A Fifth of Telecommuters Work Less Than An Hour Per Day | Hacker News Reader

A Fifth of Telecommuters Work Less Than An Hour Per Day

theregister.co.uk

76 pointsmrsebastian57 comments

This article seems to conflate "works less than eight hours a day" with "doesn't get the job done." I would expect somebody who doesn't have the distractions of an office or the pressure to appear busy for eight hours regardless of actual workload might get things done faster.

Also, a lot of telecommuters are either intermittent workers (e.g. freelancers) or part-timers, so it's unsurprising that a significant number don't average many hours a day.

From my experience, a day of working from home is about as productive as working a week at the office.

It's not as black and white as that for me, but that definitely does happen.

I find working from home 2 out of 5 days to be great for my productivity, while still being very available to colleagues.

Weekend hours without anyone else in the office is generally 2-3x (as measured in a BPM database) as productive for me.

Interesting, I would say depends highly on what you are doing, and how self motivated you are. With certain tasks, I feel a day in the office is as productive as a week from home. I also found it weird that everyone jumped on the efficiency bandwagon. I actually know people who work from home, and there are definitely a sufficient number of them who do very little productive work in a given day (not that it is necessarily different in an office).

As long as you don't have to respond to email, chats, calls or other questions and don't have to talk to anyone at the office.

I'm quite sure a large number of people working in an office are truly productive only an hour per day as well. The only difference is what gets in the way of real work.

I'd say 1-2hours of productive work a day is quite common (it fits with my current experience). The difference is when you're working at home you don't have to pretend to be working. So when you've got no work to do you don't have to pretend to read a document. You can go for walk, do the dishes, play with your kids, work on side-project/ learn a new language. Same productivity, happier worker.

Absolutely. While "Office Space" and "Dilbert" are parodies, they are based on a lot of real-life scenarios. Some days I end up spending the day answering the phone/email/IM or attending meetings that interrupt my programming work.

"I'd say in a given week, I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual work."

And that movie was pre-facebook, he was not wasting time on the internet.

Office Space released: 1999.

Size of the Internet[1] in 1999: "Estimates the publicly indexable Web at 800 million pages, 6 terabytes of text data on 2.8 million servers as of February 1999."[2]

Snowclone of a credit-card advertising campaign: Worthless.

[1] back when it was still a proper noun.

[2] Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles. "Accessibility and Distribution of Information on the Web," Nature 400(6740): 107-109, July 8, 1999

Yeah, the internet sure sucked before Facebook came along and added... nothing.

I've been using the internet at work since 1997. But it was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is now. "Surfing the web" was generally something people did at home, on a 56k modem. A software engineer fixing the Y2K bug in bank software probably didn't have much access, and probably didn't care a whole lot anyway. Certainly, the movie made no mention of the internet.

And obviously facebook was merely an example. 1999 was pre-reddit, pre-wikipedia, pre-digg, pre-hacker news, and pre-twitter. Yahoo had just bought viaweb. Most of the people using the web today weren't using it in 1999, and most of the pages, services, and content that exist today did not exist in 1999.

The point is that no matter how distracting the internet might be, procrastination has always been an issue for developers.

I posit that you're doing it wrong. Friend some 18-24 year old girls.

This isn't journalism, it's useless garbage. The article assumes a clear bias in the way it interprets the data and doesn't bother to ask any obvious questions in hopes of explaining the numbers.

And somehow we manage to outperform our office counterparts. PG talks about how some people can produce 10-100x more than others and that those who produce 100x should start their own companies. The idea is that you will be rewarded for your huge productivity with huge rewards. The flip side of this is that you could work a normal job from home and work 1-20% of normal job hours and make a decent wage with tons of free time.

Or, if you're willing to omit a lot of personal details to your employer, one could also work 2 or 3 jobs in parallel this way.

"Stay-at-home workers also said getting dressed for the day was far too strenuous"

As someone who has spent a few years working from home (but doesn't now), that's a horrible assumption.

Sure, there were days when I'd be working in my boxers, but there were also days when I would be wearing trousers and a shirt ready to go out for a meeting. And when I wasn't properly dressed, it wasn't that it was "strenuous", or even that I was lazy, it was a case of not needing to.

