About two and a half. Not that my workload is exceptionally light, either — four classes, two jobs. But I’m not interested in anything I’m doing, so my time usually ends up going elsewhere.
As a student, during the school year it’s generally 2-3 hours a day plus classes, but that’s homework, not job work. Right now, during the summer, I’m doing some casual freelance and personal web design and programming, and again I’d say I get maybe 2-3 hours of solid, productive work done on any given day. The rest of the time I spend reading way too many blogs and zoning out while listening to talk radio. 😉
That depends on the definition of “productive”. If we’re talking for my actual job, 1-4 depending upon what’s going on at work. The lower the workload at work, the higher my productivity elsewhere [motivation dependent].
Well, it depends. Usually I work on a site for about 2 hours a day, which isn’t that much. I surf a lot. A LOT! And I’ve still got school and a summertime job.
I don’t have to get productive work done anymore, and I *love* it! However, now I’m getting more work done then when it was demanded by an employer. I’m funny like that. (I would say 5-6 hours normally. Sometimes more.)
productive is definitely a word needing a definition. I’m a freelance web developer, so my definition of productive is “any work that helps me to make some cash”. Using that definition, I’d say it’s about 6 hours. on a VERY good day. I work from home and I have two kids. one is 3 and one is 13. right now, since it’s summer vacation for the school-bound children, they’re both here. All the time. 6 hours is a couple of hours in the early morning, and the remaining four spread out from noon to 11pm. Plus I have a horrid attention span, in fact, there’s a nice bird sitting outside my window which before this sentence started being typed, took about 4 minutes of my time. Damn birds.
Lately? Probably about two. I notice there’s an inverse relationship between the number of feeds in my reader and the amount of work I get done daily. I need to break this nasty RSS habit, before I get fired.
Matt, I’m obsessive about my calendar. I literally take two-and-a-half hours each Friday to block out the week ahead, where each pending task for each of my projects gets a block each day. If there’s anything I can’t do after that excercise, I have to notify my project managers/stakeholders or reprioritize…
That said, some days are better than others…some days I come in and crank out 7-9 hours of real work. Other days it’s less than 5. The sweet spot is probably around 6 hours. This includes administrative overhead (like my Friday calendar ritual), so I’m defining “productive” as “not screwing around on company time.” 🙂
If I have a meeting with my academic adviser or group in the next two or three days, and if it is an “update” meeting, then I cram in about 10-15 hours of work. If I am bumming around generally, which is what I do more often, the number is around 4-6 hours. The number of hours I manage to sleep are, on the other hand, inversely proportional to the proximity of the next meeting.
That really depends on what we consider to be “productive”, doesn’t it? If we’re talking about time spent learning (I’m a law student, so that’s pretty much my full time job during the semester), I’d say approximately 4-5 hours per day, mostly briefing cases, reading relevant journal articles and chapters from critical commentaries on the law, and reviewing what I learnt in classes. That number shoots up to around 10-14 hours when working on papers or preparing for finals. (My sleep patterns are the inverse of my productivity patterns.)
I rely extensively on Outlook’s calendar functions and task lists to keep me on track. Fridays I spend at least 2 hours carefully blocking out my commitments for the next week, including scheduling down time for recharging and meeting up with friends.
On average get about 5-6 hours of productivity from my day. Three are completely blow off. I think the higher up you get in the working world, the more time you spend in meetings. Meetings are not productive, unless they are technical review or design meetings. Those are only productive if you follow the rules of meeting etiquette, keep things moving, and learn when to take things ‘off-line’.
My average week holds about 3.5-4 hours of meetings. I spend about 4 hours a day coding. Maybe I’ll spend an hour testing said code. Various distractions around the office (loud neighbours, etc.) are going to chew up a lot of one’s time regardless. Trips to lavatory and break room for elimination and re-fill of tea don’t help.
Depending on the day of course I am usually productive about 6 hours at work. My job classification as “webmaster” is pretty broad so most anything can be considered productive. At home I try to be productive as well, but that usually doesn’t happen to much, the joy of sitting down and relaxing takes over.
Well, I’d say anywhere between 4-5 hours, of course it increases at times depending on how mission critical what you are working on is. The rest of the day is spent posting/replying to mailing lists and surfing the web(which I do a lot, I should probably list this as productive research) and a few minutes on IM in a day.
At present being unemployed and fresh out of HNC Web Design course (which sucked and taught me funk all) I have about an hour, maybe 2 of proper work and thats on personal projects.
