
Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working? - acalderaro
Let&#x27;s include meetings&#x2F;email as job related.
======
throw832649
Throwaway for maximum honesty: I am pretty sure I spend at least 75% of my
time "at work" not working. HN, Reddit, messing around with side projects or
learning a new language or framework. This has been the case for my entire
working life.

I seem to get as much done as other people (sometimes better) so part of me
wonders if I'm not as unusual as I feel. Part of me wonders if I should get
evaluated for ADHD, since I find it such a struggle to focus on my work. And
part of me is just frustrated with myself, that theoretically I could spend
like 3 _good_ hours at work each day, get more done, and have more quality
time to myself.

~~~
barsonme
The best way to describe ADHD is: _The TV is always on, but you don 't get to
choose the channel_.

Some things are easy to focus on—I can sit down to program for a bit and lose
track of time for 5 hours. On the other hand, if something is boring, it's
_mind-numbingly boring_.

It was the worst while I was in school, since teachers and professors just
thought, "oh, he's unmotivated" when in reality it was more along the lines
of, "I'd rather cut my toenails with a rusty butter knife than write the
paper." (Okay, perhaps that's a _slight_ exaggeration.)

Anyway, if it affects your life and managing it yourself isn't working (give
it an honest effort, of course) definitely speak with a doctor. While too many
parents think their kids have ADHD when the kids are really just, well, kids,
trying to cope with ADHD without some sort of guidance sucks. A lot. It's
amazing how much more productive you can be if you get some help coping with
it.

Just my $0.02.

~~~
J-dawg
>"I'd rather cut my toenails with a rusty butter knife than write the paper."
(Okay, perhaps that's a slight exaggeration.)

This totally describes me. The line I quoted resonates because sometimes the
idea of a boring task is actually _frightening_ to me, in the way you
described. Like I get a really sick feeling about it and will do almost
anything to avoid it. On the other hand I feel like I have so much going on in
my head, and so much I could _produce_ if I could only channel it properly.
The TV is most definitely always on. My lack of focus and procrastination has
definitely held me back in my career.

One thing I'm wary of is medicalising what might just laziness. How do I know
it's not a version of "special snowflake syndrome"? Is my own inattentiveness
(and inability to get over it) really so much worse than what a "normal"
person experiences?

To give a parallel, I heard a podcast where Ramit Sethi was talking about
"introvert porn", where he's saying there is all this stuff online about how
hard life is for introverts, how extroverts don't get it, basically making
people feel good about being an introvert and telling them that it's an
integral part of who they are rather than something they can change. And he's
saying that this is a dangerous and self-defeating trap to get into because
people don't realise that social skills can be learned. All these "introverts"
are just falling back onto an excuse to avoid confronting the thing that's
holding them back.

If I start blaming all my problems on ADHD am I just falling into a similar
trap? After all, not everyone can be successful. Maybe I'm just not successful
because I'm not that _good_ at anything, not because of a medical condition.

Possibly relevant: I am in the UK where ADHD seems to be a lot less recognised
than in the USA. People here are often critical of the idea of medicating ADHD
in kids (which is relatively unusual here afaik). I don't know how a British
GP would react to someone asking for an adult ADHD diagnosis - I imagine it
wouldn't be taken very seriously.

~~~
coroxout
It's true that adult ADHD (and non-hyperactive ADHD, and ADHD in women) is
under-recognised in the UK.

However, NICE (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence) has published
guidelines about diagnosis and the short version iirc is that you're well
within your rights to point out that your GP is not a specialist in this area
and ask to be referred.

The bad news is there may not be anywhere locally to refer you to, so you may
need to travel out of area, pay to see someone private (and then fight to have
your prescription accepted and paid for by the NHS). There are more kids'
specialists but they may not recognise the nuances of the adult condition.

No, I haven't done it - I've been meaning to for over a year and keep putting
it off, ha ha.

Links:
[https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/CG72](https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/CG72)
\- NICE guidelines; [https://aadduk.org/forum/](https://aadduk.org/forum/) \-
AADD UK forum

~~~
J-dawg
Thanks very much for your comment. I hope you go and do it soon. I'd love to
hear about your experiences when you do.

------
hardworkerthrow
Over the first 15+ years of my career as an engineer and engineering manager,
I've repeatedly surveyed colleagues and friends in engineering roles about
this question. I've asked it of people I consider low-performing, all the way
to folks I'd consider 10x developers.

I have never met a single software developer who, when pressed to give an
honest assessment and when "working" is defined along the lines of "actively
defining, coding, or debugging a feature", self-identifies as working more
than 50% of the time. There are occasional stretches of 12+ hour working
sessions, but they are very rare.

I'd say I've asked this of over a hundred people.

This isn't to say these people only do 4 hours of work a day. Often, peers
have described how they hit a wall at work, go home, and then work on personal
projects in the evening.