If I wasn't going to see anyone for a few hours after waking up, and I didn't happen to feel like wearing much, why would I bother? Other times I did feel like it and I was fully dressed even if I wasn't going to see anyone. That has no relation to what work I did.

I definitely think it's a matter of someone's personal ritual.

I've been working from home for the past four years, and I have definitely slipped into a habit of being lazy with my clothes/appearance.

I sit around the apartment in a pair of track pants 90% of the time (which makes me look like either a washed-up, out of shape footballer, or possibly a mobster), only putting on real clothes if I have to do something later that night (and even then I don't get dressed like a real grownup until just before I have to leave).

I also haven't gotten a haircut in about 8 months. I don't particularly like long hair, I just haven't gotten around to it (in spite of the fact that the ridiculous mane I have grown makes me look like one of the Thundercats).

In fact an observer might look as the way I live and conclude that I've been in a horrible bout of depression for the past four years (doesn't put on clothes, doesn't shave or deal with their hair, is a shut-in), but I can attest that I'm quite pleased by this situation.

I'm inclined to call this survey bullshit. There's no information available about it, except a blurb at the very bottom of the infographic claiming that it's from their survey of hiring manager. At best, it only tells you how lazy hiring managers who use careerbuilder.com are when they work from home.

How much telecommuters work, depends on each case. In my case, I have been working from home for the last 7 years. I am highly motivated because I want to maximize achievements in the rest of my life.

Mostly, I work in small teams with other remote friends, on fixed price contracts and on my own projects. Fixed price contracts means that the faster I can finish work, the more profitable it is, and the more time I get for my own projects. For my that is a brutal incentive to get things done.

This is my current pattern. works for me, but may not work for others:

- I don't watch TV, except occasionally while lunch. In general I don't like TV.

- 4 years since my last vacation. I hardly can forget about work.

- I don't follow any daily routines. Typically work around 5 - 12 daily hours, usually until late in the night. I find this way the more productive for me. Overall, that translates to around 40 hours of fair intensity work per week. I wish I could do more, but I have found that to be the sustainable amount. Surpassing that, leads to burnout, and less productivity overall.

- I take a few short breaks during work. A walk in the garden, cook something simple, browse hacker news, etc. I have found that necessary to stay productive. That seems to take over the occasional talks in a on-site work. For example, I once did a project in odesk, with their invasive surveillance system, and without taking breaks. Got a five star rating in the end. But the experience was so dismal, that I almost decided to retire from programming. I was often dreading every minute of work.

- I maximize use of time. When I can't stand more work, I do 1-2 hours of intense jogging. Or get out, take a walk at a pleasant place, take lunch at some place, etc. In this way, I am always highly motivated in what I am doing.

- I have found that I am very self sufficient. I used to need some hangout-with-friends time, but I don't need that anymore. Now I mostly feel that as a waste of time.

- I work on weekends, and usually take the Mondays off. When I visit places, I prefer to avoid the usual tumult of the weekends.

Note - this isn't "20% of full-time telecommuters are skiving off". Some might be, others might telecommute 1 day a week and use that to do their chores (which might be sanctioned by their manager). Some are freelancers who are effectively unemployed. Others are self-employed, and procrastinating. Some might be students, who have a part-time job they do from home. Some might be full-time mothers, who do the odd job on Mechanical Turk.

As a comparison, I'd like to know the breakdown of hours of actual work for those who go in to the office every day.

With telecommuting, amount of time worked != amount of work completed.

Chances are, that hour they're actually working at home is getting the equivalent of 8 hours of traditional work-in-an-office work done.

While I wouldn't diminish the distractions found in an office, I'm not sure if I ever ran into a case where 7 hours of my day was wasted on nonsense that wouldn't have occurred had I been at my house.

I've been telecommuting two days a week for the past 2.5 years and have found that certain things get done significantly faster at home and other things get done significantly faster at the office. I have a job where I'm coding maybe 5-10% of the time, and most of the coding is done at home where I can assure that there will be few distractions outside of my control. The same goes for any activity, done solo, and requiring prolonged concentration.

Are there really work environments so distracting that 8 hours in the office equals 1 hour at home? That seems crazy. If so, there's is something seriously messed up at that office.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for telecommuting and did a 100% telecommuting gig for 3 years straight, but there's no way to get a days work done in 1 hour.

