Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

This is me.

On a good day, I might work for 3 hours of my 7 hour day. On a bad day, 1 hour. Somehow, I get the work done, and even get praised for it, though it's not taxing or particularly good code. I think my firm is afraid to lose me, and let me get away with too much, but that could be paranoia / imposter syndrome. That said, my productivity is on a par with others I work with (surpassing some) and I don't consider myself to be a better coder than they are.

I spend the larger part of my day on side projects, learning new languages, trying new apps, painstakingly reorganising my local file system, reducing the size and complexity of my dropbox folders (even though I'm using less than half of my free space), reading HN, tinkering with electronics at my desk, reorganising my workspace, blogging, reading, listening to podcasts or audiobooks (I find I can't do anything that involves typing at the same time, but I can do graphics)

I have curtailed my reddit / browsing a lot, but its still more than I'd like.

Lately, I've decided that my job is not challenging me enough, and I want to leave it. And so I blame that on my lack of focus. But if I'm honest, I've always been like this. In previous jobs, in college, in school, I've always done the minimum required to get by because I have other "more important" things to do.

I'm easily distracted. I don't think I'd go so far as to say I have ADHD, but I do have trouble focussing on tasks when a computer is involved. I have a theory that this is a side-effect of the modern computing experience itself. Switching tabs and multitasking is so easy these days, with the amounnt of RAM / Bandwidth / CPU we have at our disposal, that doing several things at once is very tempting. I barely bother to close apps. I would normally have 4-5 VS windows, Android Studio, Photoshop, Sublime, etc all open at once, and while I'm not switching between them every five minutes, I might alt-tab to one by accident and lose an hour fixing some bug or trying some thing out.

There were some college projects that really captured my interest, but those were an exception.

While our company goes with the rest of the world, I wish the company would consider 10 hour days 4 days a week, with half the department working in the earlier part of the week, and the other half working the later half of the week instead of all of us working the traditional 8 hour days 5 days a week.

So I make the best of it and enjoy those days where I do mostly nothing the entire time. But I'm never not doing anything.. I build web apps and run a popular website, so I'm always kept busy.

That said, if I'm rolling and happy it can be way more, if I'm tired/struggling to hit the flow/not creative - way less. I can get an awful lot done in a day (or few days) if I push, but doing that long term becomes counter productive.

On a regular day, I'll also get a bunch of smaller 'work' done, but it's mostly the admin-y stuff. Sales, email, help, calls, networking. Sometimes that can be my whole day - I suppose it depends how important those things are at the time (sales!) as to how much they're considered 'work'.

Edit: Just to add, decent headphones are a godsend.

The other 10% is making tea and drinking some, usually looking out the window or chatting with someone.