
When Does Work Actually Get Done? - ryan_j_naughton
https://priceonomics.com/when-does-work-actually-get-done/
======
dbingham
They didn't measure when work got done. They measured when people chose to
update their project management software. That doesn't necessarily correlate
in any way with when the work is actually getting done. So all of their
conclusions are based on flawed assumptions and a bad data set.

Anecdotally, I am an active user of multiple project management platforms and
do my best to keep them actively up to date. When I am in a state of flow and
being productive I almost never break it to update the project management
platform.

I'm honestly not sure there's much of a pattern to when it gets updated.
Sometimes it's when I'm trying to get into a work mindset and remember what I
did the day before. Sometimes it's when I'm winding down at the end of the day
and making note of what I did. Sometimes it's in between tasks.

A better measure might be when git commits were made to repositories, but even
that is a pretty imperfect measure. I often don't made small commits as a I
work, but large ones once a cohesive portion of the task is complete (or
several small ones as the same time using git add -p).

~~~
Bartweiss
Thank you for pointing this out. I know that for myself, Jira updates and high
productivity work are _anticorrelated_. I'm not going to update a ticket while
I'm focused on code, and large blocks of flow-requiring work often don't even
justify ticket updates until they're done.

Fundamentally, this data just looks like "people update tickets before lunch
and before the end of the day", which is hardly interesting.

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crispyambulance
This data was collected by a project management software tools company.

As such, I suspect most of it is bullshit generated whenever the people who do
the actual work decide to key in the minimum amount of info in order to keep
the "project management professionals" off their backs.

Monday mornings are a great time to get "boilerplate" work done to satisfy
PM's.

When the _actual_ work gets done depends on the individuals, their teams, and
the projects.

~~~
Bartweiss
Even aside from, er, "defensive management", I doubt the quality of this data.
My team has triage meetings Monday at 11 AM. The number of tickets 'created'
or 'completed' during that one hour stretch is probably 30% of the total for
the whole week, but that's a function of coordination and scheduling that says
nothing about actual work completion.

------
Brotkrumen
The time or day I complete a task is unlikely the same time or day I spent
working on it.

If I complete a task at 11 a.m. I've probably worked on it the day before and
just wrapped up final testing before 11 a.m. Same with Monday being the "most
productive".

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Not only that but just because your employer forces you to work at certain
times doesn't mean you are most productive at those times.

~~~
Bartweiss
For that matter, the time you're in the office updating tickets isn't
necessarily linked to your work hours.

Lots of people operate on schedules like "think of a good answer to the
problem at 8 PM, crank out two hours of work, roll in at 11 AM to test the fix
and update the ticket". As far as this study knows, that work pattern equals
"high productivity at 11 AM", even though all of the actual work happened
during the "low productivity" timeframe.

------
erAck
They gathered data of office robots that start to work between 8 and 9. Also
it's only data of robots forced to use a particular tracking tool. Yes, a work
cycle is 2-3-4 hours after having started fresh. Start at 11 and mark
something as done at 14.

That sponsored article should be categorized using their book titles
advertised at the bottom: "The Content Marketing Handbook", "Hipster Business
Models" and "Everything is Bullshit".

~~~
lostcolony
"office robots" is a generalization you're making, and weakening your point
with an insult.

That said, without actually describing in more detail how they measure it,
yes, it's very, very circumspect. I'd wager even more so than just asking
people "hey, when do you feel most productive?" Because the time I mark
something done in JIRA, say, is barely correlated to when I spent the most
time and focus on it (and even that correlation is not being picked up here.
That is, I'd say "The time I spent the most effort on a problem is within 4
working hours of the time I marked it done, unless I completed it first thing
in the morning, as I might wait until the end of the day to mark it done, and
also barring a whole flurry of initial effort, it not getting me anywhere, I
take a break, realized I was thinking about it wrong, go back and get it done
in minutes").

------
Apocryphon
Pairs well with the RescueTime piece:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16073745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16073745)

------
rhn_mk1
Some of the bar plots seem misleading because of the scaling. The monthly one,
for example, almost made me believe that January is half as productive as
October. The "zero" level is not stated anywhere, but the lowest value is
still halfway to the top.

This feels like intentional exaggeration to me. If the lowest value started at
the base line, like they do e.g. in currency exchange plots, there would be no
doubt about offset. This way, the initial impulse is to compare areas of the
bars.

~~~
Rainymood
Your comment made me curious so I redid the plots with three different axes.

The first one starts from 5.5 which makes it look nearly identical to that in
the blog post

[https://i.imgur.com/n0LZJd8.png](https://i.imgur.com/n0LZJd8.png)

The second one is where I let the y-axis run from 0 to 10 instead of from 5.5
to 10. In my opinion, this changes very little

[https://i.imgur.com/cmrnbDp.png](https://i.imgur.com/cmrnbDp.png)

The third one is with the y-axis from 0 to 100 which makes the effect
significantly less pronounceable

[https://i.imgur.com/pk9Bs9n.png](https://i.imgur.com/pk9Bs9n.png)

Matlab code:

    
    
        m = 1:12;
        tasks = [7.2 7.6 8.3 8.1 8.2 8.4 8.6 8.4 8.8 9.5 9.0 8.0];
        bar(m,tasks);
    
        % axis([0 12.5 0 100]);
        % axis([0 12.5 0 10]);
        axis([0 12.5 5.5 10]);
    
        title('In which month do people complete most tasks');
        xlabel('Month');
        ylabel('Percentage people reporting completing most tasks');

------
michaelt
The article doesn't make it clear what their data source for this is - but I'd
have thought that would have a big impact.

If you measure the time I commit code, you'll find the most happens just
before I go home every evening; if you measure the time I mark tasks as
complete in a task-tracking system it's at a scheduled daily stand-up meeting.
So different data sources would show different results.

