Ask HN: How much time in your working day do you spend in actual work? - wowsig
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malux85
As founder: about 12 hours, I take about 4 hours total breaks in the day to
swim and often an hour or two nap in the middle, nap required because two 6
hour chunks is quite strenuous

This is not rigorously followed - sometimes 3 hours then an hour break then 3,
sometimes 6,

I eat when I’m hungry and I sleep when I’m tired, I don’t have fixed meals or
fixed schedules

First ~6 hours normally admin, emails, proposals, reseller support, mentoring
juniors

Next ~6 hours is 100% coding

Work from home so no commute, nothing else to waste time on

Work 6 days a week, Sunday’s reserved for rest, reading and research

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bemmu
If "actual work" is running Candy Japan, about 2 hours per day this month.

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palidanx
Do you run Candyjapan.com? If so, how'd you get into this?

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luckydude
I'm semi retired so not that much, certainly nothing like I used to work.

When I was a kernel engineer at Sun, there were stretches where I worked
around 14 hours per "day". "day" had a different definition for me, I worked
on about a 34 hour "day". Which meant that my day time hours were constantly
shifting. A coworker put a clock on my door that said "where's larry?" and it
showed when I'd be in next. I think it was a joke but some people said they
liked it.

The reason I did this was I would be working on stuff where it could take ~8
hours just to regain the state I had in my head when I stopped working the
previous day. So if I did 8 hour days I'd never make any forward progress. So
you do 8 hours to page in the state and then you go as far as you can go to
move things forward.

I didn't have much of a social life back then but I didn't care, I was getting
stuff done at Sun and loved it. It was a super productive time of my life.

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lamansion
>> it could take ~8 hours just to regain the state I had in my head

Sounds interesting, can you please share more details about what you were
working on?

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luckydude
It was almost always performance stuff. I'd get stuck with stuff like
"Oracle's cluster database sucks on our systems, can you find out why?" and
then you have to go figure out where it is slow (find the hot spot) and then
figure out why we were slow.

That meant keeping all of the hardware in your head, the kernel in your head,
and the app in your head. If you didn't have all that state it was super hard,
maybe impossible (for me at least), to figure out the problem.

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Noumenon72
I come from a factory background where it wasn't uncommon to spend the entire
8-12 hours working at the fastest safe pace I could. After a year of
developing, I still spend almost no time on water-cooler talk and web
browsing, the only things that are clearly not work. I don't see anybody else
wasting time like that either. I wonder if the 'barely four hours a day'
people would not count stuff like editing a wiki, investigtating a log, and so
forth.

My job isn't 100% programming by any stretch. But when I do have programming,
I spend 8 hours straight. It doesn't seem to make me very productive, but I do
spend it all hard at work.

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muzani
Rescue Time puts it at about 2.5 hours/day of programming time.

The max I've ever pushed for and recorded was 250 minutes. Even that left me
too exhausted to drive back home.

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Top19
4 hours total of pure undeniable work throughout the whole day (so wake up to
sleep). K. Anders Ericsson, a professor on the study of “expertise”, notes
that the best violinists in the world top out at 4 hours of practice. So I
don’t feel guilty after 4 hours.

Another thing Ericcson noticed, the violinist who practice the most and are
the best take midday naps.

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JoeAltmaier
Contractor, currently with a large ag company, remote. I work 1 or two hours
out of 8. The rest spent waiting for their antique tool chain to get stuff
done. Read a butt-ton of HN the last month.

Previous contracts - I worked an hour for every hour I billed, moving their
project forward. Usually 5 or 6 hours a day. The rest spent working on more
contracts etc.

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SirLJ
Not much - automate as much as possible and enjoy the freedom, but be
available when the crisis strike :-)

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muzani
Living the dream.

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SirLJ
Absolutely, the bad side is I cannot retire early, love the job and every year
I am postponing...

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xaedes
As a research scientist:

~7 hours (after breaks), of which only 3h are programming.

The rest is organizational stuff like meetings, writing research proposals,
answering emails, making powerpoints, supervise students, etc...

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wowsig
So do you count your work hours as 3 hours or 7? And curious, if you try and
optimise for more 'real work' time? I feel I'm quite hard on myself and
consider it unnatural if I read an article or even browse randomly at work.

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xaedes
A few months ago I had the feeling I get nothing done (programming), because
of all the other stuff I had to do.

That is why I started tracking my time consumption on a half hour base. "If
you want to control something you need to measure it" was my thinking. The
time tracking itself doesn't cost much time. Did it earlier for my private
life for a few months.

The first weeks my average programming time was only 1.5h! I slowly got it up
to 3h now.

But do I count it as 3h or 7h work?

Hm - As a student I sure had more time for programming itself. But I actually
get more work done now. I can much easier pursue multiple projects and
delegate work to students. It is just that I didn't (have to) see all the
organizational stuff that needs to happen beside the programming itself as a
student.

The other 4h I do valuable stuff. Some of it should imho be done by others,
but we are currently a little bit short on staff..^^ It's a nice learning
opportunity though.

So to answer your question: I would count the whole 7 hours.

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xaedes
But honestly all the work-related reading on the web (e.g. hackernews) I do
should count as work time too. Then you can add some 4 hours or so.

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ajeet_dhaliwal
How do you decide if it's work-related reading/browsing or not? So watching a
music video on YouTube is clear but I'd say HackerNews is muddy, leaning
towards entertainment. For example you need to sleep to work too, but that
doesn't count. HN may provide general nourishment about latest tech news and
have interested articles that elevate your general knowledge but hard for me
to pin that down as hours worked. That's the problem with work today, it's not
easily measurable, in the old fashioned way of thinking of work as putting
caps on bottles I'm guessing most people do far less than they believe, I
wouldn't be shocked if it was only a couple of hours for many.

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xaedes
Yea well you have to dig through a lot of trash to find the gems. But since it
is part of the deal you need to take the time into account that you need to
wander through the mud. Officially I won't count the hours that I use for this
at home. But at least for me that is definitely work related.

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bouchardm
Solution architect here, probably around 5 true productive hours. If you count
all the time people ask me question, arount 8 hours per day.

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spoonie
Based on my time tracking, around 6 hours. Sometimes less with lunch, but on
average I spend 1/4 of my day taking breaks.

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hguhghuff
10 hours or so mostly programming but also other work.

