Ask HN: How do you manage to work less than 8 hours despite full-time job? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you manage to work less than 8 hours despite full-time job?

29 pointskipi99921 comments

Lately I saw some comments of people that claim they don't work 8 hours a day anymore, mostly because of their sanity, and they complete the same amount of work or even more. One of them spent 4 hours on coding and 2 hours for meetings and learning, which seems totally not feasible for me. I have a lot of activities and even one more hour a day (7 hours of daily work) would be a real blessing. I could use it for learning more programming stuff, but not necessarily related to my job.

The questions are: How long is your typical flow state? How long are your breaks and how you use them? How do you remove distractions? Is there anything more I should know?

Thank you in advance

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On average I work between 4.5-5.25 hours per day.

I divide my working time in 45 min. sessions with 10 min. breaks in between. To be honest I don’t always take the breaks, which is wrong and is something I need to improve. During a break I stand up, do a chore at home or go to the balcony.

In the course of each 45 min. session I do only work with little to no interruptions. No casual Internet browsing, no mails and I try to avoid chats. On average I tend to do 6 to 7 session chunks per day which is more than enough to implement features, fix bugs and write documentation.

Distractions. Avoid the ones under your control (reading news, procrastination) and embrace the ones out of your control. When you get a sudden phone call, instead of going directly back to coding, you could read/write mail or answer some work chats. Such activities also count as part of my sessions.

No one is there to supervise me, so I need to be _honest_ about the time I dedicate to work in each session. In the end, I exercise self-control to the best of my abilities. I could also do 3 work sessions a day and still get paid, but I don’t believe this is in my favor. Doing more is OK, but I hit a cognitive limit sooner or later, so I only push myself when it’s really needed.

When I need to learn new stuff, I do it mostly in the mornings. Memory works best after the brain had some sleep.

I’m slowly realizing that one of my biggest mistakes is making my pomodoros 90 minutes in length. It worked for a bit, but then it became overwhelming to think that I’d be stuck for that long in each session. The standard 25 minutes isn’t enough to get momentum when coding. I will try 45 minute sessions this week.

I know what you mean. Funny enough, I settled on 45 mins., because this was/is how long a single class lasts at schools in my home country.

I just put to use a habit built long time ago.

They do that because human focus on a single task wanes after ~50-60 min.

45 minutes is the best for me. Long enough to get in the flow and short enough to not be lost in the flow.

When people claim they work „less then 8 hours“, they typically found a perfect spot for them where their work is engaging, but also comfortable. They are able to do the work, get challenged enough but are not over-their-head.

I had jobs where I worked 10 hours a day, often on my own will since I wanted to figure something out. Most often than not, I was skills missing for the position I had so I did more work.

I had jobs where I worked 15-20 hours a week, and was praised and earned a lot of money.

So if you are good at something, like really good, and you join a company lacking these skills, than you probably don‘t have to work as hard since you already make a difference just by being there.

You choose your company and the amount you want to work as a developer these times. It‘s up to you. Some people however overwork themselves with 60+ hours and earn less than people who work 20 in a different industry but better pay.

I am currently in a position where I grow a family, and I found a well paying hjob where some weeks I work 50 hours, but most weeks I work 30. I get enough done to be a good performer. And that‘s enough for me at the moment.

Which means, my skills perfectly fit the position I am in, and for once I don‘t try to overdo it but just do a decent enough job to get a bit of praise. I use the down time to relax, watch movies, play with my kids etc.

Exactly this. I probably work around ~5-6h/day and people think I work more than 8h/day. I've found a company where I fit very well culturally and technically and can be very very impactful with minimal effort time-wise.

I see other people at FAANG working a lot and grinding for maybe ~30%-50% more pay than me... I'm OK.

Some of these things are only possible in certain position,but rough ideas: 1) reduce number of meetings to minimum.

2) in the meetings, know why you are there and try to stick to the agenda.

3) sort out things you need to do by priorities ( low, medium, here and now).

4) Check if your to do list is balanced: e.g. not all tasks are 'here and now'. If it's not balanced,raise it with management or try figure out yourself why that's the case.

5) Turn off distractions: email, text, chat,etc. Leave 1 channel ( phone?) open for emergencies.

6) Inform others where you are and what you do. E.g. : 'I'm in a zone between 9am-11am, don't bother contacting.

7) Learn to be OK if you don't do everything you were supposed to. You aren't in a hospital, nobody's going to dye.

8) Aim to complete 3-5 things in any given day. No point to commit to 20 if it's all going to be half baked.

