In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes | Hacker News Reader

In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

inc.com

142 pointssharjeelsayed50 comments

There's a trick in this clickbait:

> According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 8.8 hours every day. Yet a study of nearly 2,000 full-time office workers revealed that most people aren't working for most of the time they're at work.

The plain reading is that this article is based on BLS data. The BLS makes huge amounts of data available (and is friendly about answering questions), and the 8.8 hour figure is really theirs: https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/chart1.pdf

But the second sentence is about unrelated research not conducted by the BLS, even if you trust that it exists.

This data looks bizarre. 23 minutes of smoke breaks? Only 15% of Americans smoke (https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adul...), so if 85% of people spend 0 minutes a day smoking the other 15% spent 153 minutes per work day smoking. That can't be right, so this list must be the average time spent on an activity of all the people who reported engaging in it, which makes it pretty useless for understanding the overall situation it purports to talk about.

Assuming a study was done, this is probably self-reported data of a self-selected population. Ask 2,000 websurfers to break down their yesterday or last week of work and you're not going to get reliable data.

Without an accounting of methodology (or at least a citation), this article is an infohazard. People might read it an accidentally take it seriously, or remember these numbers but not remember they were completely unsupported.

Yeah, very bizarre. She's claiming that the average American works spends 23 minutes a day on smoke breaks, and 26 minutes a day looking for a new job, and 17 minutes a day "preparing hot drinks", etc. Something is completely bogus here.

> 17 minutes a day "preparing hot drinks"

This figure I can believe.

As can I. As with the smoke breaks, it becomes a water cooler moment - a socially acceptable time to talk with colleagues about personal lives and the occasional work-related meeting.

One possible explanation for this is that people are supposedly spending time doing certain things, but in reality are doing different for things. For example, my mom used to talk about how people at her work were allowed smoke breaks, but no equivalent breaks were allotted to non-smokers, so people would pretend to smoke just to take a few minutes off.

As a smoker, I'm only mildly surprised at the 23 minutes. While it does seem unusually long, my experience at least confirms that probably easily half of my smoke breaks turn into a meeting of sorts (which can last a while!), or something else that is not work but work-ish enough that it doesn't seem to cause issues. 153 minutes is probably more than reality, but even a full hour a day would only be mildly surprising in some of the environments I've experienced (so I might be entirely off-base for the US).

In fact, some of my non-smoking colleagues started participating in the 'smoke breaks' (alongside the 'hanging-around-in-the-coffee-area' breaks) not just because those breaks can be problem solvers, but because it would lead to important informal 'meetings'.

Personally I hate this. I wish we had fewer self-harming 'down-time' moments at work (whether cigarette breaks or after-work inebriation) and more of the positive kind (meetup/lightning-talk-but-of-course-with-beers-for-those-who-care, long big-meal lunches as part of company culture, etc.), because I'm convinced they're crucial to the health of the company (cross-pollination of ideas/concerns between departments, for example).

non smoker do break too, most of the time even bigger than smoker. Yes, I have proof.

23m = 3m leaving desk + 10m smoking + 10m talking + 3m returning to desk

Since the article doesn't specify what types of professions were studied, thus I am skeptical of its conclusion. While this ~3hr/day productivity might be true for typical corporate/office workers, but they make up only a small percentage of the total work force! What about the productivity of bus drivers, doctors, cooks, masons, mechanics? Somehow I think that the average roofer doesn't spend ~2hrs/work day reading social media and news websites.

The title should be fixed but the article implies as much.

"Yet a study of nearly 2,000 full-time office workers".

I know I'm not up there checking...

I see an awful lot of people these days talking like white-collar work is the default and blue-collar is some kind of weird outlier that doesn't really count.

This makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of the reactions I have berm getting since tracking my concentration meticulously with Toggl.

I work as a remote consultant and track everything down to the second.

"Filling out" timesheets and answering "how much I worked" a non issue.

I've been getting accolades for how much work I accomplish... even when I clock only 3-4 hours a day.

How much time do you spend tracking everything? (I assume this is accounted for on a second-by-second accounting.)

I do it on the fly as in when I context switch.

Takes about 10 seconds max (copy paste ticket #, type meeting name, etc)

With a context switch every 15mins or quicker... probably easily 1 minute or 1.5 minutes per hour of work.

So somewhere like 1-2% "tax" on my time.

In practice though...I feel like an athlete and training my concentration and tracking results.

