One of the reasons that I hated being a manager, was because the job involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen.

I couldn’t work on my own projects (because I was on paid work time), and it would have been irresponsible, in the extreme, to put myself into the critical path (because it was no guarantee that I would be able to reliably work). I sometimes tasked myself with projects for work, but they were almost always ignored by my company, and that hurt.

I’ve heard that being a soldier in a combat zone is long hours of idleness, punctuated by short periods of terror and stress.

That pretty much describes my time as a manager, without the “terror” part (and the bullets and explosions).

It sucked.

I now work at home, on my own technical tasks. I get a lot done. My personal productivity is through the roof.

I take a lot of breaks. Sometimes, I even nap.

But I don’t have a time clock. I will often start coding, at 6AM (sometimes, before I even get in the shower, after my morning exercise), and will continue to code, until I hit the sack. I often test my software, while I’m sitting in bed, and will enter issues, from my iPad.

When I have a problem that I’m chasing, or I am in the middle of a big implementation phase, I can work for many hours, straight. I will barely come up for air, and I feel absolutely exhausted, when I finally step back (nap time!).

I’m not particularly concerned about a measured life. I get a lot done; far more than I ever did, when I was being paid.

And I’m having a blast.

That means you need to be dealing with poor performers, rewarding with outstanding performers, trying to improve uneven performers, managing expectations from your management and shielding your team from the vicissitudes of your bosses as much as possible, fighting for things your team needs while shielding them from the demoralizing realities of working for a big company where HR and IT etc. don’t give two shits about the actual mission (if applicable), keeping an accurate budget, making sure your team is individually recognized for their success but that you take the blame for their failures, responding to changes in direction and getting your team on board, being the face of management even when that’s unpopular, and doing all the other little things required to keep the team going as effectively as possible.

There’s a lot of work to do there, and it can be incredibly rewarding when it’s going well and incredibly frustrating when it’s not.

It can also mean you have days when your team is working all out to deliver and the only thing you can do is order pizza and keep distractions away. Those are boring, often frustrating days.

It’s not for everybody, but that’s what I think a good manager does. I think it’s often easier when you manage a team and aren’t an expert at what they do (although you still need to understand at a relatively deep level), since that minimizes the chances of you trying to dive in and solve the problem.

I'm not surprised to hear a manager's work can go unnoticed. That's unfortunate :(

Good management is really rare. One in five or even ten maybe.

One in fifty, achieve the above but are able to produce teams that regardless of their manager in the future would produce good results at minimum. Great managers don't seem to just focus on the business but also leveling up each individual on the team.

I think plenty of individuals have had mediocre managers and they would describe them as good.

Working with "the best" ICs reshape your perspective of what is a great ICs. Just like managers. Much earlier in my career I used to believe that great ICs were one in 20, then it became fifty and now, two hundred.

Doing this well also requires building relationships with the team and trust. Recognizing little things like how people can be afraid of a project (and that fear can lead to spinning), and how to break things down/prioritize.

In software I think there are also system changes that can make individuals happier (often stuff described in books like the Phoenix project and working effectively with legacy code). A lot of which enable the things you described.

People are happy when they’re productive and goals are clear/make sense (and they have the space to focus on the work for them) and they get recognized for it.

Glad it's behind me, though.

Here's a couple:

> Chris was the best manager I've ever reported to. Period. He was supportive of his team, always motivating us to deliver excellence, even under daunting schedules set by the people above him. Because of Chris' support and commitment to his team, he fostered a deep loyalty and respect from our department.

> Chris is passionate about developing software and about technology in general. This means he is always in touch with the latest trends and best practices in the industry. However, he is careful not to introduce a new process or methodology to his group unless it has clear benefits and he has considered the input of everyone affected.

Chris has always been very well-respected by his engineers because his management style allows their best skills to shine. It's not simply a hands-off approach; he'll look to remove roadblocks where he can and offer help in any way possible. He is good at identifying an inefficiency and reaching out to help improve it.

More than just management skills, Chris is a kind, understanding, sensible and fair human being. At one point, we had a six-year run where no one left the group. I hadn't really noticed or appreciated this stability until someone from our HR department pointed out how remarkable it was. This could not have happened without someone like Chris managing the group.

But, what do they know? I'm sure they were mistaken. BTW: One of them was from a chap I laid off.

Testimonials from employees are a good indicator for a good manager.

I felt good about what I did, even though I didn't enjoy it.

> 27 years is a long time to stay in a job you hate.

This statement shows that we are in a privileged place, indeed. We get to have a career, where we can do work that we enjoy, and make a lot of money at it.

The great majority of people don't get that. Most of my friends don't like their jobs. Some, are very good at what they do, and make a lot of money.

The job was relatively easy. I liked the company I worked for, and my peers. I felt a great deal of Responsibility towards the company, my peers, and my employees. I made enough to live on, and save. I could have made a lot more money, elsewhere. Despite the obvious sneers and judging that I get, I'm actually no slouch.

Nowadays, I work for free, on software that helps others.

WFM. YMMV.

How do you do that? Apparently I'm an inconsistent performer now.

When I say uneven, I’m thinking of somebody who either: (a) is excellent at certain key aspects of their jobs but clearly below expectations in others to the point that it’s an issue, or (b) somebody who performs well but doesn’t always put in enough effort. In both cases, it’s subjective and difficult to determine that it’s to the point where intervention is required, because that’s usually an uncomfortable conversation. Often, you’re the first manager ever telling the person that they need to improve—-even if you’re not the first person to think there’s an issue. Typically, the other person will think you’re an asshole. As another commenter said, they may recognize later on that you were right but normally in the near term, you’ll have strained the relationship. (That’s why managers avoid those conversations. Sometimes it’s cowardice, sometimes it’s deciding that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze today.)