I've come to the conclusion that is generally impossible to do mentally
intensive tasks for more than 4 continuous hours over the long term.

~~~
nubbins
Thats interesting because 4 hours is exactly the limit I've seen cited by
researchers as the max for highly focused work but even that much is a kind of
skill that has to be developed, so a beginner might have much less
concentration.

~~~
veddox
Can you give a reference for that number? Sounds intriguing...

~~~
antognini
This article also references about four hours as the limit that a creative
professional can work every day:

[http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/darwin-was-a-slacker-
and-y...](http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/darwin-was-a-slacker-and-you-
should-be-too)

~~~
veddox
A fascinating article, thank you for sharing!

------
decasia
Arguably, time spent reading HN is a legitimate part of becoming/remaining a
good developer. Certainly, spending time socializing with coworkers is a
required part of work, many places. Spending some amount of time unwinding at
the office is arguably required for mental health and therefore a functional
component of remaining a worker -- does that count as working?

"Working" is an ambiguous category, it seems to me. One definition of work
(call it "productivist") says that we're only working when we're literally
producing something valuable. A more organizational view might hold that
"work" is _whatever_ you're socially (often implicitly) required to do to keep
your job (whether measurably productive or not). And a third more holistic
definition would include stuff like exercise or professional development that
are not always directly "required" by anyone, but that you might go crazy
without doing...

~~~
austenallred
I'll be honest; I don't think using HN is anything close to what I would
consider "working." At best it's marginally optimized random browsing.

~~~
rl3
While it isn't work, reading technical articles regularly on HN can be very
beneficial.

In fact, the first thing I tell aspiring developers is to start reading HN on
a regular basis if they already aren't. It confers a sort of broad awareness
of various stacks and ecosystems over time that's hard to obtain otherwise.

~~~
decasia
Yeah, learning the culture of your profession -- with a broad awareness of
different ecosystems and things -- isn't "immediately productive," but it's a
simple form of professional development. (And in my opinion, enlightened
employers understand that decent professional development is a really
important part of the work process.)

~~~
jrs235
It falls into the important but not urgent quadrant of Stephen Covey's Time
Management Matrix.

------
lazythrowawayd
I probably spend half my time not working. I'm burnt out though. After a few
years at my current position, I just don't care.

Why is this?

I've had a few promising projects languish because my manager is slow or
hesitant to allocate resources. That's a bit demoralizing. When I'm on a path
to production for a functioning system I get caught up in the devops meeting
vortex. That's a waste of time and it takes several weeks to get any sort of
resolution. In these cases my time is mostly spent looking for workarounds and
not "working". I feel there are a lot of politics and favoritism in the
company, and my manager (and our team) is not on the right side. It's
demotivating to have your work ignored because you're not a priority. I don't
know how anyone stays for more than a year.

Edit: In the first few months I worked on random on-going projects, but was
quickly made lead on some new projects. It was good at first, but after about
9 months I'd say most (90%) weeks I don't put in anywhere near 40 hours of
work.

The sad thing is I've always gotten a raise (double digit in two cases) and
full bonus every performance cycle.

I've finally started looking for another job.

Does anyone have recommendations? I'm really looking for a company that
enables their individual contributors (engineers) to actually get shit done.

~~~
robind2
Work for a startup, preferably one that is already somewhat profitable. I have
worked for this type company my whole career and this "devops vortex" you
speak of is a foreign concept. I run a small IT dept and we have one 30 min
staff per week plus a one-on-one for each dev. And they code and solve other
problems all day, and of course surf the web or socialize to break up the day
too.

~~~
lazythrowawayd
I'm already in talks with two well known pre-IPO startups (<500 employees).
The devops vortex is a new animal to me as well. I've never had so many
problems moving systems into production than I have at this company.

Edit: I've talked with many in my professional network and they describe
similar meeting loads (~1 hr/week) as you do. I'd estimate I spend on average
3 hr/week in meetings. And most of these meetings don't result in action
items. They're essentially pointless.

~~~
scorpioxy
Coming from an organization where I spent > 10 hours a week on meetings, I
hear you. I believe I spent more time writing emails than writing code. The
code I did write was done at night after everyone left and there would be no
more meetings and useless phone calls. Managed to create the most used/useful
application in the organization and still nothing changed.

When it occurred to me that things are not going to change in my lifetime even
with all the promises of upper management, I started creating side projects
where I am in control of the full direction. When that wasn't enough, I also
started looking for a new job. Joined a startup as a CTO/Lead Dev and was
happier.

------
ThrustVectoring
You're almost certainly getting a sampling bias by asking this question at
~2pm Pacific Time on a weekday.

------
9erdelta
Some days almost the entire day. I'll read, watch videos, do some tutorials.
But its offset because usually when I do this it's because I'm hung up on
something and it just isn't going to get solved unless the ole brain has time
to do its subconscious thing.