Having those few seconds sometimes helps you align efforts better

Thanks for the Toggl suggestion. I use RescueTime but it's very unstable on Linux. I will try this out.

I've been using Qbserve [1] to track my productivity and it has been super helpful.

It divides your time up into Productive (iTerm, AWS...), Neutral (Email, Slack...) and Distracting (Reddit, Facebook...).

I've found if I get 5 productive hours in in a work day then it's been a very productive day.

[1] https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/

This way of tracking worker concentration raises a lot of questions, especially in an era where we are surrounded with stuff designed to grab our concentration.

What if access to social media is made impossible? What did the numbers look like when it didn't exist at all? What happens to the 44 minutes? Does the "productive time" get increased? Or does the "news checking time" gets increased instead to compensate?

What happens during a weeks a 2048-like / google-pacman game has just been released? Does the "productive time" goes down to the toilet? Should we consider ourselves fundamentally less productive, and reduce the official workday time to 1h during this period?

What if the underlying phenomenom actually is "1/8th of work time = news checking", instead of "1h of work time = news checking", as the article suggests?

Please let's not jump to conclusions too fast ; the reasons why we're not working 100% of our 8-hour workdays have almost nothing to do with the reasons why Ford workers weren't working 100% of their 16-hour workdays.

Indeed.

In context of mental jobs, like programming, I identify at least three things of wasting time:

- coping with stress (I find myself browsing HN when I'm stressed; whether or not it ultimately helps being less anxious after I close HN is debatable, but it helps for the moment)

- it's hard to get into the zone, and in the meantime, life goes on; especially in the presence of focus-destroying distractions (like open-plan offices), it's easy to think about and check up on non-job-related things in your life that are important

- I like my hot tea and snacks

The first two I can beat if I can get into flow (less external distractions help here - like being alone in a room with doors that close); as for the third, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna plug myself into IV for my boss.

> What if access to social media is made impossible? What did the numbers look like when it didn't exist at all? What happens to the 44 minutes? Does the "productive time" get increased? Or does the "news checking time" gets increased instead to compensate?

In the olden days, it was "newspaper time" instead of "Facebook time," so I'd guess the numbers would look similar.

I remember long ago, working on a security job to pay my studies (in France, so not for tuition but for everyday life).

I was on a semi public bus company, in charge of opening secured doors in the morning. The front hostess arrived and stated "Ah ! The newspaper ! It's the first task of the morning !"

Well, it was not, because she made her coffee first :-)

Maybe give everyone the last 2.5 hours off every Friday and they won't spend that time during the week looking for a new job.

The original source of this appears to be a survey performed by vouchercloud (https://www.vouchercloud.com/blog/office-worker-productivity...). Interestingly, the "2h 53m" value is claimed to be the average value reported by the 1989 "UK office workers aged 18+" surveyed.

The survey also included a list of non-work activities and asked for each activity (a) whether they were guilty of spending time on that activity, and (b) if yes, how much time they spent. For example, 19% spent time searching for new jobs, and of those who spent time searching for new jobs the average time spent was 26 minutes. These add up to a mere 94 minutes of "wasted time" per day, suggesting that either respondents severely underestimated the time they spent working, severely underestimated the time they wasted, or there's another 3.5 hours/day of time spent non-productively on things other than the 10 options listed in the survey.

I'm skeptical about these, because each time we've tracked worker productiveness they've worked around 6 hours out of the 7,5 they are paid to on average. The only way we'd get someone spending that much time on news/SoMe is when our workers are bored.

Like an IT tech waiting for a consultant to call back on a priority task or when someone simply doesn't have enough things to do.

We do lose a lot f time to things like chitchat, but I think our overall productivity and happiness require the freedom for people to do so.

I don't think the points of the article are wrong though. We have people who work less than the standard 37 work week at certain periods in their lives, typically younger parents, like 30-34 hour weeks, and they are much more productive and score much higher on employee satisfaction. But I do think the research is a tad thwarted by coming out of American workplaces and that it isn't useful for every office space.

Maybe this depends on the job. I can do tech support all day long. Programming comes with productivity traps such as difficulty getting into a zone, procrastination due to feeling overwhelmed due to deadlines or project difficulty and limits on creative productivity. My brain begins to melt after 4 hours of straight problem-solving on average. Problem-solving requires creativity, which burns out and leads to busy work.

It includes our programmers who are some of the most productive workers. A couple of them are task focused almost the entire time they are at work.