As for how to work on improvement, that always has to be case-by-case considering the issue and the personality. Sometimes the “stop doing that” conversation is enough. Sometimes coaching or mentoring or development experiences can help. If those don’t work, can you shift responsibilities around or find a different role that is a better fit?

Normally you try to gently do those things anyway before you have the direct conversation, and then hope the direct conversation provides some motivation/insight to take it more seriously.

If you’re on the receiving end of that conversation, I guess my advice would be to try to critically self-reflect and see if you can understand where your manager is coming from. If you can, then you’ve both got a common place to start from towards improvement. If you can’t, or you think they’re just being unreasonable about expectations, then it is probably time to move on or hope they move on quickly.

The "improvements" I've been told to make is to document why stories are slow - mostly context switching from prod support, context switching from my role as ASC, and of course just being slow when working with a system or language that I haven't worked on in a while.

So my perspective based on the feedback is, this isn't a performance issue (if it was it would be under communication instead of speed). It solely addresses visibility of the switching. I have requested consistent work, like being full stack in a single stack. The whole point of specialization of labor is to increase speed and quality, yet it seems this management tenent is wholly missed by my organization. You want consistent speed? Give me consistent work.

The best part is I got a 4.5% pay cut, yet they say they want to retain me. All while the company is talking about across the board increases (which I won't be eligible for) and having trouble filling roles that typically stay open for 6 months. Which is it - do I suck, or do you want to keep me?

They want to keep you, they just don't want to pay you (more than they have to).

After you leave, they will have to hire a new person and give them 120% of your current pay. (And the new person will be less productive, at least at the beginning, simply because they will be new.)

But the company is making the bet that you will stay, at least for a few years, because apparently most people do.

Many managers don't realize this. Even managers that have a ton of experience, all they do is fire or have harsh conversations with people who "underperform." The truth of the matter is a good manager is rare. 1 out of 10 literally and it's not an experience issue. A good manager is one who is highly highly unbiased and people are generally not like this.

The person you replied to is not a good manager. Based on his reply he is actually below average.

Basically for these managers good employees are those that can predict what the manager wants and how he thinks. If the person is able to guess and predict what his manager wants on a consistent basis, then objectives are more clear to this employee and as a result he can achieve them. These people are then perceived as "good employees".

Due note that a good manager makes objectives for each task unambiguous and crystal clear. A bad manager leaves a lot of room to fuzzy concepts like "quality of work" because he himself isn't clear about what he wants.

I have seen it many times. Employees who are basically geniuses fired because the manager wasn't able to realize how smart the person was. Instead the manager left the employee with vague instructions and expected him to just "get it." The manager didn't know that the employee is an expert in infrastructure and deployed him on writing algorithms...

This is an unwise and inefficient deployment of resources. It is the managers job to determine what each of his employees like and what they are exceptional at and deploy resources accordingly. It is also the managers job to understand in detail the nature of the assignment given to an employee so tasks can be handed out efficiently.

Bad managers tend to throw random people at random tasks without fully understanding the task or the person. In these cases there is an element of luck involved. How hard the task is versus if the person assigned to the task is suited for that task. An employee who handles the task well or is able to temper the expectations of the manager through communication is perceived as "good."

These managers are easily recognizable. I will tell you how to identify them. They perceive the world as employees who are "underperformers" and those who are not. The person you replied to put the world in 3 tiers lol. The world is very nuanced and it is impossible to divide people into three buckets like this. He is the quintessential example of "bad manager."

I'm unsure if you are asking for advice on how to improve because your current manager marked you as inconsistent or if you think GP is calling all people "who are trying to improve as inconsistent"

I'm a manager. I want to improve ALL of my team. To rephrase, I want each of my members to work on things that benefit themselves (they improve) and benefit the team - if we can't do that, I zoom out: how can they benefit the team, department, the company, the industry, the world. You might notice this means I may find a better place for them on a different team or even outside the company. All of this. ALL OF THIS is trying to help the person in an area that he/she wants to grow in.

Growth opportunities are very diverse: coding a new language, learning at a seminar, teaching at a seminar, side projects, art, games, mentorship

Its a lie manager making dev's effective at their job. All a manager needs to do is communicate the requirements properly most preferably in a written document. That is the only useful thing. Everything else like motivating are just BS which has become very clear in the post covid WFH situation.

Now looking back i can feel the needless interference by managers that slowed down the progress of work. The other sad thing is they assume they have power to fire people to some extent which usually junior engineers believe for the first few years.

Before concluding i had a bad manager, let me say i have had over 10 managers in the past 20 years and its not manager's fault its the job that's BS.

Precisely. Hence managers delegate this to devs to figure it out themselves and make documentation easy enough for them to understand on a higher level so they can make it look like they understand whats going on. This is what been exposed with WFH.

The important thing that pisses me off is the salary of manager is about 50% higher than IC's. IMO it should not be 70% of IC's salary considering the skills it requires. Manager does not have more responsibility than IC. Manager never takes responsibility for projects failure, its always blamed on IC. Its easy for a manager to get away because usually about 5 IC's will be in a project and one or two failure to deliver features are tolerated. Combine this with attrition its so easy for a manager to not take any responsibility.

I got a lot of joy out of helping everybody develop, find their groove and helping them coordinate and learn from each other.

The business demands I was shielding them from were extremely stressful though. A million things that everybody wanted done yesterday in wildly different directions.

At some point in trying to make concessions on the business side I started losing the support of a couple of senior guys on the team though. After a couple of months it was pretty clear there was no getting that confidence back. When the demands from both sides became too high to resolve, I didn’t have any choice but to move on. Really frustrating too because I gave so much to that job and team, but you can tell when you’ve lost people and there’s no easy fix like refactoring the code to make it all better.

