For me (as a programmer) it really varies a ton. I used to put in insane stretches, due to the medication I needed to take in the past and that is how I got used to things in college.
Now I work more regularly, but still can put in a solid 6+ hr day most of the time, and yet some days… yeesh I’m lucky if I can get a third of that. So I work more on other days to compensate.
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Most of my jobs have been salaried at 40 hrs/wk. I worked 60-80 hrs/wk, effectively driving down my hourly rate in pursuit of my next promotion.
Nice try, HR lady.
HR Lady?
We all know HR is actually just an AI bot now.
Their pronouns are: (Kill/All/Humans)
Your proposal is acceptable. Implementing in 5… 4…
Hehe you caught me. I’ll just put you down for a “doesn’t work at all” then… :-P
Typically 9-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. But I’m an electrician with my my own company.
Starting a company is a trap lol. But it’s also nice that the only people I have to answer to are my clients, and I can fire them if need be, so there’s that.
Depends. Usually got really busy stretches and then stretches where I don’t do shit. Usually averages out to about 5-6 good a day I guess
Productive work with measurable results? Two hours. Four hours meetings. Two hours getting interrupted, forced socializing, and then trying to remember what it was I was about to do.
Sometimes I only have 2 hours of meetings but they are all 30 minute meetings with an hour or two between. So I am barely back in my flow by the time he next meeting rolls around.
The “flow” thing is what most non-IT folks don’t understand. It’s tough to jump back in and just start solving the same puzzle I was working on hours ago with no backtracking to figure out which micro piece of the 20 regular-sized pieces I was working on.
That’s probably why I would procrastinate on technical work with project management work back when I was in IT.
Sometimes when I really get into something, I just stay late and work on it while the office is empty.
Thankfully I’ve been in positions where if I work the rare 10-12 hour day, I can take the time off later in that timesheet cycle. It helps that I always have a bunch of results to show after those nights.
Cloud eng with ADHD here. It really varies between 30 minutes to 16 hours, both extremes being rare
Some days I feel I’m getting absolutely nothing done, but also quite recently I was hyperfixating on a project and would continue working off hours with a glass or 5 of whiskey because I was having too much of a blast
However I’ve been reminded before by my manager that the random chatter and stupid meetings are still part of work, and while there’s optimizing that can be done, I shouldn’t count them as slacking so eh I guess 8 hours a day it is then.
That’s a boss that’s living in reality, congrats!
I feel this so hard! 😁
As a housewife, both 0 and 16? Since I don’t actually have a job, I feel like I’m not being productive if I am not cooking, cleaning or organizing. Try to make it so my spouse doesn’t have to do a single thing once she comes through, especially on her days off.
as a lesbian workaholic whose apartment is a disaster i feel slightly comforted to know that lesbian housewives actually exist, as I might want to marry one someday…
I wait tables. If I’m not working at full speed every second I’m on the clock, I will be complaining about how slow it is.
“If you have time to lean then you…” Oh man I remember that one for sure! 😳
8 hours a day five days a week.
Probably around 4h over a 8h day on average in an IT engineering job.
My brain tend to procrastinate and wander around a lot, random questions come around and I look them up, maybe 60% related to my job, but not directly to my current task. Overall, unless I have a boss, as good at my job as I am (only happened once), watching over my shoulder and asking what I did the past hours, it’s not a problem.
I think this wandering allows me to be as efficient during my active hours as some people are during 8h. And the 4h searching random stuff makes me more knowledge, including in my job field.I’ve never really worked, for as long as I can literally remember.
Oh you mean at a job? It varied, 40-50 before I qualified for disability.
But In general, I’ve been defective/broken all my life, since like 1st grade or so as far as I can recall. It just took until my 30s for my depression to finally overcome my will to live.
Shitty Life Pro Tip: we’re all broken. See those dead fish eye stares by the likes of the Zuck (who is totally human btw) or Bezos or such.
Some of us are simply more honest about that fact than others. Kudos for that - it ain’t nothing, it really is not. Some (okay, me) might say that it is, in fact, everything.
Depends on the scope and parameters of the engagement and of course the engagement itself.
But I can tell you when I’m about to (an extremely variable time frame) take root, I go until it’s got and the box is popped.
You mention hours as a programmer?
Is that active coding? Because as you gain experience you may spend less time writing code that will ultimately be replaced by more efficient processes.
E.g. quality over quantity. Are you being more thoughtful during the design process?
This is an “Ask” style community, so the answer is however you feel like it is for your situation - I only got us started to give us a beginning for the conversation:-).
But to answer your question specifically about my own POV: some meetings are very productive, so not “only” the coding, no. Also, the 6 hours is quite the lower bound - it could be twice that if I am on a roll, with programming, with design matters, documentation, or whatever.
You don’t have to overthink it:-). Although you can if you like? :-P
Productive work where I can say “this contributed directly to completion of this thing” amd point to something tangible is probably a couple hours.
Four hours a day is spent coordinating work or ensuring people are on the same page and things aren’t forgotten. Basiczlly the stuff that would happen on its own if people were perfect and wanted to do everything they needed to. That is because my position involves a lot of project management duties.
Another couple hours having meetings that are more important to attend in case something new came up than doing direct work or blowing off steam with coworkers aka teambuilding.
This all swings wildly, sometimes I spend an entire day producing something tangible and some days are wasted entirely on meetings. But overall that seems about right.
Fwiw I would count meetings that are productive as in organizing things as “work”. Not all are that way sadly:-).
There are a lot of busy work meetings that people love to use to dismiss meetings as a whole, but a well run meeting can both avoid a ton of work and get people onboard with things they were likely to blow off. One project I am running has people volunteering to do work and we have even decided not to do something after getting into the weeds, saving a ton of time. But if we didn’t decide as a group we would have wasted so much time on that thing.
My general rule is that if the meeting exists to let people know what happened, what is coming up, and no decisions will be made it should have been an email. If there will be a group decision or work distributed based on feedback from the group it is likely to be productive.
Every day is different. Some days I’m in the zone, some days I’m standing outside the zone wondering why it’s not going well. I don’t think I can quantify the actual time though.
You answered it well enough - probably many of us feel the same, I know I do:-).