~~~
1_player
Letting the subconscious work through a hard problem while doing something
else is a truly underrated trick. Taking a shower or going for a walk also
works wonderfully.

~~~
wingworks
I used to take hour long lunch breaks, which I'd spend about 35mins walking to
get food and finding a nice spot to sit outside, most days I done this I would
come back into the office refreshed and often fix the issue I was working on
shortly after coming back. But the hour-long break was always founded upon,
which is why I ended up leaving. (it was also the only break I took each day,
but the culture in the team I was in was to take no more than 30mins break)

~~~
9erdelta
30 minute breaks? Sounds unbearable! Plus knowing that you're being judged
creates a pressure that doesn't help solve problems.

------
superasn
Speaking as a solopreneur, I work only 3 hours a day, more like 3 x 50 minutes
laps with 15 min breaks in between.

Also each lap is dedicated to one activity, first is manufacturing where I
work on my project (the actual coding part), second is traffic (this is the
dreaded marketing/outreach part) and finally is the optimization part (seo,
increasing conversion rates, improving design, etc).

I've seen that the diversity of this work prevents you from getting bored and
also is very good for your sites because if you keep working on just coding
your sites seldom make any money.

The 3 hours limit is because after that i can happily watch tv, spend time
with my family or just work on my other hobbies besides computers guilt free.

P.s. When you try to do as much work as you can, i believe you still only get
3 hours of work done - yet you feel guilty of not doing enough which causes
unhappiness.

~~~
0wl3x
Sorry is this is rude but how do you make a living only working 3 hours a day?
Are you products already established?

~~~
superasn
No it isn't rude at all. Yes, some sites are already established but I also
launch at least one new site every month to add to my income.

3 hours is a lot of work if done without distraction. _I think the key is to
make your work more mechanical and less creative_.

I have a system that I have perfected over the years which helps me do
this[1]. It's like a stupid step by step list where each item links to a
document which is another stupid step by step list that I follow like a
"Robot" for these 3 hours. When you do it this way, it makes it quite easy and
3 hours daily is more than enough to launch a small to medium size project in
a month (I think there are less than 200 items in total and about 50% of it
you can easily outsource).

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/i1oBM2t.png](http://i.imgur.com/i1oBM2t.png)

~~~
Xcelerate
I've had some success with that approach and am considering adopting it as my
"goto" approach (over my current approach, Trello, for which I just stare at
all the cards on the board and panic at how much I have to do).

When a deadline is coming up, I take a 10 minute "organization break" and list
the actual, concrete steps that need to be mechanically performed in order to
complete the task. I think the problem is that my mind tends to get hung up on
abstract task descriptions and I start overanalyzing. For instance, "Design
welcome page" will turn into a wasted day of messing around with colors,
fonts, and layout positioning. On the other hand, "Add X, Y, Z to prototype
welcome page" is a much more concrete task and it defines _completion_ so that
I can move on to the next task on the list.

(Btw, you could turn your nested-robotic-link-list into a quick webapp that I
bet would get a decent number of users.)

------
throw112358
I sit in a cubicle and I update bank software. I'd say in a given week I
probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

~~~
alltakendamned
I would go crazy in less than 6 weeks. Simply for the fact that I have to be
present, but with nothing to do.

------
webjac
I've been an employee for like 20% of my career and a the rest I've been a
freelancer.

I never worked more than 4 hours (of real work a day). There's the occasional
super productive day where I have done over 8 hours of productive work, but
that's the exception, not the rule.

I usually work around 3-4 hours of productive work daily. Heck I'd even say
20%-30% of that time is not even productive (meetings, emails and necessary
yet unproductive things).

When I worked for companies doing 9 to 5, I wasted a looot of time doing
nothing: reddit, fb, and stuff. I also recognize that I need that distraction
to do some real productive work.

I'm very fast and productive when it comes to actual work, but if I don't get
the procrastination time then I just become a blurry mess of a brain and take
10 times longer to do the same things.

~~~
imarg
I think procrastination time is also important and necessary.

I just completed a course on Coursera (Learning How to Learn -
[https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-
learn/](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/)). One of things
mentioned is that our brain has a focused and diffused mode and both are
needed for us to learn.

So, I guess, something similar happens when we are working. You need both
focus time but also a down time to achieve things. Of course, too much
procrastination is also not a good thing.

------
swah
60% or more :(

But there are SOME DAYS that I work 150%! ("in the flow")

So how to achieve flow consistently?

One of the few things that works for me is to get started working first thing
in the morning: no news, no HN, until 10am, etc. _When_ I can do this, I know
I'll have a productive day.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Does this cause a productive mental state, or is it merely a symptom of it? I
suspect it's causal (based off what I know of brain chemistry), but I could
definitely be wrong on that part. Like, "get assigned bullshit work, can't
focus on it because it's bullshit, end up on HN" is definitely also a
plausible story to me.

------
slizard
Pre-, during, or post-burnout?