As a manager, trust is the only thing that allows you to be effective; when your team knows that you are really looking out for them.

you kind of have to do this. idk how I could function effectively if I didn't have a reason to be looking at the code all the time.

Even if the manager specifically says "Hey everyone, give me some feedback. Be open and honest" - That's a trap. No one will ever actually do that, because if you bruise your manager's ego, they have the power to make your life a living hell.

As someone who has worked with managers who did tried to get too involved in projects, they just become a dictator. Since the manager will play an oversight role in the project, any small issues will be visible to them at all times. Normally, the team could work out small roadblocks on their own to keep stress low. If the manager is involved, they'll often try to "make themselves useful" and slow things down. Let's not even mention manager statements like "Hey guys, let's keep a note of this so we can work on restructuring our processes in case this happens in the future"... (Because everyone loves redrafting SOPs every 2 months, right?).

A good manager is one that stays out of the way and lets you do your job. Having a manager on a project kinda feels like that episode of The Office when Michael comes to Jim's party and everyone was just kinda standing around awkwardly.

1) I pick what I'm going to work on after the rest of the team picks their tickets.

2) I fix one bug per day, not matter what.

3) HIPPO (HIghest Paid Person's Opinion) is not an acceptable reason to make a decision.

It's worked well for me, your milage may vary.

Then I'll never know how to make things better. It's dysfunctional when you can't communicate safely and equally dysfunctional when problems are hidden for fear of a manager's ego.

If you cross the barrier the people in your team will be put under pressure having to do things like for example disagreeing with technical decision or debating something in a code review with... the same person that has the power to promote or fire them.

It creates a power gradient in every day activities.

That's "stealth" micromanagement regardless of the good intentions and technical skills of the manager.

Of the best managers I've worked for, one of the most obviously important things they did was keep other teams off our backs. Constant interruptions, shifting priorities, "just a quick question", and the like do more to destroy a team and its progress than anything else. Their name doesn't get attached to lines of code or completed items but a lot more things get completed as a result.

Do they need to be the one with hiring/firing/promotion/rewards authority? I don't know.

It was what it was, and it is what it is.

I just wrote about my own experience, and my own feelings about that experience, as opposed to rendering judgment (look through my posting history, here, and you’ll find very little judgment of others. I am too old and tired to fight. I have better things to do with my time, other than TCP/IP posturing).

1) reading emails. These emails generally consist of a few categories of things — stuff I need to be informed about, questions, asks for permission (a special form of question), documents (generally decision and decision docs, or stuff from Product), and meeting requests.

2) meetings. These meetings generally consist of stuff that couldn’t be handled over email, but is a lot of the same stuff. It’s also status updates, not from my staff, but with my peers. 1:1s and staff meeting (mine and my manager’s) are the balance.

3) There is no 3. Really, it’s a full time job to do 1 and 2. Every now and then I will carve out some time to write a document myself, but in general that gets delegated because I will do it more slowly than someone who doesn’t have a pile of time-sensitive email and meetings to deal with.

Oh I forgot - we give the people who do this control over the employment of the people who do the actual work. Very weird system.

> And yet one that billions of people participate in.

Most of humanity participated in slavery for a long time as well. A lot of Europe's city dwellers enjoyed watching the hanging of criminals at dawn or sun-down, too. People also developed the mass habit of accusing a neighbor they don't like for being a witch and were hoping to have them burned (because the neighbor's chicken pecked your watermelon seeds or whatever; yeah, people are that petty).

Appealing to statistics and what the majority does is missing the point of the big power imbalances that are sadly one of the constants in every human society or system.

It doesn't help that many programmers are rather introverted and prefer passive resistance as opposed to having a good and informative one-on-one meeting, of course. And many managers are stuck in the unenviable position of having to develop skills to extract valuable actionable info from introverted people who prefer to sabotage them behind their backs. I recognize that and I sympathize.

But the inconvenient truth is, and one many managers forget about all the time, is that most of us have zero decision power -- which is quite the shame because we need it in no small amount of situations.

Formulas like Scrum (or anything "agile" really) are a complete and pathetic joke. The process must adapt to the task at hand. The best performing teams I've been in had zero process -- they only had some 10-15 ground rules like "if you are stuck for more than a day please raise the issue with the rest of the team; nobody will think you're stupid, we'll only try to unblock you". Whatever needed to be done, we used our own breed of process that best served it. On the rare occasions Scrum was actually useful btw. Most of the time the schema was more or less "enable your ICs, actively seek to unblock them, then leave them the hell alone, they know what they're doing".

You alluded to (in another comment) that you don't make the decisions; that you facilitate the people to arrive at the right decision. Kudos to you but you should still recognize that you're the minority, sadly.

Most programmers are forced to work with managers whose ego is easily bruised. That's a fact of life, one that can't be fixed by going to another job because the odds are at least 90% that it will be the same there as well.

So yeah, there are problems on both sides, that's unquestionable. I mostly went on to rant about how appealing to statistics is a poor strategy to evaluate if a given system is good (which doesn't at all explain how many companies started getting more bang for their buck after they moved to a 4-day working week btw; among other examples).

It’s quite simple - you as a manager can only do the work of one IC but your are responsible for multiple ICs. If they sit idle, make the wrong decisions, are demoralized or leave the company, you hurt the org much more than help by technical contributions yourself.

I’d put the cutoff at about a team of 6. Below 6 you can do technical work yourself, above 6 you’re better off taking care of your team.

[1] This business jargon term has seriously got to go. It's bullshit and oddly demeaning.

As a manager-of-managers, when I hear that a manager is doing "a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen", it's usually a sign that something has gone wrong.