Balancing motivation and criticality (or clients/bosses ideas of criticality) of issues is the key. Ranges between 2-3 low end up to 7-8, usually at the 4-5 range. Though lately, it hasn’t been more than 4-5 much at all. (Maybe the summer weather?)
I strongly disagree with this statement of Eli’s “Trips to lavatory and break room for elimination and re-fill of tea don’t help.” I say they do help; they keep your physical body (remember that thing?) in condition to allow your mind to express itself (through code or whatever). It’s like stretching time before and after heavy exercise; essential to long-term productivity.
I am a big fan of the microbreak, but I’ll agree there’s a dangerous tradeoff with all this connectivity to non-work stuff from work. Here I am, taking a microbreak, but if this had been a link to a long and interesting article which was somewhat work related, I might spend a little too long keeping up with the zeitgeist and correspondingly less time on the tasks I’d hoped to complete today. The number of casual conversations via instant messenger is compensated for by the times I can often get issues/questions resolved significantly faster using IM. It requires a little discipline, though. 😉
Productive hours per day? It ranges from 2-12, usually averaging around 6, I’d say. Like other commenters I find many or most meetings non-productive.
I started tracking myself severa months ago and was surprised to see that I do about 2-3 hours a day of actual work for my employer in 8-10 hour days. I get plenty of work done on projects at that level and I’m fairly happy with my work and my employer recently gave me a raise, so we’re kosher on everything even though I spend half the day blogging or reading about blogging.
So starting June 1st, I shifted my work to gel with that. I work offsite most times but am in email and IM contact, but I started setting aside 4 hours to concentrate on work stuff for my employer. I work hard during that chunk (it’s often the early morning, sometimes early afternoon), and when I’m done with 3-4 hours of actual work, I shift over to personal programming projects.
With this setup I still get my work projects done, and I’m finding I no longer shift my attention among work communication, personal email, reading blogs, and doing blogging. I just work hard for a few hours on work, then shift to working on my own stuff and getting up to date on personal junk.
It really depends whether or not the obsessive compulsive (“Can you fix this right now cause I just thought of it?”) or the manager to be (“Lets discuss architecture so I look important”) types wander over to my cube. My major career goal now is to get an office with a door!
About two and a half. Not that my workload is exceptionally light, either — four classes, two jobs. But I’m not interested in anything I’m doing, so my time usually ends up going elsewhere.
As a student, during the school year it’s generally 2-3 hours a day plus classes, but that’s homework, not job work. Right now, during the summer, I’m doing some casual freelance and personal web design and programming, and again I’d say I get maybe 2-3 hours of solid, productive work done on any given day. The rest of the time I spend reading way too many blogs and zoning out while listening to talk radio. 😉
That depends on the definition of “productive”. If we’re talking for my actual job, 1-4 depending upon what’s going on at work. The lower the workload at work, the higher my productivity elsewhere [motivation dependent].
Well, it depends. Usually I work on a site for about 2 hours a day, which isn’t that much. I surf a lot. A LOT! And I’ve still got school and a summertime job.
I don’t have to get productive work done anymore, and I *love* it! However, now I’m getting more work done then when it was demanded by an employer. I’m funny like that. (I would say 5-6 hours normally. Sometimes more.)
productive is definitely a word needing a definition. I’m a freelance web developer, so my definition of productive is “any work that helps me to make some cash”. Using that definition, I’d say it’s about 6 hours. on a VERY good day. I work from home and I have two kids. one is 3 and one is 13. right now, since it’s summer vacation for the school-bound children, they’re both here. All the time. 6 hours is a couple of hours in the early morning, and the remaining four spread out from noon to 11pm. Plus I have a horrid attention span, in fact, there’s a nice bird sitting outside my window which before this sentence started being typed, took about 4 minutes of my time. Damn birds.
Lately? Probably about two. I notice there’s an inverse relationship between the number of feeds in my reader and the amount of work I get done daily. I need to break this nasty RSS habit, before I get fired.
Matt, I’m obsessive about my calendar. I literally take two-and-a-half hours each Friday to block out the week ahead, where each pending task for each of my projects gets a block each day. If there’s anything I can’t do after that excercise, I have to notify my project managers/stakeholders or reprioritize…
That said, some days are better than others…some days I come in and crank out 7-9 hours of real work. Other days it’s less than 5. The sweet spot is probably around 6 hours. This includes administrative overhead (like my Friday calendar ritual), so I’m defining “productive” as “not screwing around on company time.” 🙂
Matt, what about you? (If you feel like sharing the number, that is.)
