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Comment by mantrax | Hacker News Reader

This guy is very right. I wrote myself a simple time tracker (I tried a bunch of other ones, but I was unhappy), to track my daily activities. Like John Carmack, I'd turn the timer off any second I'm not spending doing real work, even if I go to the bathroom.

I found out that during a "8-10 hours workday" I'm actually working, as in coding, getting shit done - maybe for about 2, tops 3 hours...

That's not just an interesting observation, I was FUCKING HORRIFIED. I'm pissing my limited lifetime away!

The first step is awareness. Always. Then comes improvement. I kept tracking myself, now being very aware of what interrupts my work, and limiting my distractions. I have yet to claim 8-10 hours of solid work in a day, but it's getting better.

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Measure what you care about. If lines of code produced is your thing, then measure that. One year I decided to measure defects released into production, so I could find root causes. I discovered that bad code wasn't my biggest weakness; it was procedures for getting things into production, and procedures for testing and replicating the production environment. So I ended up spending more time getting that stuff right than I did before.

Different people have different kinds of responsibilities and things that should be important to them, based on what's going on in their business and with the rest of their team. Sometimes "hours spent writing code" is the thing for some people, but keep in mind it isn't always the formula for success for all people.

If one does very intellectual work, 8 hours of solid work are pretty hard to achieve. Hardy said in that "four hours creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician" in A Mathematicians Apology.

I think for engineering work, one might be able to stretch it a bit further. But factoring in breaks, I don't think it is sustainable to go beyond 7 or 7.5 hours.

This was my experience too. I found that I was productive 2 hours each day. The time tracker helped bring this up to 4 hours in an 8 hour day. I would play a game where I would try and beat yesterdays score.

Unless you have your own office, or at home or coworkers are forbidden to talk to you on pain of death and torture, I find it extremely difficult to be more productive than 4-4.5 hours in a 7-8 hour block of office time.

I get around 30-40% of my weekly work done on the single day a week I work from home. Sitting in the office, even with headphones on, I can hear the conversations of about 5 people sitting near me, and I inevitably end up joining in to add my $0.02.

I too wrote a simple time tracker (as a chrome extension) for myself and later published it on chrome store - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onnkllhiaannegcomg...

Now, I have defined "4 hours" of actual productive time as goal of each day.

but is 8-10 hours of solid work really the goal? Or... condensing down the 2-3 hours of real work in to, say, 3 hours, then using the rest of the time in some other capacity?

To answer you and nextos both, I don't have a hard goal. As the saying goes:

"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving."

I'm optimizing and seeing what happens. If I hit a stubborn limit, and nothing works to break it, I'll accept it. But at least I'll know what's going on, and as you say, I may plan better the rest of my day.

That's a great piece of advice. Being goal-less but focussed has had an incredible positive impact on my productivity.

One anecdote: I can get up to 6.5 or 7 hours of programming in, but I'm utterly drained at this point. I'm sure others can go higher, but my mental stamina gives out completely.

Mine was the same. After 7 hours of real work with no slacking (eg lunch does not count as work), I find it better to switch to easier tasks (docs, organizational, etc).

What did you the rest of the time? There is difference between writing documentation, design work, attending mandatory meeting and checking facebook or video.

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