Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

However, creative stuff like programming doesn't tend to fix in such a neat box, and the preparation, or creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problems tends to benefit from spending time doing something else - your brain is still whirring on the problem whilst you are out walking, exercising, cooking etc.

If you add on the time spent working through problems, you'll probably come to the same conclusion that I have that I spend 24 hours a day thinking about the problems i'm tackling. I often come up with great solutions whilst i'm asleep, and bad nights sleep is often correlated with a gnarly problem i've still not worked out.

I personally don't get hung up on how much time I spend actually coding. Some days it's full on, other days I seem to achieve next to nothing, or if anything go backwards. I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right.

I do agree with the general notion that working 8 productive hours everyday does not work long-term. But assuming that you could work three hours completely productively every day, that does not imply that the remaining five hours would be completely worthless. In a normal work week, I am sure you could get more out of the remaining 5x5 = 25 hours than the six hours at the weekend.

Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day.

I think the appeal of "3 hours a day" is that the number is so extremely low compared to the number 8. But I don't think that it will work. Flexible time models also give you a pretty good work-life balance, and they're more realistic. I mean, for one, you won't find an employer who will follow this 3-hour model, so we're only talking about self-employed workers. But even then, it has to be a pure coding or other desk job - if it involved e.g. any meetings at all, how are you going to fit that into your small time budget of three hours only per day?

Yeah, like I said, I don't think that this model is going to work in most situations and for most people.

I have been struggling with organising my time as well, and I found that fewer hours every day means I only focus on what's important, and I can achieve a state of flow, with a good routine, every day. I do 4 hours of 95% effort, no distraction deep work, and then I need to recharge the batteries.

It all depends if you're doing creative programming work, or menial one. I'm building a business, and the software underneath it. It's not too dissimilar to sculpting or painting: bursts of intense work, with tons of space necessary to digest, plan the next step or just daydream and think out of the box around hard problems. Some people thrive in a brute force approach to creativity (work until the problem is solved), for others intuition is the driving force (think until the problem is solved)

The issue is that as a society and the corporate machine is tuned for the brute force approach. We celebrate the 100 hours/wk Musks and Carmacks, and forget that their physiology, and more importantly, environment is much different than most of us.

How many hours do you think Musk spends thinking about paying rent, cost of living, standups with a boring boss, endless Zoom calls that cut into his focus? How many hours does John Carmack spend, bored to tears, plugging yet another Slack library into their CRUD app for a boss than makes 500x his salary?

How many hours of "brainstorming", daydreaming and reading up on exciting tech do they count as work? How many hours of daydreaming and "digesting" can you do sat in an open space cubicle?

(Sorry, started talking about creative force, and went on a societal critique.)

To be honest I rarely have more than 3-4 productive hours in a day, where I actually get hard stuff done. Sure on special days I can be productive 8+ hours; but those are rare.

re: author of article: I wonder if he does technology learning activities outside his 3 hour work window?

Some days, it’s two hours; some days, 12. If I were to average, it probably comes to around four or five hours (out-of-the-arse guess).

WFM. YMMV.

Friday was a 12-hour, OCD day. I went the entire day without eating or drinking, as I was obsessing over finishing a dashboard app I wrote.

At the end of the day, I had a combined blood sugar crash/dehydration event.

FUN

I don't recommend it.

I usually drink a bit less than a gallon of water per day. I keep an insulated mug at my desk, and make sure it's always at least half-full of water.

I can really recommend that book, I haven’t adopted to many of the practices that he recommends but I am working on it and it already had a profound impact on the quality of my work but also my general mental health.

At present the idea of working 3 focused hours per day doesn't seem outrageous, but back in 2014 this would have been quite progressive.

For example 4 hours x 31 days = 124 hours per month.

Now compare this to a corporate job where it feels like you are setup to fail. Every day 3-6 hours of meetings / conference calls. Constant flood of emails that are often irrelevant or unclear, but you need to stay focused reading them because something can be relevant to what you are doing (often the part important to you is written in an ambigious way, since they dont know what to do with your case - so you have to ask for clarifications - more meetings). Constant context switching due to having to drop what you are doing to do something else. Trying to do you your actual work.. often after hours, when they still call you. Or you cant even do your job, because someone who is supposed to provide something for you didnt do it on time, so you are waiting. (They update that it will be there the next day, on next day -> they again say next day and so on).

10 hours per day x 21 days = 210 hours

Of course corporate work is safer. Somehow the corporation exists and moves forward.

That's why it is so impressive that the author can be their own boss. Could even make some contracting work from time to time.

> I even disable all notifications on my iPhone before I go to bed, so I don’t see them before I start working next day.

An idea from the creative artist world is to consciously divide the tasks into creative and other. Game plan goes:

Wake up. Do not read email. Or slack. Breakfast then walk, thinking about things.

Write down the ideas you want to come back to. Then lunch.

Then take a look at email, slack. Do the traditional fire fighting while trying to write code simultaneously game until the evening.

Spend the evening socialising, reading, generally taking in new information, probably in the hope that it gets sorted while you sleep and takes your mind off the fires of the afternoon.

That's not a path to three hours a day of work. But it probably is a way to make progress on hard problems despite a software dev day job that applies pressure against that, via cultural firefighting.

I do think you could then have another 2-3 hour block of something completely unrelated every day and be very productive doing that as well.