Don't get me wrong: I don't expect everyone to be productive 100% of the day, but if managers are reaching a point where even they feel like they have too much free time then one of two things has happened:

1) The company has grossly over-hired for the workload at hand. If all the tasks are done and the manager couldn't find anything to do if they tried, it's possible that the company just hired way too many people or greatly under-shot their workloads.

This really does happen at some companies that get so big and profitable that executives start chasing headcount and having the biggest department they can get away with. You end up with so many managers that most of them spend their days sitting around or, even worse, inventing new and unnecessary work for their teams just to fill time. It's not good.

2) Or: Managers have too narrow of a view of what their job is. Speaking generally (not accusing the parent comment) - This often happens when developers who haven't experienced good management or managerial mentoring get promoted into their own management positions and assume their job is literally just to delegate to the engineers and then check on them until it's done. In non-stagnant tech companies, there is always more for managers to be doing: Reviewing/updating documentation, helping with hands-on testing of the product, observing or interacting with customers to get a deeper understanding of the problem, coordinating with the sales team to get a better understanding of their domain, and the list goes on. Many of these tasks aren't immediately obvious without proper managerial mentorship, and they might be downright foreign if your only experience with managers has been of the delegate-and-wait variety.

Personally, my experience was that I was far busier as a manager than I ever was as an IC. IC work is more narrowly scoped and easier to constrain to specific time limits, or get targets and deadlines shifted according to however much work could be done. As a manager, the amount of work that could be done was both never-ending and also extremely varied, comprising tens or maybe hundreds of possible tasks that often needed attention in parallel, combined with the inter-personal demands of managing people and constant hiring.

From a security standpoint (because that’s my wheelhouse), if you’re not under attack, your metrics suck, if you chase tickets, a lot of them get closed without effective resolution.

We’re not manufacturing widgets, and can’t earn that bonus by making 10% more widgets.

In other words, only stupid people have a work ethic?

Big companies tend to hire "specialists" to do all those tasks you mentioned, which I think is a mistake. If the purpose of those tasks is to improve the function of product development, which can be rephrased as "make the coders more effective" then each of those people require a high bandwidth communication channel to the coders. You can only have so many people that you communicate a lot with, and so the effectiveness of those people in improving the effectiveness of product development is limited. Their job is to make sure the devs arent working in silos but they all just end up forming their own silos because its simply not practical to have high bandwidth communication with all these different groups of specialists.

Im talking about designers, product managers, project managers, user researchers, data analysts etc ...

My broader point is that I agree with your vision of what a manager should do but IME it's not how larger companies tend to be structured.

I use the time to triage my day. Works a charm.

The only problem here is an employer claiming ownership of a personal project, assuming the personal project isn’t interfering with employee product delivery and isn’t violating employer security policies.

My solution to this is dual employment. My secondary employer has trouble differentiating work time from personal time so they end up with the most liberal IP assignment policies I have ever seen. Everybody, corporate IP attorneys, know this.

So, unless it’s making money or an employer wants to lay down a provision patent they won’t fight you on it. They are fully aware the alternatives are moving to another company or to stop innovating. As a result most employers with silently bless the personal projects even on company time. They won’t bless these efforts directly because personal projects on company time or property are ethical violations that legally compel the employer to take ownership and shut it down. That is the last thing anybody wants.

I was careful to keep my side work to stuff that did not interfere, or compete, with my corporate employer, so there was never a problem.

As a JavaScript developer everybody wants to tell me how it’s done, what the right way is, and so forth. It’s not worth arguing over because the most incompetent developers tend to be the most vocal ones.

I have been writing JavaScript full time for almost 15 years and most corporate JavaScript I see is complete garbage. How do you know what excellent code is? Numbers. Code size, execution time, maintenance time, defect resolution time, test automation capabilities, new feature delivery time, and so forth. For example if your app takes 4 seconds to load and mine takes 50ms I will just assume I am less wrong, but you can’t advocate for that because will cry about code style and frameworks and other bullshit. So silently I write my personal project.

I also have a vision of where I want the team and the company to be and try to get strategies to achieve it. For example, increases pay bands justification, promotions, career ladder, more training budget, paying for software, approve open source usage requests that are blocking someone etc.

Experienced this on multiple occasions especially recently and it does indeed hurt - especially when you know what a difference it could make to users or fellow developers and it’s ignored or ignored and then some higher up miraculously suddenly invents an identical idea several months down the line.

Bonus points if it’s a whole team effort for almost two years that gets more or less scrapped despite the obvious need for it as a dependency for multiple teams.

One of my dreams, was to be in a place, where I could create and craft my own work, without having others take steamers onto it. It's personally gratifying, to know that all the "I could do this better if..." stuff was absolutely right.

These days, I have to keep the scope small, and, still, no one is getting rich, but I am pretty chuffed with what I'm doing.

Can't put a price on that.

RescueTime wrote a similar post, but +100 data:

https://rescuetime.wpengine.com/work-life-balance-study-2019...

Look at the second histogram. The average is roughly aligned with OP’s summary, but there is huge variance. These comments have already devolved into people telling each other they are lying, or about to burn out - all I ask is humility in the face of our messy shared reality.

Thank you for listening to my TED Talk, I guess

When I was younger, one of my early challenges was that I had been misled to believe that only time spent in the editor, writing code counted as “working”. There’s a somewhat pervasive idea among devs that meetings, e-mail, communications, team discussions, and other such facts of business do not count as work when you’re a programmer. It led to some anxiety before I accepted that collaboration and communication is also work, something that seems obvious in retrospect but was difficult to swallow as a young programmer raised on Internet forums.