9) Learn stuff early in the day- much easier than towards the end of it.

10) Take short brakes no matter what: even 5 min walk down the corridor is useful.

Before covid, my work takes on average about 7-8 hr a day. Now, without the social aspect, I can easily do 5-6 hr a day, but there are days I work 10-12 hr because I was in a flow to solve the problem. From my experience, how much you work is largely depending on:

1. company culture. My friends who work on trading desk as tech person were doing long hours before pandemic, now, they are doing crazy long hours. Managements don't trust their people, lack boundary, etc.. I no longer work for those companies and I'm much healthier because of that.

2. Your skill vs expectation of your job. If you can easily qualify for the job in both hard and soft skills, your hours will be easier. If you are behind on the job in those skills, then you'll have to work harder.

3. And lastly, the skills of your team(s). I work with a lot of teams with junior-mid level developers, so I spend a lot of time trying to get them to understand what we are doing. Whereas seniors, we just get it done, but there are some seniors that are more obstacles than juniors.

Software is near impossible to estimate. Things that can be done in 1 day can sometimes take 2 weeks. And something that seems like it should take weeks can take hours.

Then you factor in the huge difference in approaches, skill, efficiency, and productivity between employees. If you are experienced, you skip the hours of googling, reading SO, etc.

You are probably pushing way harder than you need to be.

If I feel like I made good progress, I take the rest of the day off. If something should take a week and I finish it in 2 days - I take the week off.

It is worth questioning how you define "work". I may only sit in my chair coding for a couple hours a day. (And a couple more on meetings and documentation.) But I'm thinking about the problems while I am doing chores, going for a walk, etc. Then when I do sit down to code, it comes to fruition quickly. If I were to spend 8 hours in a chair staring at the screen, I'd "work" more, but I'd accomplish less.

This is why I am such a proponent of remote work, at least for coders - it allows us to spend more time doing what is truly the core of our job: thinking, and less time just sitting in a chair typing out those thoughts into the proper syntax.

I don’t really get in a flow state any more unless I turn off all email and chat. In those cases it can last up to 4 hours.

That happens maybe 20% of all days though, and people don’t really enjoy it, so it’s mostly something I do for my own sanity.

The rest of my day is spent showing up in meetings and trying to prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot, which involves a lot of back and forth.

When in the office, I think I regularly made 9 hour days, but at home they’re at most 7.5 hours, mostly due the constraints imposed by having to pick up my son from daycare.

I once spent a week power washing and staining my deck. I’d only look at the most crucial work stuff and ignore the rest. When that happens, you go through a realization how much of our work actually matters and what appears to matter at the time, but really isn’t as important. In fact some of it just needlessly creates stress and work for others.

I recommend doing something like this, it can be a nice reset button...

In the course of say a quarter or two I work on average 5-7 hours a day. Some weeks there is more work to be done than others depending on the phase of the project at hand. I tend to not start too many things at the same time (start working on a bug, documentation, new feature etc), basically limiting the amount of WIP. Projects still get delivered on time or with slight delays that is not detrimental to the success of the project or the morale of the team, while still learning a ton. so going “the extra mile” anything beyond that is asking for trouble (stress that would eventually lead to burnouts). Im lucky that my direct manager and peers are more or less the same way too. The older i get the more interests i have in things outside of my profession so i try to make the time for it.

I hammer maybe 1-2 days a week (3 max). Then I either cruise control and completely chill the other days.

If stuff really needs to get done though, I'll hammer.

The solution is simple - just switch teams to one where people are allowed to slack off. It's basically a norm in a big bank I work for - the management is mostly non-technical and clueless, there's little time pressure so devs are not really pushed hard (or at all) to deliver.

that sounds great. How to find a company/team like that?

Word of mouth is the surest thing I guess - just listen to your colleagues describing low-effort companies/teams they’ve encountered, and try to get there. FWIW I’m in Europe and all the jobs I’ve had here in big multinational companies were pretty low-effort. Maybe it’s less common in the US.

//multinational companies in Europe//

Could you please name few of these, I soon will be looking for Junior Java Developer job. Thanks :)

Sorry, I don’t want to dox myself here. But pretty much any team doing maintenance on something older is pretty slow-going. Also, ant work which requires a lot of integrations is often blocked by dependencies not getting their shit right.

On my side most of the time is wasted on uncertainty of tasks and some tasks are absolutely boring so I push them back.

Hope I can learn from some of the answers here.

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