~~~
goodoldboys
the real question

------
iLoch
I'd like to see where people are from if they're replying to this thread. I
wonder how cultural norms affect effectiveness (do Americans work less at work
because of the work-oriented culture which requires them to stay at work
longer for no reason?)

~~~
natoliniak
I work in the USA and i would say I'm about 30-40% productive, maybe less. My
productivity is strongly related to the density of meetings throughout the
day: My productivity killers are relatively short gaps between meetings (<45m)
during which i am completely unable to focus because of the anticipation that
i will soon be completely distracted. So if I have three 1hr meetings with
45minutes gaps between them, my daily productivity plummets to nearly 0. Open
office plan also doesn't help with staying focused.

------
throwaway_jazze
(Throwaway for honesty)

Significantly less now that I work remotely, on my own schedule, and at a
reasonable company. I get 6+ hours a day of real work in, usually more, but
try not to overdo it. (For awhile I was becoming a bit workaholic without the
boundary between work and not-work, spending 10+ hours at it.) I take breaks
and do spend a little time on HN or Stack Exchange to clear my head, but I
don't do Reddit, webcomics, facebook, or any random sites during work. That's
my relax after work stuff, done on a different PC. So in terms of
productivity, I'd say around 75-85% work, 15-25% slack most days.

I previously worked an 8:30-5:30 where management measured productivity by the
butts-in-seats metric, scheduled a lot of meetings, and was quite anal about
punctuality. I was lucky to get 4 hours of serious work in most days (between
all the interruptions, bureaucratic stuff, and having to work based on my
manager's sleep schedule). Sometimes I ended up doing more work at home at
night than I did while 'at work'. Maybe 50% productivity, often less.

Before that I worked at a 9-5 where we had to record our time per task so
specifically that we even had a task to enter the time spent filling out the
timesheet. I could have done better there about focusing on solving problems
and improving business if I wasn't constantly distracted by the clock ticking
and all the estimating and meetings about estimates and deadlines and
timesheets. Maybe 50% productivity.

------
justrudd
Hm. Given an average week, probably on average 35% of my day is not working.
Average being a reasonably interesting bug and/or project to sink my teeth
into. Somedays I'll work 10 hours. Others I'll work 4 to 6.

Unlike most people, if I finish my work in 5 hours, I go home. If I'm not
going to be working, I'd rather not be working at home. I've never had any
complaints about work quality or throughput. I have had one complaint about
not being seen in the office.

[edit] clarified the 35% bucket

~~~
tucaz
How do you assess "finished my work"? Unless you are working on tickets that
might stop coming in is really hard to be "out of work", specially in
projects.

I ask this because I see a lot of people saying the same but there's always
more work to do, being testing something that should be working, fixing bugs,
refactoring that old piece of junk you left behind due to times constraints,
etc.

~~~
justrudd
For me, it starts during sprint planning. I know what work is going into the
sprint, and what work is being assigned to me (we don't run sprints in the
natural way of grabbing the next card that's free. I disagree with it, but it
is what it is). So I plan out what I need to do on a day-to-day basis to
finish that amount of work. For a normal sprint (i.e executing on plans and
agreed upon designs) I try to plan the day to be ~6 hours of coding work a
day. Sometimes my estimates are long and I finish in 4 or 5 hours. Could I
start on the next card? Absolutely. And if I finish all my work early, I'll
pull something from the backlog.

But in general, I find it more sustainable to just go home after I finish in 5
hours because I know there are going to be times that I work 10 or 12 hours
(or a Saturday). Also, for me, depending on the next card, it might take an
hour or so to get going at the end of a day. So I'm now at 7 to 8 hours which
is when I normally leave. Was that hour or two wasted? No. I retain the
knowledge till the next day. But again for me, I've found that coming in and
starting a new task fresh reduces that one or two hours to less and gives me a
singular focus for the day.

If I finish in 2 or 3 hours, I always move on to the next task. That would be
silly to go home after 2 hours (most days).

I adapt this style for wherever I work. It has worked for me at start ups as
well as BigCo.

[Update] For the side things (refactoring messy code, flakey tests, automating
a tedious process, etc.) - I create cards/tasks for them and get them into the
sprint.

I know this makes me sound like a "terrible" employee. But it allows me to
give my best on a more sustainable basis. And if it is something that truly
needs to be done in a month, I'll work those 10 or 12 hour 7 day work weeks...

~~~
tokenizerrr
How do your coworkers feel about you only being a few hours at the office?

~~~
dilemma
They probably make snide remarks because they don't understand that someone
executing according to plan, consistently over several years and projects,
working 5 hours per day, is more valuable than someone working 8 hours in a
less organized manner and sometimes missing deadlines.

~~~
dingaling
It sounds like you're only allocated to one project at a time, correct?

In many big corps it's common to be on four or five projects at any one time.
Finishing one discrete piece of work is only a signal for the next project
manager to appear at my desk and demand that I get working on _his_ piece of
work.

And I can see his perspective, he doesn't particularly care if i was super-
productive that day on Project-A when he's managing Project-B and there are
still hours left in the working day.

