I'm always curious how others "work." I use the Pomodoro technique myself, where I do a minimum of 8 sessions per workday. I try to do 10, but usually, I'm somewhere in between. I do not count meetings.
Every day at work, I show up and do a minimum of 4 straight hours of concentrated and focused work.
I often get told things like: "I'm killing it", "I'm a high producer", etc.
To me, I feel like I'm cheating the system, and I work too little.
I use a similar technique, combined with meticulous time tracking of every and any minute I spend professionally. As somebody who is self-employed, I quickly realized that working 8+ hours per day is an absolute myth. I count any day where I spent more than 4 hours in a state of focused work as a great day, and weeks where I spend more than 20 hours a week are rare. My personal goal has shifted from trying to work as many hours as possible to compressing these 4 productive hours into the smallest time window possible. Arriving at 10am at work, and leaving at 5pm is close to the optimum in my experience, due to coffee breaks, lunch, and the occasional goofing off on HN.
So no, you're not cheating the system, you are probably running at optimum efficiency. The efficiency of the average employee in terms of productive hours per day spent in chair is ridiculously low.
As a side note: I'm very much wondering whether I should insist on 40 hour work weeks when I get to the point of hiring people. I know there is a movement going for the 4-day workweek, but I personally see more in a 6 hour work day.
At best 2 flow hours before lunch. 2 flow hours after lunch. Sometimes bonus 1.5 flow hours after ‘tea time’ (not sustainable). Sometimes bonus 1 flow hour after dinner (completely unsustainable). Basically 4hrs is sutainable. 5.5 is pushing it.
Also I’ve found if you don’t take at least a whole day off (hobbies that look like work don’t quite count as time off) then daily concentration with quickly deteriorates as well.
edit: I should note that these are high concentration hours, my data isn’t as good for non heads down work.
> As a side note: I'm very much wondering whether I should insist on 40 hour work weeks
Productive h/w varies way too much from person to person and by circumstance. I let ppl set their own expected work schedule for the next few weeks by themselves as long as they keep the prediction up to date and their accuracy is reasonable.
I have had ppl get solid 40-60h/w effective time on target, and I have also seen <10h/w. The ppl I bring in are better at predicting their productivity and current life situation than I am. They are competent adults. Let them plan, structure, coordinate by themselves and only interfere if evidently necessary.
One size fits all is nonsense. If in doubt: measure and analyse.
I am a huge procrastinator. After a long time of trying various things I found out that getting shit done is a constant battle that starts very deep inside the mind. I'm talking about the stuff you talk with your therapist and probably not on the first session too.
I get stuff done only as long as I'm keeping the chain of motivation from the inside the mind to the thing I'm doing. If I start thinking that I "have" to do something, the chain is broken, as it means that I don't really want to do it.
When my mind is in the "I chose to do it" mode instead, I don't even need Pomodoro - I can consistently do stuff even if there is some aversion.
The most coherent writing about this I know is the Procrastination Monkey series from Waitbutwhy.
I certainly have plenty of days where I do around 8 hours of productive work. Of course there's also days that I only have 4 hours of productive work. I'd say in a given week there's usually around 2 or 3 days that I am productive for ~8 hours.
I am happy I work for a company that doesn't distract me too much as distractions cause me to lose focus. Every Monday we discuss deliverables and bugs issues with last deliverable. I add new features and fixes in the coming days and Thursday evening or Friday morning I send out a new release for testing. Apart from this there isn't too much communication, this approach allows me to focus on my work most of the time.
My daughter has been home for the last month or so, since schools have closed due to COVID. To stay productive, I only work in the night once my daughter is in bed. This way I have no distractions. I sleep in the morning while my girlfriend takes care of our daughter. In the afternoon I wake up and spend plenty of time with our daughter.
