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Comment by partido3619463 | Hacker News Reader

partido3619463

4 hours a day of real work seems low, but certainly not 40 hours a week.

What do you define as "real" work? In most productive days of coding I get 4/5 "real" hours of focused, concentrated work. Very, very rarely would I get more than 6 without finishing the day mentally exhausted.

Meetings? Doing more than two back-to-back, hour-long meetings is an ordeal if you want a productive meeting. You can sit there and stare into space for far longer, or just keep minimum attention. But intelligent debate with multiple individuals for longer than that is hard to pull off, especially if you also want to get the productive work as mentioned above.

Meetings of the "just being present" and responding various, random emails that need little care? Feel free to spend 10 hours a day on those, for sure.

4 to 5 hours of real, focused, concentrated work is impressive. I take a long time to recover from a meeting and they're usually in the middle of my day, almost every work day, and often there's more than one. They're also exhausting so I'll have lost some vibrancy by the time I do get back in the flow of actual work.

4 to 5 hours is achievable and easy if you are aligned with your work and team and find it energizing. With a bad team, bad money, or bad product, downright near impossible to care enough for it.

Meetings themselves are the problem and what I'm suggesting are the problem. I don't think team alignment is related to the disruptive havoc caused by meetings. We have a lot of evidence that it takes a long time for a mind to refocus on a task once disturbed.

I say it's impressive you can crank out that level of focused work because I can't get a long stretch of uninterrupted time that you can. Maybe you have fewer meetings?

It's two 2-hour work blocks a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Yes, you have to aggressively block other activities. Working in small teams with similar goals and prescheduled sync points has helped a lot.

But it's like marketing though. You're productive for 50% of the time, but you can't know which 50%. Scheduling one's self 4-day work weeks seems great in theory but you can't force the flow state to happen

As a programmer, I've always felt that, on an average, 4 hours of actual work gets done by me on a daily basis.

This does not include meetings, communication etc.

This is essentially the time spent towards a tangible deliverable.

It's still work, even if it's not the work you want to be doing.

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