Followup question: for how long have you kept this work up and where has it brought you?
I average 4 hrs of productive coding per day according to WakaTime[1]. When working on well-defined projects/features and not having meetings it goes up to 8 hrs coding per day, but that environment is difficult to create. Also there's the debate whether being productive means spending less time coding, or spending time towards the right problem (revenue, impact, team initiatives, etc). I also find the language and framework I'm using makes a huge difference in how much I accomplish given the same amount of time. When you're not sure if cranking out code is actually productive it's best to start measuring work in output velocity.
For myself, I just assume when I'm coding in 2 of my projects I must be coding towards some goal, so I assume my time spent coding in those 2 projects is always productive. That's why I set a wakatime goal to code at least 4 hours per day in those 2 projects.
1: https://wakatime.com (Personal profile: https://wakatime.com/@alan)
This is a very *unique" defifition of 'productive".
I would normally consider productive work to be anything that adds value to a product used by users of said product. Also include amortized benefits like reducing tech debt. V2 rewrites are often not productive--wait until v3 or later when you actually know what big changes are needed.
I think it might be easy to be myopic with your definition though. If I'm pushing the company goals further, I'm being productive, even if I'm not learning. It might not give me more technical expertise, but it will help on my next review. And that helps with success. Helping others with their stuff might not help my learning either, but it also helps them and the company move forward. Meetings are an opportunity to distill and communicate information for target audiences. Scrum ceremonies are opportunities to similar, but also to find ways to balance business and team needs. Now, not all meetings are productive use of time, but I think people will tend to overly discount them.
I feel I'm mostly productive for most of the day. I also spend some time reading and learning about things on the edges of what I know. I've done this for about a decade within one company. I've approximately tripled my salary and earned a lot of equity. I started with some poor knowledge of php and MySQL to many years later a principal developer influencing the designs of our distributed, scalable, and highly available systems. I also have introduced new technologies, strategies, and systems here. I've learned to work with others throughout the organization at different levels in different disciplines. I did not do any of this in a vacuum. I've had great peers, great managers, and others who are knowledgeable that I could learn from. No official mentors, just kind of the village to raise a child kind of thing.
I'm on mobile and should get out of bed now. Hopefully. This stream of consciousness is a bit coherent and doesn't have too many typos and someone gets something out of it.
The time tracking is just for me, I don't share my logs with anyone else. So far I believe it's kept me focused on achieving specific work goals and not getting distracted, leading to more concrete achievements I can cite in my annual performance review.
I am working on increasing this through better techniques such as pre-planing, mini habits, reflecting
If it's beneficially for you professionally: I deem it productive.