

Randomized studies of productivity - wmat
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/02/06/randomized-studies-of-productivity/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheEndeavour+%28The+Endeavour%29

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personamb
I believe in the rough benchmarks of ~4 hours of work a day.

I also believe that people are widely scattered around that mark.

I've been doing an experiment where I print out my work day in 5 minute
increments, with three tick boxes next to each time-period - "Hard" work
(Coding), "Soft" work (reading e-mail), and being distracted. As the day goes
along, I tick off the increments as I remember to do so, and I get a pretty
interesting picture of my day: \- I rarely do "hard" work for more than 45
minutes at once \- I do about 1.5 - 5 hours of "hard" work / day, depending on
meetings, sleep, drinking the night before, all sorts of things \- I'm
improving my ability to focus on "hard" work over time.

I definitely recommend this!

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kristianp
Despite what he says, I'm sure it would be possible to design a study that
gives an idea of the amount of 'hard' mental work is optimal per day. It might
be necessary to do different studies for different tasks, though. I imagine
the brains capacity for learning the violin might be at a different rate to
learning Python, for example.

Even if the study's conclusion is that "it depends on the person", that would
still be a useful result.

