong.