Ask HN: How hard do you work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How hard do you work?

52 pointsLiron43 comments

How many hours do you spend at your workplace? And in that time, how many hours of actual work do you do?

I've tracked my time for over 2 years solid.

The first year (2007) I was 46% billable efficiency (web design).

The second year (2008) I was 49% billable efficiency (doing web design).

I also do sales / marketing / customer service / and building my own web app so this is purely consulting stuff with clients and I'm happy with the numbers.

In 2007 I worked 2784 hours. In 2008 I worked about 600 hours less than the previous year. I think that was my goal going into the year. Objective achieved!

Thanks for the numbers. As a principal in a consulting company, that's about what I'd guess for my own time. Of course, I haven't tracked my time nearly as thoroughly. :)

I'd be interested to see other numbers like this if anyone has them.

we used to spend 16 hours a day working on weebly, mon-fri and sunday, but we'd always take friday night and saturday off. we were fairly productive, so i'd say at least 50% of that time was actual, productive work.

over time, and with a move into our own office (and out of the apartment), we've shifted to what feels a more sustainable 10-12 hours a day, 5 days a week.

at the same time, we're pretty liberal with vacation as appropriate (probably 5-6 weeks a year), as it's a great time to recharge the batteries. in this context, vacation generally means working at a much reduced output -- it's pretty hard to step away completely.

all in all, we feel very happy with what we've been able to accomplish at work, and feel lucky that we're able to have as much personal time as we do -- it's sometimes not as much about the amount of time, as it is about the flexibility to take time off at the drop of a hat.

So that first paragraph means that if you eliminated the non-productive time, you work 6 x 8 hour days. And gain some work life balance.

However, having been there, that didn't work for me. The amount of time that isn't spent coding seems fairly consistent as a percentage, leaving aside a small constant factor. When I ran my small business, I would sometimes deliberately work fewer hours a week to try to increase productive time, and after falling below a (fairly high) number of hours per week, the productive time was cut at least as much as the non-productive time.

Thanks for your 37-signalite contribution. Here's a fantastic bit of information: people are different, not everyone is like 37-S and their cohorts.

I was just making an observation, from the perspective of someone who has no work-life balance, and is occasionally jealous of the people who put their work away at 5pm and have families, houses, friends, etc.

early on, i think it was pretty hard to figure out when we were going to be productive, and when we weren't. partially because some of the stuff you do (email, research, etc) doesn't feel particularly productive, even though it needs to get done. let's put it this way: we had no cable, gaming system, or anything of the like -- we most definitely were not wasting time, it was more like 8 hours a day of solid, uninterrupted coding, surrounded by 8 hours of email, meals, catching up on the news, etc.

the one benefit to being very committed early on: we did occasionally have weeks that were (usually by necessity) insanely productive, where we'd accomplish some absolutely unbelievable task, something that would have otherwise taken a month, usually because of a strict deadline. if you refuse to work more than 4 x 8, a la 37 signals, that's just not going to be possible.

believe it or not, though, i was actually trying to provide an example of a positive work-life balance :)

I do actually believe that 40 work weeks are artificial, and not conducive to either good work or a good life outside of work. When it's time to be enthusiastic and produce something, rigid hours should not get in the way. But, on the same theme, when it's time to take a break, a two day weekend often won't do, nor will arbitrarily scheduled holidays, or even 2-3 weeks of vacation.

It depends. When I'm in the zone I work myself into the ground. When I'm out of the zone I'm very unproductive. I found a secret that helps me get into the zone though. Its a secret, for $9.95 you can order my e-book or just read the rest of this comment.

I'm not a planner personality at all and I find planning my time does no good. However I do respond to accountability. So what I do is make a table with the X axis representing the days of the week and the Y axis representing each hour slot in the waking day. I print this out so I can carry it with me and one sheet of paper has one week.

I then fill in the table throughout the week with what I did during that hour. If I ate, I put down that I ate. If I was asleep I put that down. If I wasted the hour I put down an X. If I did something productive I write that down. This method works for me and after two weeks of this I'm back in the zone and don't need to track my time anymore.

I don't track my time at all any more. I have found that it's useless. I used to spend 8 hours at my terminal and thought I had a good day. Until I realized that I got so little done.

Here's what I do...

I DO NOT log on without a written plan for the session. I start on the first thing on the list and work my way down. Most lists only have one or two things to do. I almost always get done whatever is on the list.

I usually make the list the night before while reviewing that day's code. Sometimes I do the list very early in the morning. It's amazing how full my mind sometimes is when first waking up.

It's NOT how much time you spend. It's how much you get done. I'd rather work 20 hours to accomplish x than 40. (Better yet, work 40 to accomplish 2x).

You're probably more of a planner personality then. I think some may have missed my point. When I write down what I did--I don't say I sat at a terminal and count that as productive. I make an honest assessment as to whether I made progress or not.

This keeping honest puts myself into the right frame of mind to stay productive. It builds momentum. I feel a small sense of accomplishment every time I log a successful hour and it encourages me to want to keep doing it.

I would count anything useful towards whatever my goals are as productive. Working in a notebook planning higher level things, developing an algorithm, or sitting down and writing code are all part of this process.

I don't think my productivity/working hour is being questioned here so I won't address that.

Two weeks and you're back in the zone? How long does it stick? For me, it fluctuates much more rapidly. Most days I'm in the zone for solid chunks of time and not in the zone for some chunks as well. Occasionally I'll have a bad day or two back to back. However one day rarely carries over to the next in terms of productivity.

exercise, read difficult fiction and/or philosophy, perhaps take martial arts.

Until I've gotten where I need to get to. I used to use this technique when I was an undergraduate to get through tough periods of the semester.

Recently, I used it on my startup after I finished grad school. I had a goal of getting a beta out and pushed myself into this working mode. I then kept going until I released the beta.

I tend to spend months in a zone where I'm able to concentrate and think about a project. During this time my social drive is down. Then I spend months in a zone where I just want to be around people and I can barely work. I think this technique is a way to throw myself into the working part of my brain at will. I won't claim to understand it. And I won't guarantee it will work for you. I just know all the plan things out stuff I was taught did me no good. This worked and so that is why I point it out here.

I work out and eat well but any one who knows me will tell you that I am life balance FAIL.

So where can we get your e-book?

I'm a programmer for an engineering company (the only one at the company). I do internal apps to help make their jobs easier.

I have 9 scheduled hours a day (1 hour lunch). I'm usually at my desk early and during part of lunch, but I don't work during these times (unless something REALLY needs done). The break helps me focus more. During my regular 8 hours of work, I generally am actually working for at least 7.5 of them. I NEVER goof off at work. I never handle personal business or surf the web while at work (aside from using Google or StackOverflow to find an answer to a programming question). The only thing that distracts me from work is chatting with coworkers from time to time.

I don't think it's fair to measure work by any standard other than "I feel what I'm doing is productive." I'm not typing code 7.5 hours a day. Sometimes I'm designing or reviewing code or refactoring or reading version control logs or reading up on new technologies. Fortunately, my company is smart enough to agree that this is work and encourage it.

I don't think it's fair to measure work by any standard other than "I feel what I'm doing is productive."

Wonderful statement. Only in extreme cases does it seem untrue for thought-workers.

If you're interested in the idea of people simply declaring their productivity (and worth), Maverick by Semler is a good read: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0446670553

I often found myself doing random stuff and then wondering "what the hell did I do?" at the end of the day. So I wrote a simple tool Smacklet http://smacklet.com/ and it has helped me immensely. All you do is: type in few words about what you are doing and plan to do now. Doing this simple exercise, I found myself more "aware" through the day and hence ended up squandering less and less time.

Give it a try if you feel like. I had several features planned, like graphs etc... but I found the current feature-set sufficient for my needs.

Nice! I like it.

8 am to 4 pm 5 days/week - client sites (10% efficient)

7 pm to 11 pm 5 days/week, 8 hours Saturday, 12 hours Sunday - my startup (70 - 90% efficient)

Friday nights and one weekend per month off (100% efficient)

I am physically present at the day job for between 10 and 12 hours typically (more some days, less others) and sustain peak productivity for about 2 to 4 hours most days.

My side business averages about 5 hours a week according to RescueTime -- more when I'm able to block off time on a Saturday to get some heavy lifting done, although after 6 hours I find my wheels spin an awful lot even when self-directed.

It drives me absolutely freaking bonkers that people think the above figures prove anything about whether I'm "working hard" on either the day job or the business.

I work far too much and far too hard, yet not quite enough or quite hard enough.

Yeah, it's a paradox, but anyone else building a company, working a regular job, and going to school will understand.

I've never seen my workplace, but I work about 65 hours a week, just over 40 of which I consider billable. Ratcheting up to 70-75.

This is not a sustainable rate, especially without equity.

11-12 hours per day and another 10-12 hours per weekend -> a bit over 70 hours per week for two years. Then sold the company and it went downhill from there. I posted longer version of this in an older thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=330672

Now it's more like 3 hours a day, 4 days a week working on some stuff that I like. So in the end it was totally worth it :-).

I work 10am - 6:30pm everyday at my day job. Usually come home, eat dinner and work on my startup from 8pm - 12pm. At the office though, I probably spend 30 min a day between person email, tech news and stocks. Maybe another 20 min chit chatting with people. I like to think I'm pretty productive though!

I don't work hard anymore. I try to eliminate the need for it. If that fails and it's more than just assembling or moving a desk, I try to pay someone else nice to do it. I'm happy that our society somehow considers typing to be more important work than roofing.

I'm in my office around 45 hours a week.. somewhere around 5am-3pm M-F with probably 5 to 10 hours of errands, lunches, and lazy times cut out of that.

I'd say I average 2 hours a week right now writing out "code" that I'd describe as my "work." That seems insanely low, but given a good typing speed, that's enough to write the K&R C book in a month. I wish my quality were that high, but I'm trying.

