I’ve always been curious how much work the average person does per day. It would be a very valuable metric to have for setting expectations - of course we’re all different and listen to yourself, but just to have a ballpark...
I burned myself out at my last gig trying to be nearly 100% productive all the time since expectations are opaque. Sure, “nobody cares how much you work as long as your work gets done” but what about when the work is estimated poorly (and everything is always late...). Too nebulous of a statement.
The 12.5 hours number from the article seems pretty rough given that it’s based only on time spent in app, but it’s something.
I wrote https://betterself.io (open-sourced) to figure this out for myself. After analyzing a year's worth of supplements and habits -- meditation at the start of my day had the highest correlation of productivity beating out any supplement I bought (I tried about 70+ supplements last year).
Any other useful correlations? Also a note on the page linked: it's not clear to me whether I need another app collecting the data or if I will need to directly enter it in your app.
>I’ve always been curious how much work the average person does per day. It would be a very valuable metric to have for setting expectations - of course we’re all different and listen to yourself, but just to have a ballpark...
I work in sessions of 45 minutes, then I take a 15 minute break. I use MagicWorkCyclce [1] to time this. I usually get 6 blocks of 45 minutes in on a good day. That corresponds to 4.5 hours of "real" work (deep work, focused mode work, whatever). I'm an academic, if that matters.
Usually stand up, stretch my legs, talk to some people if I'm at the office. Most of the times I always get a cup of tea as well (or coffee if its before 1pm)
I can't strictly speak on my productivity for these times, but I spend an average of 24 out of 40 hours per week focused in on my IDE, text editor, testing application, CI server, etc. My per day time fluctuates between 4 hours and 6 hours. These times include both developing and administrative tasks like managing tickets.
Note that I don't have the plugin running in my shell. Ay Git actions or fiddling with the shell does not get counted.
> Sure, “nobody cares how much you work as long as your work gets done” but what about when the work is estimated poorly (and everything is always late...).
Estimates are just that, they are guides. They are often wrong.
I burned myself out at my last gig trying to be nearly 100% productive all the time since expectations are opaque. Sure, “nobody cares how much you work as long as your work gets done” but what about when the work is estimated poorly (and everything is always late...). Too nebulous of a statement.
The 12.5 hours number from the article seems pretty rough given that it’s based only on time spent in app, but it’s something.