------
neal_jones
I have recently gone freelance/self-employed and I have quickly missed the
reality of being able to not have to question if I'm actually getting work
done every minute of the day. The truth is, I can't do brain-intensive work
for more than maybe 5 or 6 hours.

~~~
steveax
I worked for myself for about a decade (web dev) and always considered getting
6 billable hours in a good day.

~~~
convolvatron
as much as keeping the pipe full and working for organizations that...have
such internal problems they have to hire contractors does kinda suck.

working when you feel like you can contribute, billing exactly those hours,
and filling the rest of your time with activities of your choice feels very
honest and liberating.

if i feel like i can't get things done because of the environment then i don't
work, and i don't bill. if i finish a job and they have no more work for me
then i say, thanks, keep me in mind, let me know if you have any problems.

not really a capitalist, but the transactional nature removes all the
festering emotional complications. and you can be a lot more straightforward
about where things are broken.

------
mikekchar
I have a follow up question: For the time that you spend "not working" would
you prefer to "work"?

For me the answer is "absolutely!!!". Reading through some of the responses,
it really seems that people are mixed. Either their "non-working" time is
spent with side projects/training or they have become demotivated by problems
with the work flow on their team.

For me the latter is by far the biggest problem. I was just thinking the other
day that, as programmers, we need a kind of statement that indicates what we
expect from the organisations we are in.

To be honest, I really want to work instead of write stuff on HN, so I'll
leave this as an exercise to the interested. As an example, I think it is
reasonable to expect to be able to spend whole days writing code (which means
that someone else has to go to the meetings, and someone else has to clarify
requirements, and someone else has to prioritise). There should be some clear
resolution of differences of opinion (whether that be in technical direction,
or whatever) -- a programmer shouldn't have to spend time arguing. A
programmer should expect to have spaces both for interacting with groups of
people and for quiet contemplation. I sure there are other (and better) ideas,
but that's what I have off the cuff.

~~~
jrs235
I got sick of feeling like I am wasting my life away at work not working, so I
submitted my resignation. Time to get on doing my own things so I don't feel
I'm wasting my little yet precious time alive. After a few meetings, I am not
quitting yet. I have been re-classed from salary to hourly and I will be able
to have fewer and more flexible "hours" so that I can get out and do my own
thing and side projects (which require business hour meetings/calls/etc).

------
throwaway184827
Reading this thread has made me feel a whole lot better about myself. Been
struggling with burnout and have been working on side projects a good 50% of
the time while I overestimate projects to give me larger buffers. I just don't
give a fuck anymore. I thought I was alone.

(Yes, I know it's wrong and I _want_ to be more productive, but I hate the
work I do and I hate the culture here. So I want to start my own thing.)

------
dylanha
Developer here. Going by my time Rescuetime logs, 62.5% of my time is spent
outside of the IDE or any other work related application. I do not enjoy this
work and spend a lot of time walking around/thinking about the problem/surfing
non work sites.

~~~
tomatohs
Thinking about the problem is working.

------
throw110
I spent 60-70% of my time not working because even though I'm working with
interesting technology, it's stuff that won't get used by almost anyway, my
peers don't seem interested, my manager is absent and the requirements are all
over the place (symptom of nobody caring, whatever is done is okay as long as
it impresses, for some random definition of "impresses)...

... so it needs to be done to check an item in a list but nobody cares. If
nobody cares, I don't care either, which makes me think I'm wasting my time,
which leads to depression, feeling burnt out, procrastinating even more, etc.

------
jonahrd
Unfortunately I'm paid hourly and remotely, so while getting settled, checking
an email or two, getting coffee, etc are all things I would do as part of a
normal workday, I don't tend to log those hours or get paid for any of it

------
IAmGraydon
I spend around 90% of my time at work doing real work. There are often days
where that number is nearly 100%. At past jobs that number was closer to
50-60%, but I've moved into a lead role (Marketing Director) where slacking
means getting buried. I don't mind it one bit, either. I'm helping to steer
the company and that's very rewarding, even if it is a lot of work.

------
iamben
I record my time pretty religiously. 5 hours seems to be a standard "working
day" of actually solid in the flow (face buried in a screen) work, assuming
I'm sat at a desk for 7/8.

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.

------
truebosko
In all honesty, I try to stay full throttle at work.

Important breaks I do take: Coffee walk (unfortunately on some busy days I
simply can't make it out), Quick chats with the team, and Pomodoro-timed walks
to stretch/ease the mind.

I usually eat lunch at my desk, which annoys me, because I always want to
socialize and be better at that. I don't find it easy to do this since the
days are so busy.

I'm a product manager, so I spend much of my days in meetings that are a mix
of working sessions, scoping exercises, communications with external clients,
and team-focused meetings.

On the days I don't have any meetings (they do exist), I zone out and get some
work done. Lately I've been focusing on the DevOps for our team.