Some people default to the other extreme, where they seem to count every hour as “work” if they did anything remotely related to work during that hour. By now, I’ve worked with a lot of people who claim 60-80 hour work weeks simply because they check their phone and type out single-sentence replies in Slack or e-mails on evenings and weekends. Some of the laziest, least productive people I've worked with are the same people posting on LinkedIn on Sunday morning about their 80 hour grinds every week.

Two better metrics I’ve found for gauging productivity are total hours spent in work mode (in the office, or sitting at my home office desk) and total time spent in time wastes (Hacker News, non-work Slacks, Twitter, and so on). If I’m accumulating more than 30 minutes commenting on HN or scrolling Twitter, it’s a sign that I’m not really engaged with work and I need to shake things up.

I’ve shared my time tracking tools and techniques with a lot of people that I’ve mentored. It’s some times shocking for someone to realize that they’ve been spending 4 hours on social media (Discords, HN and Reddit are social media) during a what’s supposed to be a workday. Many of them gauge their own level of focus as average or better than average before actually tracking it. They might even be surrounded by friends or peers who engage in the same amount of distraction during the day, reinforcing their own behavior. Usually once they see what they’re doing as a hard number they can take steps to break the habit, but for some it’s so deeply engrained that they don’t understand what they’re doing until they see it as a number.

In my experience, people who claim to regularly work 60-80 hours/week are completely full of it. Yes, there’s this “thought about work for a second, that’s another hour” mentality. But there’s also just a ton of people outright lying about the amount of time they actually sit at a desk.

I worked at Yahoo for a while and nearly everyone told me they worked long hours, like 10 hour days, every day. The vast majority of them were working at most 8. People would talk about working late but they came in even late, too. Showing up at 11am and leaving at 7pm is not a long day. The people claiming to work until 7 were also not actually stating that late typically, because if I stayed until 6 the place was a ghost town. There legitimately were a few people who were working long days, but they very much seemed to be the exception. There was an unhealthy culture of pretending to work absurd hours, though.

I liked the freedom to work long days every now and then, and then take some time off later when I wanted a long weekend or so. A colleague decided that's a great idea and started doing the same, but stopped after a week or two when he realized he's just accruing negative time.

I'm not claiming that I was fully productive with my office hours, just agreeing with you that some people really do think they work more than they actually do.

I use Qbserve on MacOS and I like it, but I haven’t reviewed options in maybe 5 years. It “just works” so I haven’t felt the need to explore.

https://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf

His models show peak productivity between 5 and 6 hours a day.

In my own experience, I have found productivity more related to sleep and exercise than anything else.

Getting 7 hours good sleep (which means winding down for at least 30 minutes before sleep, a stretching exercise or meditation), and enough exercise every day to get the heart rate up.

If I don’t do this for a couple of days, I can be unproductive from hour 2 after waking! We managed to implement a defect metric in my previous team that worked well, my defects went through the roof after a couple of days of 2 hours sleep.

There is a lot of literature on this correlation, but just thought I would share my own experience.

2hours sleep or 2hours less sleep? Because 2hrs is approximately none, that would not be at all surprising.

We wanted to get a handle on how often work went backwards in our life cycle, and why it went backward.

We had a JIRA lifecycle hook that asked for the reason for moving from SIT state back to Development state, or from UAT state back to Development state etc..

One of which was defect. A defect either being a confirmation that wasn't implemented as per the spec, or an edge case bug.

Test failures were different, we had automated testing so test case failures were picked up before the ticket moved on in the lifecycle.

We could also move completed tickets from Deployed to Review, if a production error was linked to a ticket. This movement could also be tagged as a defect in the same way.

We would then just query the jira database and report on it, by project, by assignee etc..

It wasn't a blame exercise, we were more interested in the % of tickets that moved backwards, and the relative percentages of causes for the move. Another category for example was 'Requirements Changed', we worked with banks, so we had a LOT of these!

I went through the loop three times before I recognized the pattern, and decided it was a good time to pass out.

There's no denying that there are far more people claiming they work 60-80 hour weeks than would collate with the data that you and OP have provided.

I think these people are generally overworked but are also poor assessors of their own performance, taking worst cases as averages and calling a day in which you finish at 5pm but answer a slack message at 9pm, a 12 hour day.

Not to be too sardonic, but: I'm on call frequently but I don't tell people I've been working for 24 hours because I got a page at midnight, even if it can feel a bit like that by the end of the next day.

Some of the more senior devs were very honest about their downtime. Some days they would log 4 out of 8 hours downtime. Usually after a strenuous week or late night deploy. Examples of this are shooting the breeze for an hour, going on a wiki binge etc..

We were all surprised by the actual numbers coming through and the numbers in the various categories. Emails and project admin would average 20% of total team time. “Firefighting” which was attending to unscheduled troubleshooting was 15%.

If you don’t believe someone who says they work X hours per week, you are probably right. We found there is a lot of minutiae, and a lot of down time when tired. Which we didn’t realize until we spent the time to log it.

If you do work long hours, I can heartily recommend implementing an easy time tracking system for yourself with categories. From our experience, it reduced the hours you worked, forced you to get some sleep and exercise, and made you more productive in the hours you do work.

At my first place, a small outsourcing shop, employees were required to log daily activities so hours per day roughly fit to 8 and 40 per week. From the beginning and unlike most of coworkers, I measured my time precisely with https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5 and soon understood that doing 8 hours per day doesn't happen much and often involves staying late, so instead I simply adjusted the reported numbers to look plausible. In four years, I only received positive feedback on my productivity. What was the management thinking, I have no idea, just like the article says, this was a farce all around.

When I changed the company, the habit to measure productivity stuck. Nowadays, I start working somewhere at 9 and finish at 18, and result is still the same - honest 8 hours of work activity per day happen at best once a month, the average week sums to 30-34 hours. Code-related activities never take more than 3-4 hours per day, that includes both coding and reviews. I get the impression that some of my colleagues might spend more time on the job, but low productivity was never a topic of my performance reviews, management seems content with what they get.