If I have a meeting with my academic adviser or group in the next two or three days, and if it is an “update” meeting, then I cram in about 10-15 hours of work. If I am bumming around generally, which is what I do more often, the number is around 4-6 hours. The number of hours I manage to sleep are, on the other hand, inversely proportional to the proximity of the next meeting.
That really depends on what we consider to be “productive”, doesn’t it? If we’re talking about time spent learning (I’m a law student, so that’s pretty much my full time job during the semester), I’d say approximately 4-5 hours per day, mostly briefing cases, reading relevant journal articles and chapters from critical commentaries on the law, and reviewing what I learnt in classes. That number shoots up to around 10-14 hours when working on papers or preparing for finals. (My sleep patterns are the inverse of my productivity patterns.)
I rely extensively on Outlook’s calendar functions and task lists to keep me on track. Fridays I spend at least 2 hours carefully blocking out my commitments for the next week, including scheduling down time for recharging and meeting up with friends.
On average get about 5-6 hours of productivity from my day. Three are completely blow off. I think the higher up you get in the working world, the more time you spend in meetings. Meetings are not productive, unless they are technical review or design meetings. Those are only productive if you follow the rules of meeting etiquette, keep things moving, and learn when to take things ‘off-line’.
My average week holds about 3.5-4 hours of meetings. I spend about 4 hours a day coding. Maybe I’ll spend an hour testing said code. Various distractions around the office (loud neighbours, etc.) are going to chew up a lot of one’s time regardless. Trips to lavatory and break room for elimination and re-fill of tea don’t help.
Depending on the day of course I am usually productive about 6 hours at work. My job classification as “webmaster” is pretty broad so most anything can be considered productive. At home I try to be productive as well, but that usually doesn’t happen to much, the joy of sitting down and relaxing takes over.
Around 2-3.
Goes up and down really, depending on my motivation. Though I guess it comes in at around 4-5 hours in general.
Well, I’d say anywhere between 4-5 hours, of course it increases at times depending on how mission critical what you are working on is. The rest of the day is spent posting/replying to mailing lists and surfing the web(which I do a lot, I should probably list this as productive research) and a few minutes on IM in a day.
Am I wasting too much time? 😉
At present being unemployed and fresh out of HNC Web Design course (which sucked and taught me funk all) I have about an hour, maybe 2 of proper work and thats on personal projects.
Balancing motivation and criticality (or clients/bosses ideas of criticality) of issues is the key. Ranges between 2-3 low end up to 7-8, usually at the 4-5 range. Though lately, it hasn’t been more than 4-5 much at all. (Maybe the summer weather?)
I strongly disagree with this statement of Eli’s “Trips to lavatory and break room for elimination and re-fill of tea don’t help.” I say they do help; they keep your physical body (remember that thing?) in condition to allow your mind to express itself (through code or whatever). It’s like stretching time before and after heavy exercise; essential to long-term productivity.
I am a big fan of the microbreak, but I’ll agree there’s a dangerous tradeoff with all this connectivity to non-work stuff from work. Here I am, taking a microbreak, but if this had been a link to a long and interesting article which was somewhat work related, I might spend a little too long keeping up with the zeitgeist and correspondingly less time on the tasks I’d hoped to complete today. The number of casual conversations via instant messenger is compensated for by the times I can often get issues/questions resolved significantly faster using IM. It requires a little discipline, though. 😉
Productive hours per day? It ranges from 2-12, usually averaging around 6, I’d say. Like other commenters I find many or most meetings non-productive.
I started tracking myself severa months ago and was surprised to see that I do about 2-3 hours a day of actual work for my employer in 8-10 hour days. I get plenty of work done on projects at that level and I’m fairly happy with my work and my employer recently gave me a raise, so we’re kosher on everything even though I spend half the day blogging or reading about blogging.
So starting June 1st, I shifted my work to gel with that. I work offsite most times but am in email and IM contact, but I started setting aside 4 hours to concentrate on work stuff for my employer. I work hard during that chunk (it’s often the early morning, sometimes early afternoon), and when I’m done with 3-4 hours of actual work, I shift over to personal programming projects.
With this setup I still get my work projects done, and I’m finding I no longer shift my attention among work communication, personal email, reading blogs, and doing blogging. I just work hard for a few hours on work, then shift to working on my own stuff and getting up to date on personal junk.
Usually? Nil.
It really depends whether or not the obsessive compulsive (“Can you fix this right now cause I just thought of it?”) or the manager to be (“Lets discuss architecture so I look important”) types wander over to my cube. My major career goal now is to get an office with a door!
Lots of good info here, thank you everyone for commenting.
On a good day? 2.
On a bad day? 18.
I always find unproductive work much more interesting.