For me (as a programmer) it really varies a ton. I used to put in insane stretches, due to the medication I needed to take in the past and that is how I got used to things in college.
Now I work more regularly, but still can put in a solid 6+ hr day most of the time, and yet some days… yeesh I’m lucky if I can get a third of that. So I work more on other days to compensate.
Nice try, HR lady.
HR Lady?
We all know HR is actually just an AI bot now.
Their pronouns are: (Kill/All/Humans)
Productive work where I can say “this contributed directly to completion of this thing” amd point to something tangible is probably a couple hours.
Four hours a day is spent coordinating work or ensuring people are on the same page and things aren’t forgotten. Basiczlly the stuff that would happen on its own if people were perfect and wanted to do everything they needed to. That is because my position involves a lot of project management duties.
Another couple hours having meetings that are more important to attend in case something new came up than doing direct work or blowing off steam with coworkers aka teambuilding.
This all swings wildly, sometimes I spend an entire day producing something tangible and some days are wasted entirely on meetings. But overall that seems about right.
Fwiw I would count meetings that are productive as in organizing things as “work”. Not all are that way sadly:-).
There are a lot of busy work meetings that people love to use to dismiss meetings as a whole, but a well run meeting can both avoid a ton of work and get people onboard with things they were likely to blow off. One project I am running has people volunteering to do work and we have even decided not to do something after getting into the weeds, saving a ton of time. But if we didn’t decide as a group we would have wasted so much time on that thing.
My general rule is that if the meeting exists to let people know what happened, what is coming up, and no decisions will be made it should have been an email. If there will be a group decision or work distributed based on feedback from the group it is likely to be productive.
You mention hours as a programmer?
Is that active coding? Because as you gain experience you may spend less time writing code that will ultimately be replaced by more efficient processes.
E.g. quality over quantity. Are you being more thoughtful during the design process?
This is an “Ask” style community, so the answer is however you feel like it is for your situation - I only got us started to give us a beginning for the conversation:-).
But to answer your question specifically about my own POV: some meetings are very productive, so not “only” the coding, no. Also, the 6 hours is quite the lower bound - it could be twice that if I am on a roll, with programming, with design matters, documentation, or whatever.
You don’t have to overthink it:-). Although you can if you like? :-P
Surely this is just baiting someone to post a clip from Office Space.
I program too; some days 11 hours, some days 2 or less. I have never been able up to do a steady schedule.
And if I code too much over a few days, I take time off to heal my brain