~~~
Bartweiss
With a little digging - it's when tickets are 'created' or 'completed' in one
type of project management software. (The article is basically an informal ad
for Redbooth, where the blog post first appeared.)

Commit times would have been a decent metric, though devs obviously vary a lot
in how they structure and time their commits. But this study used ticket-
completion, and finds lots of work gets done at 10-11 AM and 4 PM. Which looks
suspiciously like a whole day's work has been logged during morning standup
and before-leaving ticket checks.

------
gpvos
I don't have precise statistics, but I'm basically worthless before 14h, and
start getting productive at around 17h...

~~~
rb808
Me too, perhaps its because I'm a procrastinator and put off everything to the
end of the day when I try to get everything done. Friday evenings are most
productive!

------
overcast
Seems like every time I figure out something, it's first thing the very next
day. Toiling away all day on a problem, only to solve it the next morning. So
the first couple hours of work, probably my most productive.

~~~
toomanybeersies
I've found that sleeping on a problem is usually the best way to solve it if
you're stuck. Sometimes you get too stuck into one way of thinking, can't see
the forest for the trees, so to say.

------
bpyne
The work week in my organization is M-Su. I'm not particularly awake on Monday
mornings, so I fill out and submit my time sheet for the previous week, which
may include support hours over the weekend. Due to my brain core dumping over
the weekend anything I did the previous week, I have to piece together what I
did from my calendar and Sent folder.

Usually my periods of high productivity are 10am-12pm, 3-5pm, and 7-9pm. (I'm
not usually in the office after 5pm so my employer doesn't benefit from the
last burst. But they would if I did.)

Friday is my day to get backlog stuff done. Depending on how you define
productivity, I'm either highly productive at solving old bugs, doing
documentation updates, etc. or not productive at all on Fridays.

I have to echo others' sentiments: the analysis is severely flawed.

[EDIT: Added paragraph starting with "Friday is...".]

~~~
dhimes
Keep a log. Makes things way easier.

------
purplethinking
Does this take vacations into account? Otherwise I'm surprised to see such
high productivity in the summer.

~~~
louhike
(<speculation>)Maybe because offices are calmer, so it's easier to
concentrate?(</speculation>) It tends to work for me so I would be curious to
know why it is so.

~~~
mrweasel
My guess as well. I normally work doing July, and take time off in August. You
get to close a large number of tasks when other people are on vacation.

------
codingdave
So our work ramps up as people get to the office, and drops when we leave for
lunch. Likewise, we ramp up as the year progresses, until we slow down at the
holidays.

Am I missing something, or is this data so aggregated that it has become
useless?

~~~
dx034
I'd stick my head out and guess they promote at year end. That's why people
complete most tasks in Sep-Nov, just in time for promotion/salary increase.
From January, no one cares about performance for another 6 months so
performance is low.

------
manmal
January being the worst, and October being the best months for productivity
matches my own perception. Not so sure about summer though.. when it’s really
hot, motivation tends to go down along with blood pressure :)

------
erikb
This is not consistent with what I'm seeing. Monday before 2 pm nothing
happens. Between Monday 2 pm and 5 pm suddenly everybody wants to get 2 days
of work done and fails. And tuesday normal, regular, productive work starts,
and continues until Friday. Usually the tough thing is on oneself to really
stop between 5 pm and 6 pm because then the productivity drops severly.

My guess would be from these observations, that the most success happen
Thursday around 3 pm. But maybe software development is special since there
are few tasks that could be done in 1.5 hours anyways.

~~~
ForRealsies
Everyone works 7:30 - 3:30 in my metro area in an attempt to beat rush hour.
11am (listed as the most productive hour in this article) is when folks start
eating lunch.

~~~
erikb
Maybe that's why this is the most productive time. In that case I would be
forced to agree.

------
kdelok
I couldn't see what their data sources were, but I wonder if this is just
tracking when people make most use of work-tracking software?

~~~
maccard
Top of the post says it’s a sponsored article based on
[https://redbooth.com/blog/your-most-productive-
time](https://redbooth.com/blog/your-most-productive-time)

------
sjclemmy
I can see that this must be an aggregation of different work patterns. I'm not
a statistics person so is there some way to estimate the source 'curves' from
this. I.e. I know that I'm most productive from around 7.30 am until about
midday.

------
fredrb
If the data doesn't take country into account, seasons are not really a
relevant metric as they might differ depending on the hemisphere you're in.

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WmyEE0UsWAwC2i
How does this correlates with weather?

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listenallyall
It took two whole companies to produce a couple of extremely basic histograms?
And given the flimsiness of the data (self-reported, no clear definition of
"tasks"), neither company felt it was necessary to include a margin of error
calculation, or other disclaimer? This is utter garbage, just filler to take
up space on a blog (two blogs, actually) and patting themselves on the back
for producing absolutely nothing.

~~~
zaptheimpaler
Welcome to content marketing!

They produced getting this post to front page of HN and hence thousands of
views, the simpler the analysis/data, the lower the cost of those views :)

------
agumonkey
when information is passed between peers ?

