My first software manager said that the most you can get out of people is five hours of real work a day. She also said that programmers need to learn to tell when the most productive thing they can do is go look out the window.
These days I do it for 8 hours or so, and not on weekends, other than weekend / weeknight research. This is remotely though, so it’s easy to get in the flow state.
In an office, forget about it. Those days are about team building, relationships and planning. I don’t expect to get much coding done on those days.
But if you’re tired, definitely take a break. If you can truly achieve a flow state 8 hours passes in what feels like 10 minutes. It’s such a cool and strange phenomenon.
But for it to work you have to be intentional. Mute slack, close email. Batch those at the end of the day if possible.
Nothing like the feeling of being super productive and getting tons of high quality, high leverage work done from the flow state.
I’m lucky in that my manager is very smart and “gets it”, because he’s been there too.
My supervisors understand that some days I'm not going touch code, instead I'll spend my time on education by keeping up with new tech, or, writing docs.. anything but talk with other co-workers distracting them
Couldn‘t agree more. There are days I spend exclusively reading and thinking. I regard keeping up on technology, thinking about potential approaches and solutions to various problems we’re facing as an essential part of my job. To an outsider that might look like a pretty relaxed work life, but this kind of preparation allows the actual execution, the thing that looks like work, to be the easiest part of a project.
And you admit to do so openly at your daily agile meetings?
Because for me, the problem is that every day I am expected to produce some code, and reading is something... that is kinda supposed to happen... but at the same time it is also not supposed to actually take time, at least not on the scale of days.