An hour long meeting booked, that ended up taking 45mins? It's an hour. It's the same reason we don't expect you to stop recording time when you to down the hall to make a coffee or take a bathroom break. The numbers only really makes sense at the aggregate level, and going to a higher level of detail is not reliable because of all the noise and different ways people measure their time.

My first salaried job was as a salesman; we incurred expenses, which we could claim back. It was explained to us that the system was there to ensure that we weren't out-of-pocket; claims didn't have to actually be true, but you did have to have incurred the expense.

I fairly soon realised that this was a lie; the expenses system was really a salary-augmentation scheme, and you were expected to inflate your claims. Everyone was at it.

I have CO2 monitor, which I use to estimate is my brain working or not: when I'm working, CO2 level raises quickly above 1000ppm, so I need to ventilate my room often; when I'm idling, e.g. by playing a simple game, CO2 level is at about 740-790ppm without ventilation for whole day.

When I'm returning from work, I see at CO2 monitor that my head is still working. Yes, I'm able to «work» sustainable 4h per day only, but «work related activity» consumes my brain for whole day.

Does this track w/ respiration rate or heart rate?

I've never thought about this - it seems like it would be hard to measure w/o a more intense face mask vo2 max testing type setup.

1. They burn out and clock out mentally or leave altogether

2. They develop psychological issues and destroy their personal life, leading to an unbalanced and unsustainable situation

3. They expect something from the org in return, which normally the org can’t/won’t match (either in the way of product ownership or compensation or role).

Someone like that needs to be constrained. Keep them on the edge and eager to contribute but don’t let them free reign. If the situation and culture allow, try help out to fill the void in their personal life (I ordered one of our guys to leave early twice a week to spend time with his girlfriend because I knew his dedication to work is destroying his relationship. I sent couple of others to weekends in hotels with their SO after long sprints).

It’s a bit odd you’re setting your employees up to maintain their sex lives but I’m sure they appreciate the forced time off after stressful times

Its just important to realize that this relationship with labor is a privilege, because trust me, its not "everyone". If that privilege is obtained because you provide something more "skilled", ok, I guess I understand that. There is still an instinctual level where it still feels unjust to me. But thats just my emotions, I understand economics trumps them.

But in some ways, it's the source of ongoing frustration. Office culture IME is not very interested in getting direct work done. When I was on the McDonald's breakfast shift, I had a solid block of hours where people knew not to bother me unless something was literally on fire. I could get into a glorious flow state. Even managers, even visiting execs knew to button their lips until the time was right. But these days? There are so many people who are happy to put 30 minutes on my calendar or interrupt me on Slack. They mean well; they just don't know anything else. How I wish they did!

Wow. Once I start doing this kind of work I both have a hard time stopping (as I find working on such problems addictive, both in good ways and in bad) and feel like it takes at least a couple hours of loading state into my brain before I could even begin to be working "at speed" on a hard problem, which means I actively try to schedule my life such that I either can spend a solid zero hours in a day working on hard mental tasks ;P or make myself ready to work until dawn (at which point I simply feel bad I am still awake sometimes more than truly feel like I am ready to stop).

And when that half hour itself is semi-routinely[0] interrupted, the whole cycle becomes a form of aversion therapy conditioning you to avoid even attempting to concentrate.

Once you're stuck in that rut, you're really screwed because every failed attempt to break out of the cycle just reinforces it, and not being interrupted just means you're worrying about being interrupted instead.

[0] As with other processes, intermittent reinforcement is far more effective than consistency.

This is partly a delegation problem (I'm trying to free up time by delegating certain things), and partly just a problem of growing up: What interrupts me might sometimes be other work or menial tasks, but it's often also just social life or having to go to to the ice rink.

I'm super happy with my current work-life balance, though a bit unsatisfied at how often I have to context switch. I wish I could just schedule as well as you do, unfortunately when it comes to social engagements for example I'm often more restricted...

For all we know, he may be completely wrong! Maybe he is the outlier and people generally, in fact do perform more "focused work" than two hours a day...

Maybe he isn't overly enthusiastic about his work place, maybe he is in a remote work environment where he isn't inspired to work more efficiently through his peers. Maybe there is a little of everything and he's just trying to warrant this one hour focused work days through "insights".

The reason I'm questioning this is because I have procastrination issues at work and take several short mental breaks, but even I, once I get going and in "the zone" (often later in the work day), I can often do focused work at least twice as long as him. He really gives nothing to go by as for his bold title, which I ask why it's not at least the more undeniably accurate: "I don't work as much as you think".

Some of my colleagues work hard. I can see their screen in the open space. They are machines. Never a distraction on the screen.

The article should be "some people don't work so much, I'm one of them".

She’s also worked as a general pediatrician seeing lower acuity patients/well visits. From talking to her, good deal of that job is essentially running on autopilot. That’s why you can do it 8 hours a day.

A pediatrician may really be working 8 or more hours a day, where 90% of patients are utterly cut-and-dry AND often having pleasant encounters with cute snotty kids and their parents. It doesn't stretch the imagination why this is possible for 8 hours straight.

The "machine-like" programmers that GP mentioned are likely working from cut-and-dry requirements and executing the same code patterns over and over with a stack they know like the inside of their eyelids. Doing this can be pleasurable in a similar way to playing puzzle games. I can see why it would be possible for 8 hours straight.

Pleasant, meditative physical work - what's called "artisanal" anything these days (cooking, carpentry, etc.) - sure.