Yes, I work in an open plan office so because they can see me they think it's OK to interrupt me whenever they feel like it. I'm in a room with the support guys and testers so all their phone calls I get to hear. Especially distracting if they're talking to a user about something I've worked on. Sometimes I manage to space out and not hear it but then you look up and people are staring at you "what do you think Bob?"

Headphones only go so far.

I worked for about 6 months in an office with an open floor plan, and the noise did get to me sometimes, but at those times I would undock my laptop and find an empty desk in some other division where people didn't have conference calls going on speakerphone. (BTW, hearing a conference call coming out of two speakerphones - or hearing a person speaking to your left and then their voice coming out of a speakerphone on your right half a second later - is perhaps the most distracting thing ever.)

I'd say it's unfortunately accurate.

You have a daily stand-up at 9:30, so even though you get in at 9, you don't bother starting anything because the stand-up will cut it short as soon as you get rolling. The stand-up is supposed to be 10 minutes, tops, but regularly balloons into a half-hour behemoth. You make your daily sojourn to Starbucks with the other developers and get back to your open work area at 10:15. There's a business user waiting for you. You develop internal tools and the brass is too cheap to employ a support staff, so you are level 1. They're supposed to open a support ticket and assign it to you instead of walking over to your desk, but you've already sent them packing the same way three times this week, and it looks like they're ready to cry, so you open a new browser window and ask what the problem is. You end up having to pull in a sysadmin, and after an hour, the two of you determine that it's a problem with a third-party service, so you open a support ticket with them and tell the business user you'll keep them updated.

It's now 11:15. The developers start lunch at around 11:30 - noon every day, so there's no reason to get started on anything now. You get back from your hour lunch break at 12:45. There's a meeting on your outlook calendar at 1 o' clock, but you read the description and decide to skip it since there are already enough developers on the docket to give enough input. You're just gathering momentum at 1:05 when the Project Manager who organized the meeting appears at your desk, asking you to come to the meeting.

"I have a lot on my plate; the other two devs know enough about the system to keep the ball rolling."

"Well," she counters, "I really need everyone's input for this meeting." (Just like every other meeting.)

"There are 20 people on the invite list... if there are any problems, I'm sure I can just follow up with you after you send out the meeting minutes."

"Look, I really need you here for this; this isn't a skippable meeting." (None of hers are.) Finally you fold--you didn't take this job because you were a go-getter who knows how to tell people "no" repeatedly. The meeting is scheduled for 1PM - 2PM, but (like most meetings at this company), it goes until 2:30.

You get back to your desk and there are a dozen new IMs and e-mails blinking on your screen. You fantasize about just closing everything and working, but you've been here long enough to know that un-answered IMs and e-mails will result in people walking over to your desk, just like the jilted business user from this morning. For a couple of months you managed to put your foot down, mark yourself as "busy" in Outlook for the afternoon, and tell people that you simply won't deal with any non-critical problem during that period, but hearing complaints about issue turnaround time come through your boss was too much of a drain.

You answer IMs, follow up on e-mails, flip through high-priority code reviews and take care of other necessary busywork for about an hour and a half.

At 4PM, you get started on your work.

Until 4PM, you've also been working on things that are value-adds on some level. Your choice not to make use of the small time windows (which aren't actually so small) is your own choice, not a direct function of the office.

Depending on what you are working on 15 minutes may be enough time to make some progress, but anything with a moderate level of complexity is going to take longer than that before gain enough context to start.

If you take notes, you can gain context from 9:00-9:30, and rev up again quickly from 10:00-10:03. The time doesn't need to be wasted time.

(Not that this is necessarily easy to do, or perfect, but I think we can accomplish more than we think in this manner.)

Notes like all other forms of documentation is suspect. If it's a complex problem that you don't already have a solution to you really do need to sit there and think "Why did I think this when I wrote it." otherwise it's easy to create flip flopping bugs. AKA fix bug 357, fix bug 372, hey wait bug 385 looks like 357 ahh that's right I need to set the flag to X, hmm wait bug 392 looks a lot like bug 372 etc.

PS: And when you have 15 minutes to work it's next to impossible to figure out how to fix 392 without also creating 357 yet again.

What I meant by "notes" was just scribbling down your thoughts as you go along - things like "$property modified between file.php:500 and :600? WTF". Enough data to jog your memory when you get back to your desk and then throw away once you solve the bug and document the fix in a real fashion.