------
donatj
It really depends on the day. Sometimes I've got basically nothing to do
whereas other times I'm overloaded and there basically isn't a moment I'm not.
It's hard to figure an average.

------
ivm
Working from home. Last month I tracked 270h on my Mac workstation: 190 hours
(70%) were productive, 24h (9%) neutral tools, and 56h (21%) distracting
(mostly chats with friends).

I also spend 1-2 hours a day on my "leisure laptop" (for example reading HN
from there but also some useful RSS feeds). So it feels like 65% would be a
correct productivity score.

Tracked with [https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/](https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/) of
course, most of the productive time was spent on its development and
marketing. :]

~~~
smartfin
Also use that app. But because of single machine for job and everything else
my stats is around 45-50% productive, another ~10% neutral.

------
qrybam
Busy day = only when I go to the toilet

Quiet day = maybe half my time

Most of my days are busy; if I'm not busy with my main work then I'll be busy
making the more mundane aspects of my job disappear into the background.

 _edit: formatting_

------
jpindar
It depends on how talkative my coworkers are that day.

------
workthrowaway19
Probably 25% on the average day. Occasionally 0%. There are entire days that
I'll spend working on nothing but side projects, but our company is getting
big so no one notices or cares. Sometimes I work from home just so I don't
have to do anything other than be around for a couple meetings.

The bigger we get the more lawyers and compliance people we ad, and the less
noticeable it is that I'm not doing shit.

~~~
shouldbworking
I find this brutal honestly hilarious

------
mdlap
I use RescueTime. Productive time is about 90% each month.

The reality is that 100% of my time, if meetings are included, is productive
(excluding minimal breaks).

I feel sorry for the people trying to run businesses with all of these
employees not working.

I'm a QA engineer. The most experienced QA engineer on a 3-person team (the
other two have either more experience with testing but less with development,
or vice-versa). I have waaaaay too much to do to get away with not working.

I do empathise with those for whom maintaining a high level of productivity is
impossible because of how demanding their work is. I'm fortunate that I have
so many different tasks to perform that if I don't have the energy to
concentrate on something demanding, I can switch to something fairly basic.

I'm also fortunate in that, for me, problem solving activities are almost
always energising. So if I feel like I'm getting burnt out I can dive into one
of the tricky but non-urgent problems I hadn't got around to yet.

------
Jemaclus
I consider myself rather productive compared to most devs I've worked with. On
a good day, I spend 75% of my day "working". On a normal day, it's closer to
50/50\. I'm a tech manager, though, so the "good" days are when I'm really
busy all day long, and the "normal" days are when I spend most of my time
coding. Like others have said, it's really difficult to do more than 4 hours
of solid coding in a day, particularly if you're interrupted frequently like I
am.

That said, I don't necessarily care that much about the hours my employees
work, so long as they meet the deadlines and are reasonably productive. I have
a good idea of how long a task takes, so if they take too much longer than
that, we'll have a chat. Otherwise, I just want to make sure they're happy and
not burnt out and staying as productive as possible.

------
AnimalMuppet
Do you count meetings as "work", or as "not work"? (I don't spend much times
in meetings at my current job, thankfully, so it doesn't change the question
for me.)