Then there's programming in a challenging heterogenous environment. Perhaps the requirements are unclear, the stack is new or undependable, you're often interrupted, or have to switch between different kinds of work throughout the day, or your technical abilities are so stretched that absolute and sustained focus is required. Then, good luck getting to those 8 hours in a sustainable fashion.

There are many jobs that are acknowledged to be so difficult when in "go" mode that no one expects 40 weekly hours. This just hasn't penetrated into tech and adjacent industries, that's why we have to engage in these charades.

The notion that you can only do 4 hours of productive work a day is frankly a luxury. If you have 10 hours of work to do, all of which is essential for people's immediate wellbeing, you find ways of being productive.

As a result, the regular mention of their long hours generally just makes me angry at them rather than grateful to them, but I guess I'm in the minority.

Again, this isn't my wheelhouse at all. I'm just repeating something I hear often when this topic comes up.

The world of human disease places some limitations on what can be done. Many people either do not have the grit or the stomach to become doctors (I could easily learn the theory, but I couldn't cope with all the blood, pus, vomit and frequent feeling of helplessness). People develop critical problems at 2 am. A doctor should know their patients and vice versa; they aren't fungible and ping-ponging a sick person between shifts tends to worsen the outcomes.

There's at least 10x more people that want to be doctors than get to be doctors.

MDs also work in a profession with a fairly unique quality: you always get paid more for doing more work, and the work is more or less completely prepackaged into self-contained units for you - i.e. a GP seeing patients more or less breaks their day into a pattern of independently compensated, 15-30 minute slots.

Also, only part of the job is autopilot, much of it is difficult and taxing. Experts will manage their attention and energy throughout busy days.

The point is that humans can and do work hard and at difficult tasks for long periods day after day. The cost is eventual burnout though, hence why so many doctors quit or go part time.

Downvotes for asking a Q?

Most residencies are paid for my Medicare funds. The 1997 Balanced Budget Act capped the number of residencies that Medicare funds, which led to fewer physicians. Who pushed for the cap?

>Lawmakers received cover from the American Medical Association (AMA), the Association of American Medical Colleges, and other major stakeholders in American medicine who endorsed caps on funding for residents and other graduate medical education programs. In March 1997, months before the Balanced Budget Act was enacted, the AMA even suggested reducing the number of US residency positions by approximately 25% from 25,000 to fewer than 19,000. “The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians,” said the AMA and other physicians’ groups in a joint statement

https://qz.com/1676207/the-us-is-on-the-verge-of-a-devastati...

And also in the past they have lobbied to shut down medical schools which led to shortages in the 60s. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMhpr033066

They have recently pushed for more physicians but those changes will take time.

Here's a document from the AMA itself stating their stance on unions (implying they don't consider themselves a union): https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/advocacy-issue-brief-p...

But those hours are very blurry and come in random high bursts („being onto something“). They’re important and effective for me but it’s difficult to categorize them or even track them.

There's maybe a slight argument to be made for meetings, but even then you're supposed to be paying attention to the meeting, if not then why are you there? One person might need to take notes...

I have more important things to do, like doing actual work.

The difference is that in the office people pretend to be working.

If you work for an agency, and sales is having a tough time closing a deal so there's no work for you today, but you have to be there anyway, ready to work or finding other things to do, maybe upgrading your tools, practicing/learning, then that's still work time. It's not leisure time.

Just because you don't achieve 100% uptime cranking out widgets non-stop at full productivity doesn't mean you're not working. We're people, not industrial factory machines.

You can say 'people are pretending' or 'that's not actually work', but it is. And saying that it's not is just denying reality by casting a moral judgment on it like that.

I agree with you that sitting at my desk or being in the office is work time regardless of what I am doing and therefore should also be paid.

I maintain work/life balance by taking a year off work between jobs. In these down time periods I both research a broad spectrum of things that interest me, and that is when I write my books.

I work as much as it seems, but I do it in a wildly inefficient way due to my employer's work-hard-not-smart culture. The fact we work 50 hour weeks to do things we could do in 35-40 is hilarious and infuriating at the same time.

50?! but why?

That's part of why many people are willing to have a go at these careers despite the well-known abysmal earning expectations.

It's just a lot of very willing supply and rather limited demand that depresses monetary earnings for labour in these sectors.

Compare also pay and conditions for programmers in the games industry vs those working on in-house corporate CRUD applications.

No, they - in general - do not. A few get this. A few more lucky folks make a living off of it. In the case of an artist, you are probably doing commissions and spend a lot of time on social media, in the post office, and such things just to tread water. Comic artists and animators you've never heard of go about their day in invisibility while they destroy their wrists, elbows, and shoulders for your enjoyment. (a number of these are contract jobs, too, which means no benefits).

Most musicians are pretty local or fly under the radar. Band teachers are usually musicians, and i'm pretty sure there isn't a lot of prestige there. Lots of "musicians" are working in such jobs, many are touring local circuits, picking music for commercials, and things like that.

The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is the unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians than we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse, I'm not sure why that would be a substitute for decent pay. Supply and demand obviously aren't the constraints on wages people make them out to be.

There's a lot of waiting tables, and if lucky, teaching gigs. Paid performance gigs are rarer and not that rosy either, eg, boring wedding music or sporadic & low-paid pop-ified club gigs. In COVID... yikes.

Prestige includes a lot of 'when will you get a real job?'

Even for the rare folks who 'make it', there's often a lot of weirdness, especially around the one-hit wonder commercial music circuit. Unlikely and hard to get there, and often ugly if you do.

Sound rough? Even worse in visual areas because even less money. Gallery scene is basically charity from upper crust and whatever small grants, if you're lucky. More likely, still waiting tables or some other day job. There are commercial gigs, but rarely related to your art: an artist's exploration of abstract oil painting is far from say musclebound video game characters for adolescents. Even if someone likes your aesthetic style, commercial versions for say a big hotel/ commercial/product are dead/generic for accessibility reasons.