You're right! However, it's inefficient for a developer to always be doing that much non-development work. And it is possible to get real work done during the small windows, but only certain types of real work. Occasionally you can fit in a bunch of good bug-fixes. Other times you're able to organize things into discrete small tasks up-front, and you can get a few of those things done with each small window. But, it's impossible to really achieve flow in those circumstances. The lack of flow is really the gist of my argument.

With the schedule you described, it doesn't sound like you're purely a developer. Either a lot of this stuff needs to move from your plate to someone else's, or you need to accept that you do a lot of non-development work.

Note that of the distractions you describe, a lot of them are things that you would have still had if you were working from home. The emails and the IMs are still there, although I guess they might be more ignoreable since you don't have the threat of the person showing up at your desk. :-)

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I really think they should define 'work'. Creative work is much different than, say, assembly of radios. A lot happens when you're away from the computer.

Mentally, at least for me, it's too easy to fall into the trap of classifying "work" as something that directly produces results....writing code, changing a design etc.

When looked at it from that perspective, it's easy to feel that you/someone are not doing a lot of "work", but often a lot of my time is spent on "work about work".... answering emails, managing clients, or even just brainstorming on a whiteboard / notebook. All of these are just as important to the end result of a project but are easy to overlook in a day/week/month that is ruled by deadlines, expectations, metrics, etc.

If I've got a telecommuter on my staff that gets shit done, but only works an hour a day, more power to him.

In the office, I'd be lucky to have a net work day of +1 hour.

Sometimes, friction and bad decisions can make you work -8 hours a day. Or worse.

Also, for some people, definition of "work" in a big company is "presence". So, that's obviously not fitting for a telecomuter.

Wow, a lot of you guys are getting really defensive here.

I can get some good work done at home, but only if I've remembered to bring home all materials I need. And if I don't need to face-to-face with somebody. And if there are no meetings scheduled for that day.

Good workers don't need to be managed but are self-directed by their own desire to do a job well done and commitment they share with the vision of the company.

There is tremendous value in coming in to the office to see your colleagues face to face but sometimes not all work requires it. Perhaps these workers finished their work early as I have often heard that telecommuters are far more productive. If they didn't loop back with their managers then I would question that relationship or the worker. I wouldn't attribute telecommuting as a killer to productivity though.

Here is an interesting article that sees telecommuting as an increasing phenomena:

http://mashable.com/2011/09/17/work-from-home-infographi/

Telecommuting reduces overhead cost (rent, utility, etc) and gas usages but it's still important to maintain rapport with your team. Yay video teleconferencing!

Shouldn't productivity be measured in number of things done where each "thing" is multiplied by a number that represents the difficulty of the task divided by the time taken to do it?

If hours are the chief measurement, then you can stretch things out to make it take more time. I'm sure this is happening in businesses the world over anyway.

Back when I worked contract at Eli Lilly, I knew a guy who looked busy all day long, but was doing nothing at all, as far as anybody else in the project could tell.

If he'd been telecommuting and working less than an hour a day, nobody would have noticed.

Couldn't there be some bias from the people that were polled? For example, I love working from home, right? So of course I'm going to tell someone polling me that I do a lot work from home.

Not saying that this is anecdotal...just sayin'.

I bill less than 8 hours a day (normally) but I work that much. I just don't feel like I should bill for what I call "stupid time" or getting stuck on something that, were I faster and more knowledgable, would only take 1/3 the time.

In this case I hope you also charge the fast and knowledgeable rate. Otherwise you sell yourself short.

As long as you get paid by the hour you should work those hours, be it at the office or at home.

If you don't want to get paid by the hour, become a contractor and do fixed price jobs.

Or be paid a salary whilst working in an overtime-exempt position.

I wouldn't care if my employees did five minutes of work at home per day as long as they get things done in similar amounts compared to their peers.

...but at least they're not stuck in a car/bus/train for two hours like those who work less than and hour per day in the office.

Working at home require twice the discipline needed when you work at the office. There are lots of distractions.

I thought about getting 2 jobs telecommuting: twice the pay for half the work.

I bet that if you measured actual, focused work time spent, this would be roughly accurate of the average office-bound employee.

Edit: BTW, flagged for having basically no objective content at all.

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