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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

I am running a marathon, not a sprint, so I frame my long working hours within a "healthy schedule". My typical day:

  7:00 am - immediately start coding last night's plan, then email, headlines, HN
  8 to 9 - exercise
  9 - breakfast & internet
  9:30 to 12 - code
  12 - lunch & internet
  12:30 to 6 - code
  6 - dinner with family (home or restaurant)
  7 to 9 - code
  9 to 11 - computer off, pencil/paper, analysis, design, detail plan for tomorrow

Exceptions: one to two days per week consulting (still keep my night schedule), one day per week with family, occasional sports on TV. I could keep this up forever.

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If you manage 10 hours a day coding and less than 1h day on email PLUS blogs/news, you are a pretty unique animal. We had a RescueTime group of YC Founders running during the Winter08 session, and I don't think anyone in the group EVER hit 10 hours of coding in a single day. Much less sustained it.

I'm also suspicious of the <1hr I see alotted for email and news (all while getting 7000+ karma here?!). If that's the case, you are fabulously unique (I'm saying this with a database of data with millions of man hours of attention data-- lots of them from web developers).

Of course, maybe you mean what most people mean when they say "I'm coding", which is a distracted mishmash of IM, news, and email, with a light sprinkling of actual coding in there.

I hereby challenge you to use RescueTime for 1 week and then take a screenshot of your dashboard. :-)

"I hereby challenge you to use RescueTime"

No need. You're right.

I should amend my previous schedule to say "at terminal" instead of "coding". In addition to my dedicated meal breaks, I alt-tab to the internet several times throughout the day. But it's not as bad as it seems...

I go to about a dozen websites including email and hacker news. Of those dozen websites, I spend 90% of the time here. As I have mentioned before, hacker news is my social life when I'm working. I work alone, all day long, most days, so I come here for my breaks. My karma total is a result of my participation here, which is a perfect counterbalance to my coding (sometimes you just gotta pull your head out).

I never IM or answer the phone without checking caller id; everyone knows I prefer email.

I suppose RescueTime would confirm what I think I already know. Maybe I'm afraid to find out.

Never IM'ing is gold. My favorite stat is that the average RT user alt-tabs to an IM window 77 times PER DAY. Think what that does to people's flow!

Kudos on the focus. If you ever do try an experimental run with RT, I'd love to hear about it. I can ALMOST promise that you'll be surprised by your data. :-)

2 years ago, I had a client that required me to be available by IM between 8 and 5. I was actually stunned after watching their employees IMing all day long. It was one of the best examples of work prevention I'd ever seen. I told them I could IM or I could work, but not both. Needless to say, they didn't last long.

You have me 95% convinced to try the One Week RescueTime trial. Maybe next week...

> We had a RescueTime group of YC Founders running during the Winter08 session, and I don't think anyone in the group EVER hit 10 hours of coding in a single day. Much less sustained it.

Can you please share what the maximum, median etc for this group was? I want to see where I stand.

I'll share my data. My max was 6.5 hours of coding. Since January, I've had 7 days where I spent more than 5 hours coding. My average (as given by the trendline) is about 3 hours/day.

Coding is my top (computer) activity on average. I spend about 45 minutes each on Reddit and news.YC; there's also a big long tail of time spent on untagged apps (often only 20 minutes or so each over the past half-year, but the total is nearly as much as Reddit + news.YC).

You are my A-List hacker :-p So, extra thanks for the data.

It was a small enough group that I won't share data, but I'll tell you mine (which is pretty similar to my co-founders, except Joe, who is an ANIMAL of productivity).

I have a "webdev" tag (which includes design and coding) that peaked at 7 hours, but typically is 3-4.5.

I have a "work" tag (which includes all webdev stuff AND work email-- customer support and fundraising mostly), which peaked at 10h 40m, but typically was more like 5-7.

About 10% of my time is untagged, which is probably split between 1-visit goofy sites and obscure CSS documentation, so you can round up the above numbers a touch.

Oh, and 27% of my time is spent on SOME Google App (gmail for domains, search, analytics, docs, reader). Google owns my ass. :-)

Thats very helpful. Thanks a lot Tony. (off topic: pic with pipe was way better than what you have now)

How can you cram your programming (i.e. creation process) into pre-defined hours every day? It's like saying "I am funny from 8 to 12, then I get creative from 1pm to 5pm and I get 'Eureka' moment usually around 7pm"

I am honestly jealous. I have days when I just throw away weeks of work and redo everything in a couple of hours, or days when nothing gets done simply because I am stuck. Your description of coding sounds more like you're in construction/manufacturing business.

"Your description of coding sounds more like you're in construction/manufacturing business."

Exactly. That's how I do it.

It wasn't always like this. It took lots of trial and error to figure this out. The secret was to decouple creative time and terminal time. When I'm at the terminal during the day, I usually have a backlog of straight forward work to do. Sure there are decisions to be made and some creativity, but the bulk of the real thinking was already done, usually the night before.

The decoupling has been the key for me.

Need to think? Get pencil, paper, listings, and GO TO EZCHAIR (or library or Borders).

Need to accomplish? Have detailed plans and GO TO TERMINAL. Not as much "head in the clouds" permitted there.

I talked more about this here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275

This is beauty of the 9 to 5:

* 7am: Wake up, read HN, eat/get dressed/etc * 8:20am: get on bicycle, bike to work (30min exercise) * 8:50am: get clean * 9am: work (code for 90% of the time) * 4:50pm: stop work * 5:00pm: bicycle back home (30min exercise) * 5:30pm: clean up * 6pm: eat

And after dinner I have free time, I could easily add 2 or 3 more hours of working if I wanted to here. And I'm socially synchronized with the rest of the world!

Somewhat off-topic, but is there any chance we'll get to see the results of your work in an alpha/beta version soon?

09/26/08

Great! Looking forward to it.

Which one is a year ? :)

That seems like a very sustainable schedule, and similar to mine. I wake up about an hour later (go to bed an hour or two later), exercise just before dinner, and do my planning in the morning. Other than that it lines up pretty much the same.

Cool. I found if I didn't exercise early, I didn't at all. I also sleep with the curtains open, so I wake up at sunrise. Nice to see I'm not the only one who needs all-nighters to get anything done. Thanks, mrtron.

Sounds like a very good day plan. How well does it adapt to life's niggles? Meetings with business partners, dates, friends, etc? (particularly other people who also have busy schedules)

I like to push all that into my one or two days away from my terminal if I can. That's what those days are for.

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