Of course we include things like getting stuck, or brainstorming solutions as productive activities.

And after your mentally burned out, rather than being allowed to go refresh it's then braindead "butts in a seat" work which is maddening.

In my experience consulting in boring offices of companies that provide business reporting and compliance services a lot of the people only have a few hours of work to do most of the time. But a lot of the processes are manual and brittle and so every so often there is a crisis and if they didn't have everyone to minimize the impact of the crisis on their customers they would lose business fast.

I bet there are a lot of companies where productivity is low because people don't make extra work for themselves, do what they need to meet low expectations but the company needs to keep people around because they can't build processes that don't need the people.

If you try to work 16-18 hours to compensate the damage done to cognitive abilities can drop that number to 45 minutes. Now as s rote worker wearing a couple different hats I get the most out of 8 hours by changing tasks to keep my concentration going shifting between development, was and Dev ops tasks or writing documents.

I don't know how they can 'average' the american worker. Due to the obvious attempt to make this article seem relevant to as many readers as possible, I would have found it more interesting if it were a bit more specific.

Reminds me of an article I read years ago that a parent decided they could cope with homeschooling their kid after they followed them around at school and concluded they were only learning for one to two hours a day, not eight.

I have 4-6 hours of hyper focus, the rest i use for emails, spreadsheets etc

I get 4-6 hours a week. All it takes is 3 meetings during the day (including the 30 minute "standup") and that pretty much writes off the day.

oh I meant a day, but I agree unnecessary meetings throw me off

This falls to 1 hour 30 for a 10 hour day.

I just want to say thanx for changing the title.

Bullshit.

I'm not reading an hour Internet pages non work related. And if i would, i wouldn't count this as my working our.

Not calling my partner every day for 18 minutes at work.

What a crappy article.

I think I read a couple of hours of news etc. at work. Here I am on HN. It's very individual, but I would not be surprised if it's true for most office workers that they work efficiently for 3-4 hours a day. And for a lot of people, some of that time is spent in a meeting...

And how do you justify your behaviour? oO?

You could use your time you get paid for for better things. Doing something for the company you get paid from?

Here have a read: http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity...

Thank you for the link.

I don't have to justify that to anyone, except maybe my family. I work for myself.

And do you write down your ours or do you talk jobs and tell them up front how much it is, independend from hours worked?

Both, and when I bill by the hour I only bill the hours I work. Billing for my breaks would quickly lead to a loss of clients when they saw how much time I spent (and if discovered, I could be disbarred).

But if I had made sure to explain that my hourly rate included breaks, as some do, it actually wouldn't be illegal.

> And how do you justify your behaviour? oO?

If you're productive for 4 hours a day you need to avoid causing harm for the other 4 hours. Noodling around on code when you're not productive carries greater risk of introducing errors.

I hope most programmers are not being paid per hour, but for the quality and quantity of their output. But I accept that many managers see those unproductive hours and imagine they could be productive if the employee just did more work.

I, what?

You can write tests. You can cleanup a small save portion after you wrote tests. You can help a work collegue. You can optimize your teams workflow.

Quality and Quantity are still connected. Do you think anyone would pay me a dime for a perfect and beautiful small feature x which i worked a year on and any one else would only need a day for it?

What if you're required to be there physically for 8 hours, and you also don't get paid any more for better work then you currently produce? I suspect that would describe the majority of jobs.

In my contract there are 8hours a day written down. You probably don't get paid for feature x, you get paid for 40 hours (or whatever).

If you get paid to do feature x, you would be a contractor with an contract stating that you do feature x for payment y.

I do make quality code because that is my standard. I do not care what others get paid for the same work. If they do, i will switch company and or will talk about my salary. If i work in a company with labor contract, than it was my choice and i still produce my quality and not reduce the quality on purpose to read HN for an our every day.

(I do get paid directly based on my work, so my original description for the 'majority of jobs' does not describe my own, so here I'm only speculating)

I don't think anyone is reducing their work hours specifically to read HN for an hour every day. Like the study describes, most people don't and aren't capable of working for 8 hours an entire day; if they choose to spend the unproductive hours reading HN instead of working on some ancillary project, I don't see any reason they'd have to go out of their way to justify it to themselves.

Are you assuming that this article was written about you, personally? Because that is what your answer seems to imply.

You are right, the article itself says something about avg. worker.

I had other similar article in mind when i wrote my comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com