Honestly, my best guess is 50%, or close. I still get my work done as fast as
everyone else, though. No complaints on performance reviews.

~~~
acalderaro
Eh, let's assume that it's work in that you're not able to just freely browse
HN or work on a side project. What would your % be then?

------
mattbgates
Definitely depends on the day.. some days I'm working the entire shift, other
days I get paid to just sit here and work on my side projects. I work for for
a project-based department and with that comes deadlines that could mean I
have to be done within 3-6 hours which can be stressful.

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.

------
milkytron
I recently started my first full time job associated with my career. I'd say I
spend between 65-80% either doing my work or something related to it such as
training or reading documentation (which take up about 20% of my time at the
moment).

------
CGamesPlay
According to RescueTime, I spend around 83% of my screen time on "productive"
things. My total screen time averages about 25 hours / week, whereas my at-
work time is roughly closer to double that. I'd say that 67% of my off-screen
at-work time is "productive" meetings and the other third is things like
lunch, walks, etc.

Putting this all together, I spend 37.5 hours / week productively and 12.5
hours / week at work slacking off (or doing human things like eating and
pooping). So call it 75% productive time.

I generally enjoy my job. I've counted writing this post / assembling this
data as "not productive" time.

------
ChuckMcM
It is an interesting question which, in my opinion, hinges entirely on a
fairly puritanical notion of 'work.'

One of my 'problems' is that I can't "not work" in the sense of a laborer who
is no longer building widgets. As a person who is asked to solve complex
problems with a high degree of dimensionality inside of an arbitrarily
constrained solution space, much of the 'work' I do consists of turning the
problem over and over in my head while I explore the solution space.

A good example of this was an early review I got at Intel by my manager (a
really solid EE type guy). He added some criticism of my time management
(considered a 'ding' in the vernacular) for a embedded
compiler/assembler/driver thing I wrote as part of the evaluation of a
graphics processor. He said I had 'sand bagged' the time estimate.

When I asked him to describe that a bit more he explained that I had told him
it would take 6 months to do, and it was 2 weeks late, and I had spent 5
months "goofing off and not working" and then about 6 weeks doing the work. So
my estimate should really have been '8 weeks' and if I had started on time it
would have been done two weeks earlier than that.

I thought about that for a long time. And explained to him the for five months
I had no idea what the best way to write the software was, and in that five
months I had learned about 8 different technologies that all came together
into the final solution. I had to learn how to write device drivers in Xenix,
how to map I/O space memory into the kernel, design a language which was human
understandable and could be compiled into the odd little RISC instruction set
of the Graphics chip. And until I had figured out all of that precursor
information, I didn't have a clue how it would be written, but then after
figuring out that information actually writing the code was fairly mechanical.

In this one case the problem was that hardware has so many great milestones
you can call out, parts captured, schematics done, netlists verified, layout
started, design rule verification, first films, films checked, first boards,
boards checked, first assembly. Bringup in stages 1, 2, and 3 etc. All along
the way there are pleasant milestones to say "this is done" now on to the next
thing.

But software is _never_ like that for building something that nobody has ever
built before. And it is even rarely like that when you have the same software
but you are building it on a different system. The linkages, the entanglement
between the system and the software (and now the network and the services)
makes each new implementation its own special snowflake, with its own kinds of
problems.

Have you ever woken up and "knew" the solution to a tricky software issue? Or
had an idea for a change to an existing system that might make it better? That
happens to me all the time when I'm designing stuff. And a case could be made
that I'm working even when I'm asleep! Not because I'm sitting there typing in
lines of code but because I'm going through the solution space, somewhere in
my subconscious, looking for clues to places that hold better answers than the
answer that is currently checked into the git repository.

As a result I tend to measure my own productivity by 'solutions over unit
time' versus 'hours typing into employer owned equipment'. It still bites me
from time to time when a supervisor needs a constant stream of 'still flying'
type status messages to feel comfortable.

~~~
tutufan
Interesting. So despite the apparent success, your manager put on paper that
you were "goofing off and not working"? Did he mention that verbally one or
two times beforehand? How did you react?

Once things hit paper, I generally start interviewing. Not sure whether that
was right. But looking back over my career, I usually should have left earlier
rather than later in those cases.

~~~
ChuckMcM
It was verbal vs on paper. What was in the review was that I needed to improve
my time management. And oddly enough I left for Sun Microsystems not to long
after that, but not strictly because of the review, rather it was that I
preferred a work culture that understood what programmers did in addition to
understanding what EEs did.

And for what its worth, I took it to mean that I wasn't communicating _how_ I
was spending my time well enough and suggested ways that would work for both
of us. I expect that had I stayed at Intel it would have been fine.

~~~
gtirloni
I've a hard time communicating what I'm doing in that "research" phase.

During standups, most people are reporting concrete tasks that got done and I
feel a bit embarrassed to say I spent the whole day trying something out
that's remotely related to the final product but was interesting for the
ideas.

It's stressful to have to report those things, I feel like I have to justify
them, what's my train of thought, etc, and a 1-minute update has to turn into
an essay. Not really sure how to improve on that.

During your time at Intel did you have to report on your work quite
frequently?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Intel was my first exposure to "management by objective" and "key results".
And yes, there were weekly reviews of your progress. Every quarter, a set of
objectives and under each objective key results, and then weekly you reported
on how you were doing with respect to those.

I think the key to your stress is either that you aren't clear in your head
what you're trying to figure out, or your trying to figure out things that
aren't actually relevant. In my life what I have done is to do get very very
disciplined about what I'm to understand and how that will relate to the final
goal. Not surprisingly that is different as a manager than it is as an
individual contributor.

If I were your manager, and you came to me with this (and I would hope your
relationship with your manager is good enough that you could talk to them
about it) I would start with three questions;

1) What parts of your assignment are you completely confident you can
build/write?

2) What parts are you unsure of how to build?

3) What things that you are unsure about are between you and building the
things you know you can build?

Perhaps you can imagine how the conversation goes after you answer those
questions. But lets say for this hypothetical that you were unsure if you
could build a database fast enough to respond in time to meet the response
requirements of the product.

At that point we'd talk about what steps you could take to understand what
sort of performance to expect out of a database, what variables had the
biggest impact on that performance, and which databases were designed to be
fast. And you and I would agree that you would spend this sprint perhaps
developing your understanding of database performance. So at the stand up I'd
expect you summarize and article you read, a set of benchmarks you set up, a
set of test tables you created in the existing system, or maybe the top 5
blogs/books/videos you've found on analyzing database performance. At the
retro I'd want to know what sources gave you the most information for the time
invested, what were the time wasters, if you were more or less confident about
the database choice and its performance and maybe how you had, or would,
quantify your understanding with something objective.