As a freelancer I only bill the hours that I feel I really delivered work. Because of this mindset and because I want to make a decent amount of money, I can't afford to slack too much. An hour of slacking is an hour I not bill to my client. I think some freelancers are probably more liberal in what hours they invoice, e.g. always invoice 8 hours every workday regardless if they really worked 8 hours or been slacking half a day. I think most clients wouldn't be able to tell the difference regardless.
>Every day at work, I show up and do a minimum of 4 straight hours of concentrated and focused work.
It's a lot TBH. I'd laugh loudly if I can do that everyday. 4 hours of focused work most likely will deleptes all of my energy and leaves me drained after work.
On my side. I work as a BI developer so a lot of time is spent in meeting. A day with 3 hours of meeting is fairly common but most of the time I don't need to speak so I mute the mic and only turn my focus to them when someone called me for advice.
A lot of time is wasted on things such as waiting for answers from a team in HQ which is located at the other side of the earth. Sometimes someone puts up a shiny new framework with quirky DSL and dumps it on our team with little documentation and you can foresee how much time it takes to "learn" and "unlearn" later. I'd recommend avoiding working in a team that has zero control of the tools and processes.
Not sure I would be able to cope with 3 hr meetings on a regular basis. I try to keep meetings as short as possible (15-30 min), and to have an e-mail thread already having taken place in anticipation of the call.
Yeah I do the same. Some of the meetings are not avoidable though considering I'm in the middle of requirements taking. For the rest I just ait through.
It was a lot worse when I worked in the analytic team. Pretty much everyday is 3 hours of meeting at least.
I tracked my productivity pretty rigorously in college for about a year. My maximum sustainable productivity was somewhere between 6 and 8 pomodoros a day. If a deadline was imminent, I could "crunch" and put in something like 12 a day for a week. Interestingly, I would crash afterwards and can only do about 3 pomodoros-per-day until my brain recovers. The average productivity in the crash + recovery cycle was also 6! So I was just borrowing from future productivity.
I also do ~4 hours of concentrated work first thing in the morning. As my day progresses, my head gets filled with all kinds of shit (good and bad), and it's really detrimental to not just focus but overall output.
In the morning, my mind is fresh and more-or-less distraction free and I feel hyper-focused even without caffeine. Also, by doing a lot in the morning, motivation stacks up and "wins" convert into more "wins" throughout the day
After that long session, I'll usually take an hour break. I try to make sure the last half hour of the break isn't filled with any instantly gratifying content (reddit, yt, etc) so my mind isn't chasing another hit of dopamine when I resume my work. Anecdotally, I feel like this helps me
Whenever I loath doing a task, I tell myself to do it for 5 minutes and if I still don't feel like doing it, then I can do something else. It's a pretty common technique and works wonderfully for me. Something about my pride and not wanting to give up after 5 minutes helps me power through
Anecdotally from myself, colleagues, friends, blogs, and random forum posters, 4 solid hours of knowledge work is right on the nose.
I work on my own time, starting almost immediately after waking up with the sunrise. I get in 3-4 hours while the world is quiet leading up to lunch time; then I'll cook some lunch and go training. Post-lunch work is autopilot admin or operation tasks. There are days where focus is amped up to 11 and the brain fog doesn't set in—but those days are rare.
I'd say that your feelings of "cheating the system" are ingrained by a culture that doesn't apply to your profession.
During school I'd immedietly do all of my assignments. Id spend anywhere from 2 to 6 straight hours getting the entire week of assignments done. By the time I got tired I was done with most of it and had time to do what I wanted. Worked wonders, while everyone else was struggling I was able to get straight A's and work on side projects/video games.
Is the "real" world supposed to be different than this experience?
I don’t know what the real world is, but my experience as a chronic procrastinator with ADD was the polar opposite of this. I did assignments on the bus, wrote speeches during the period before I’d have to give them, etc. I’m mildly messed up from these habits now, but I did (mostly, with some spectacular failures) get away with it at the time.
If something captured my imagination, like certain writing assignments or my programming classes, then I could hyperfocus.