I think at the office I'm probably down to ~10 hours a week of "unproductive" time now (e.g. reading this stuff, writing this comment, gossiping with friends about someone's date).

As I previously posted on my blog (http://danieltenner.com/posts/0002-counting-hours-doesnt-mak...), counting hours doesn't mean much in terms of how hard you work. A much better question is how much of your energy you spend on your work vs. other things.

I spend most of my waking energy on my start-up. I used to spend about 20-30% on my relationship, but that's not happening anymore, thus resulting in an increase in available energy. I spend about 10% on my blog. I probably spend about 10% keeping up with tech news via HN and other means. It's a sizeable investment, but worthwhile - it does impact my job to be aware of all this stuff and connected to the community.

I'm in class from 8 am until 4 with a two hour lunch, I spend the two hours working on freelance projects or my tiny little startup (its already paid itself off!). From 4:30 to 8ish I work at a web development shop. Every day I program in C++, C#, Java, and PHP (with SQL, javascript, 3 different JS libraries and a templating language all mixed in). I move between Eclipse and Visual Studio for Java, C# and C++ at school. For my startup I use Vim and Netbeans (trying to learn Vim but I'm not all that effective in it yet so I move to Netbeans or Notepad++). My startup work is done on the weekend when I boot into Ubuntu. At work I use Textmate on a Mac.

After adjusting to my new environment 4 times in a day I manage to complete 40 minutes of real work.

With school and personal projects I often find my self in similar positions. I have been working on becoming proficient using Vim and what helped is using the Vim plugins for each editor. I pretty much forced myself to use Vim or some derivative for every thing I do and it has worked wonders so far.

The link for the netbeans plug-in is here http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3653

It is a java implementation of vim and works pretty well. The plugin for ecplipse places an instance of Vim withing the editor window but I found it was quite buggy and slowed things down a bit (at least on my laptop). I don't know if there is a plug in for visual studio but you could check.

I am so glad I forced my self to use it because it payed off. Just keep a cheat sheet by your side and within a few days you will at least be able to get stuff done, and then just pick up a new trick each day to really learn to fly. Just start now because once you get going you will wish you made the leap sooner.

Given that I work from home, it depends on whether or not I've taken Adderall that day.

It ranges from 2 to 16 hours.

If I may ask: why not just take it every day? Does it cause side effects?

my guess would probably be not wanting to develop a tolerance, potentially because it isn't prescribed and is then probably expensive...

I highly recommend you try not taking Adderall. In my experience (I've had plenty of experience), it only screws with your priorities (you think you can do anything while you're on it) and makes you completely useless when you're not taking it. I was prescribed it myself for several years, and only recently went off. I've replaced Adderall with a little bit of caffeine, and lots of exercise. And yes, Adderall has a bunch of negative side effects. Try it once if you want, but don't make a habit out of it--you'll regret it long term.

I actually found myself quite annoyed by distractions. I felt like I was God, and I wanted to get my project done as soon as possible. Felt wonderful.

The dopamine production in your brain can become dependent on the Adderall. Reaching this point would make you "that fucking addict" in your local community.

8am-6pm at my "real" job, and 3-4 hours a night on my startup. I can usually get in 8 hours on a Saturday or Sunday. It's going much slower than I want, but I feel like I am maxed out when also considering my other obligations.

I currently work a daily 8-5 job doing .NET and some (at 27 years old, you can laugh at this) COBOL.

on the side I freelance web work and am considering trying freelance full time. While I would end up working longer hours, I actually enjoy the freelance and I wouldn't be stuffed in a cube daily and forced to use really weird tools.

So, when I'm on a freelance project, total I pull close to 14 hour days for about a month straight (and work weekends), but then the job will complete and I'll be waiting while they spec out another one for about a month, I use that time to work on side projects.

I'm a first-year Ph.D. student. I attempt to "work" a 40-hour week, but I count classes and classwork as part of that 40 hours and try not to count unproductive hours. Toward this end, instead of taking a full weekend off, I often take Thursday through Sunday "half off". I'm not sure whether this results in more or less work getting done than would otherwise. During my first semester, I felt very unproductive, but I've been fairly successful at getting things done this semester.

i'm a freelancer, working around 8-10 hrs a day with small pauses.

however i'm taking at least 30% of the year off, cannot be productive 11 months in a row.

lately i've found out that working sharply less hrs/day and taking less vacation produces more quality and longer lasting knowledge in my head.

but my biggest concern is the i/o rate: how much time one takes input (learning, reading, networking) and produces output (code, results, blog posts)

Not very. My paid job is typical enterprisey CRUD apps in java. Most of the work comes from fixing others mistakes and battling with poor decisions around what tools we use (ClearCase?!?!, a good 1+ hours/day wasted there). I'm more productive at home on my side projects but by the time I finally hit the groove it's bedtime.

As a sidenote, it's amusing to see that working hard == spending much time at work.

Too hard.

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