From your perspective you would probably have spent the time 'surfing the web'
to find out various sources of information or perhaps prototyping some things
on AWS or on a local server.

If instead you came back and said, "I really don't know anything more about
databases yet but I learned Rust, and got stuff running in the new Angular
release and updated my server to the latest Ubuntu and read a book on
containers. Then we're going to have a different talk :-)

~~~
gtirloni
That's really very useful, thanks a lot.

------
fatherofone
Depends what you mean by work? I'm reading an article on Async with C#, that's
not coding but is work.

I watch some videos on latest tech, thats work too....

Only thing that matters is if have I completed tasks in my sprint or are there
any critical issues

------
hfourm
Reasonably ~5 hours of coding, maybe sometimes less on days with a lot of
meetings.

Rest of time on HN, reading, or admin type stuff (planning, ticket & branch
management), and of course meetings

------
halis
I have my days where literally ZERO gets done. On days like that, if I can put
together a PR with two lines of code, it's a win.

However, most days, probably 4.5 out of 5 on average, I am super productive,
taking very few breaks aside from lunch.

In a typical day I probably get 5-6 hours of solid work done. But there is a
downside too.

In order to achieve this, I sometimes skip meetings and ignore requests from
other people.

I am considered a high performer and seem to be an anomaly to most people.

------
1_player
99% of my 5 hour day. Because I discovered I can't usually stay in flow mode
for more than 5 hours, so I get in the office around 12pm and leave around
5.30pm

~~~
triangleman
So that's your working time?

~~~
1_player
Yes. When I sit at the desk I start working and time tracking and I don't
slack off till I leave, except maybe to browse some music on Spotify to keep
me concentrated.

When I was spending 9 hours/day as an employee, I'd be slacking off a
cumulative 2/3 hours every day.

------
rstuart4133
Does depend on what you call "working". I deem the time I spent on tech sites
like HN as working. So does my boss. He similarly considers the time I spend
at the odd tech conference working. There are good reasons for this - I drive
change around here, and most of that change originates from exposure to ideas
from those sources.

If you could that (and I do), I'd say at least 75% of my time is spent
working.

------
callesgg
Depends how you want to define work.

I think of stuff that is beneficial to the company in one way or another like
95% of the time.

Re structuring thoughts, digesting ideas.... talking to others to understand
how they think.

But if someone that did not know me came and looked at what i did during work
hours and did not get to ask questions to me. I would assume they would think
that i only worked 20-25% of the time.

Things are not always what they seem.

------
nickrivadeneira
I'm surprised by the responses here. I didn't think it was as prevalent as
comments suggest. At the beginning of my career it was probably around 50%,
though after spending two years at a consulting company, it's dropped to 5-10%
maximum. I find that reducing interruption and having music going keeps me
engaged.

------
5_minutes
Days at the office mean meetings and socializing. Its not really working but
hey I get paid.

Working from home is getting things done.

------
jarboot
90%, not including lunch.

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

------
nunez
These days less than 10%. I take lunch and a coffee break or two though.

I used to read reddit and hn to saturation on many days before getting into
consulting; these days, i hardly read anything until before or after my core
hours, not because i can't but because there is more interesting work to do

------
MileyCyrax
At least 90%. If I'm at work and not working, I'm usually working on one of my
own projects.

------
ajmurmann
Not counting lunch break, I'd say I probably spend ~90-95% working.

------
KerryJones
When I worked for other companies I would say I worked around 70% of the time
I was "working". When working for myself I think I am putting 60-80 hours of
real work in a week.

------
glennsantos
I only spend around 5-15% of my time at work, not working.

Work in my context is time spent on things I planned to do and want to do,
including the small breaks I take to recharge and socialize.

------
krystiangw
I believe I'm productive for about 70% of the time. I'm most distracted when
I'm swiching to other project. I need to re-focus again.

------
smilesnd
100% of the time, because I do what I love.

------
brentm
My number are all over the place but according to WakaTime about 152 hours
last month was spent in the IDE.

------
ubersec
aderall keeps me going anyways. probably 2-4 hours depending on the day.

------
ivrrimum
0%. I work as a upwork freelancer. More precisely by hourly rate and upwork
desktop app takes screenshots at random times, so i can't really browse HN and
other sites. But I will tell you honestly, i don't want to go back to normal
work. I get shit done( there is also that "gambler" feeling, when you see how
much money you earn each week ) and in good quality( I get reviews from my
clients, so i can't code bad either ).

So yeah, a hour paid is a hour worked.

------
douche
If I have to go to the office: maybe 2 hours a day of actual productive work.

If I work from home: usually 4-6 hours of productive work.

Going to the office adds up to a ten-hour day, with the commute. Working from
home is usually a 6-7 hour day, and I get to stay in my pajamas, take the dog
for a walk, take a break to do some housework, and be in a comfortable
environment.

I don't work from home enough anymore.

