
Ask HN: How much productive work do you average per week? - baalimago
With &quot;productive work&quot; I mean work which somehow yields personal growth and future professional success.<p>Followup question: for how long have you kept this work up and where has it brought you?
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welder
> I mean work which somehow yields personal growth and future professional
> success

I average 4 hrs of productive coding per day according to WakaTime[1]. When
working on well-defined projects/features and not having meetings it goes up
to 8 hrs coding per day, but that environment is difficult to create. Also
there's the debate whether being productive means spending less time coding,
or spending time towards the right problem (revenue, impact, team initiatives,
etc). I also find the language and framework I'm using makes a huge difference
in how much I accomplish given the same amount of time. When you're not sure
if cranking out code is actually productive it's best to start measuring work
in output velocity.

For myself, I just assume when I'm coding in 2 of my projects I must be coding
towards some goal, so I assume my time spent coding in those 2 projects is
always productive. That's why I set a wakatime goal to code at least 4 hours
per day in those 2 projects.

1: [https://wakatime.com](https://wakatime.com) (Personal profile:
[https://wakatime.com/@alan](https://wakatime.com/@alan))

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karmakaze
> personal growth and future professional success

This is a very *unique" defifition of 'productive".

I would normally consider productive work to be anything that adds value to a
product used by users of said product. Also include amortized benefits like
reducing tech debt. V2 rewrites are often not productive--wait until v3 or
later when you actually know what big changes are needed.

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sethammons
Most of my day is productive usually. Sometimes I'm not, and this is when I'm
blocked, usually on a build system or similar (I actively avoid multitasking
as it is a good way to do multiple things poorly). If I'm blocked for a short
while and can do very cognitively light work, I will likely work on it. If it
will be longer, I can usually pivot to something else that needs to be worked
on.

I think it might be easy to be myopic with your definition though. If I'm
pushing the company goals further, I'm being productive, even if I'm not
learning. It might not give me more technical expertise, but it will help on
my next review. And that helps with success. Helping others with their stuff
might not help my learning either, but it also helps them and the company move
forward. Meetings are an opportunity to distill and communicate information
for target audiences. Scrum ceremonies are opportunities to similar, but also
to find ways to balance business and team needs. Now, not all meetings are
productive use of time, but I think people will tend to overly discount them.

I feel I'm mostly productive for most of the day. I also spend some time
reading and learning about things on the edges of what I know. I've done this
for about a decade within one company. I've approximately tripled my salary
and earned a lot of equity. I started with some poor knowledge of php and
MySQL to many years later a principal developer influencing the designs of our
distributed, scalable, and highly available systems. I also have introduced
new technologies, strategies, and systems here. I've learned to work with
others throughout the organization at different levels in different
disciplines. I did not do any of this in a vacuum. I've had great peers, great
managers, and others who are knowledgeable that I could learn from. No
official mentors, just kind of the village to raise a child kind of thing.

I'm on mobile and should get out of bed now. Hopefully. This stream of
consciousness is a bit coherent and doesn't have too many typos and someone
gets something out of it.

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kyllo
For the last 6 months or so I've been tracking my time with org-mode in Emacs,
and I typically get about 4-5 hours of productive time a day. The rest is
taken up by meetings, e-mails, chat, coffee breaks, and task switching
overhead.

The time tracking is just for me, I don't share my logs with anyone else. So
far I believe it's kept me focused on achieving specific work goals and not
getting distracted, leading to more concrete achievements I can cite in my
annual performance review.

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tmaly
I get between 1-2 hours a week on long term big picture goals.

I am working on increasing this through better techniques such as pre-planing,
mini habits, reflecting

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baalimago
To clarify: writing "productive" i wanted to include reading studies,
studying, networking (to some degree) and so forth, basically everything which
isn't "watching the latest tv-show while having a beer". Even working out
could qualify, but somewhere around there I draw the line.

If it's beneficially for you professionally: I deem it productive.

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notomorrow
16 pomodoro

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astazangasta
I was going to answer in this vein. What are the units of productive work?