The problem with work is that if you get done, there is always more work to do. So the sprint never ends in a way. In college things are pre-defined and you just have to keep in sync, if you do it early like you or late, the tempo stays the same.
With work there is no tempo. However what happens in reality is that for agile teams there is a little bit of a tempo. A Sprint, which is usually two weeks. In my experience there is always more work in a Sprint that can be done.
The only solution I have found is working, and then letting things settle. If a story takes 3 days and you get done in 4 hours, what do you do?
Increasingly I have absorbed "work" into a three step feedback cycle - something comparable to OODA but with a more contemplative purpose. It's really intended for creative projects but it scales and generalizes nicely to many life things:
1. Principles - why you do a thing
2. Benchmarks - what defines success and failure at making the thing
3. Mediums - how thing is made
The starting point - the review - is often to-do list like. The to-do list's function is mostly taken care of within five minutes of heading out the door for a walk with out-loud self-talking: "So, yesterday this happened. And I want to do this today." Verbalizing it(while a bit surprising to passerby) makes a huge difference because it does the "getting it out of me" function that all these apps do, and then lets the thought disappear into conversation without a List of Shame forming.
But the thing I say I want to do is usually defined in terms of medium(the specific actions I take or techniques I will be using). If I agree I can drill down to specifics until I've designed an exact step-by-step process. If I disagree with that it's going to happen that I loop around to either the principle(is there a good reason?) or the benchmark(am I measuring the goal correctly?).
Blockage can usually be identified by pointing to one part of the cycle that doesn't work. I have to get all three parts to cohere for an action to matter. So I will have days where I act and then learn that the benchmark is wrong, thus needing to throw away the result but getting a little bit closer to coherent design.
All of this happens outside the formal workplace, mind. The principles and benchmarks of the business, after all, are independent of my own. But it pushes me to find useful perspectives and get away from hours-on-clock production, which I needed to do when I started working for myself. I've ended up with all my income deriving from investment, which could also be seen as "cheating the system". I actually worked backwards from the outcome(hmm, somehow that happened) to what made it happen(identifying and refining how I operate). When I do the analysis it's really clear that the times of my life that were most stressed were the ones where obligations made me act, act, act without being able to go through the loop, so now I'm trying to apply it more consciously.
In case it is helpful to anyone, we've recently started a post series in the HourStack blog about this topic. A lot of focus goes into time management strategies, but often prioritization is ignored. It's quite powerful if you can put the two together in a way that works for you as doing the right work is preferable to just doing work.
There are many prioritization and time management strategies out there, but we intro some of the popular ones [0] and we'll be expanding each of those into detailed posts over the coming weeks. The first one about using the Ivy Lee method to prioritize tasks [1].
4 hours, in my experience, is the absolute maximum that a motivated person can work on a heavy task in a day. I can't cite any study for this, but it's a number that I've seen used by really solid teams, internally. Billable hours, of course, exceed 4 hours-- but that's because billable hours includes "boilerplate" work.
4 hours is A LOT. You can get a lot of stuff done in 4 hours. 4 hours x 5 days a week can be sustained long term as well provided that the remainder butt-in-seat work isn't too draining/demoralizing.
My maximum is about 8 hours for a creative / cognitive task, but that requires pushing / forcing yourself on a level comparable with Apollo Creed's training montage.
I have no system. I boot up my laptop in the morning, have a coffee and answer all support emails. After finishing my emails I feel like I've done a lot and start looking at my fun projects (trading bot, IoT projects) Then a server error pops up on Telegram and I realize I was supposed to rewrite the image processing routine. Back to work, and up until late at night before finally finishing this task. In short, event driven task management.
Every day at work, I show up and do a minimum of 4 straight hours of concentrated and focused work.
I often get told things like: "I'm killing it", "I'm a high producer", etc.
To me, I feel like I'm cheating the system, and I work too little.
What do other people do?