I was around a lot of this in my early 20's. The entertainment industry is at odds with art. Happy to be away from it, and empathy for artists pushing through it.

It's hard to try and make money on something lots of people do as a hobby, it's the same situation in professional sports.

Yes they do. I'm both a musician and a software developer and the difference in social prestige is night and day, depending on how I present myself.

You're trying to refute the statement that musicians and artists get a lot of social prestige, by stating that they make little money and do work that's not glamorous, and that's irrelevant, it's rather actually part of what gives it prestige.

> The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is the unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians than we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse, I'm not sure why that would be a substitute for decent pay. Supply and demand obviously aren't the constraints on wages people make them out to be.

I've been working professionally as a music creator for nearly 20 years. I think what separates the musician types you're referring to from actual professionals is an understanding of how to make money with art and when to pivot one's career, e.g. "live gigs are paying me nothing... how else can I make money with my music?" I'd be miserable if I'd stayed in live music beyond my early twenties or believed that teaching was an adequate substitution for being paid to create for a living.

Most hobbyist musicians never work beyond the genre or instrument they initially learned, like a "programmer" who learns HTML as a kid but fails to take their expertise further. It's a severe lack of business acumen, self-awareness, and desire to evolve.

Posing with a guitar will help you get laid. Even if you don't play remotely well enough to make any money, or for anyone to really care about your music.

> I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting.

Groupies, maybe? I've encountered them hanging on even celebrity impersonators (in Los Angeles) and cover bands (in Las Vegas), not just originals. Not to mention authors and visual artists. Most artistic scenes seem to attract them.

Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly.

My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribute this to an unhealthy grip on life that stemmed from somewhere.

All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week. I had to keep on top of their own hours to tell them to go home and find a girlfriend.

DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it. Only do it if you can honestly say you are unhealthily obsessed with it and can’t actually have a normal life.

> All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week.

> DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it.

Do as I say, not as I do. The culture of being always on, and working these insane hours comes from management allowing it or leading by it. It's utterly meaningless for you tell your reports to not work crazy hours only to show them that you need to do it.

Being a manager puts a power dynamic at play; it's one thing if a team member is working silly hours but if your boss is, it sets the expectation that you can too. By working you are setting the precedent for your team

I did 80+ hours as well when I was just writing code and managing servers; about 40/60 respectively. It was more than 80 hours and I missed things, but I was young and made up for it. I would not want to do that again either.

> six days a week.

Anecdotally when I was doing that much work, it was 7 days a week. When I woke in the morning my phone was full of emails slack pings and build issues, and it was closer to midnight when it stopped than 10pm. There is no down time whatsoever in an environment like that, everyone is constantly stressed and overworked and it just makes it worse

Agreed.

> Why do it though?

It was a boiling frog situation. When I joined, things were good. 35-40 hour weeks, interesting work, great coworkers. The team grew, and all of a sudden I was a knowledge holder in areas. It started with an occasional message from a co worker who had a deadline, and then the deadlines were every 2 weeks, and it wasn't just one coworker, it was multiple coworkers. Then it was other people working late nights and me replying on saturday mornings to their issues because I wasn't really working, it was just a slack message. Then it was me fixing issues on a sunday morning because it was the only time my mailbox wasn't bursting. Around that point I realised what was happening, so I scaled things back to working hours, and started getting negative feedback and comments about "not trying as hard as others" from other managers (not my manager though). My annual review came back as negative because other teams were reliant on me being available, so i went back to being always on for about a year before I got another offer and left on good terms.

It genuinely took me about a year afterwards to realise how bad things had gotten (everyone checks their work email precautionarily at 11pm on a saturday night so they can sleep without worrying, right? That's normal.) I'm much better off now.

I am not entirely sure what is wrong with them. Only one case can be attributed to money. The rest looks like a weird psychological addiction.

If you are good at coding, then you code for a day and create something you are proud of. +1 to self worth.

You send it for code review or deploy and you get positive feedback. +2 to self worth.

A junior dev in house or browsing your open source project loves your code and asks for advice. +3 to self worth.

Compared to.

Go out to a social event for lunch, struggle through the social interactions.

Maybe drink a bit too much because you are stressed.

Get caught in a difficult spot when you tell someone they are wrong (which they were, but you were being rude).

Hang around for the whole afternoon / evening because you told yourself you have to make this work and get a life.

End your day without any self worth reward and struggle the next day due to the alcohol or paranoia of reliving the previous day.

This is the life of a few socially awkward (and usually high iq) people I have had the pleasure of meeting. And myself.

I think it is healthy to take the second option, get a life, learn to make relationships.

But it’s the hard option. Sitting at the IDE and being good at what you are good at, is much easier.

There are definitely ways to mitigate this way of thinking, one being understanding the "spot light effect" the "phenomenon where people tend to overestimate how much others notice aspects of one's appearance or behavior."

Also to do more structured based social activities.

- 100 km running minimum per month. I take this seriously. - Writing notes about work in a notebook. Not publishing but that's the only way I can stay away from other work and not feel bored. - Spending more time on two hobbies: hardware/circuits and cooking.

Things are improving!

I used to take 15min jog cuts, it made me have just a few more thoughts ready when I was back at my desk.

Minor coding tasks like documenting and preparing a commit can be done in any amount of time, but crucially it is time that is allowed to be broken up by meals or meetings. Casual skimming over the code for ideas is also in this category, eg scanning for random TODOs that can be checked off.

I try to gather all my regular calls on the same day, that way I get it out of the way with the least amount of context switching.

Long term doing 2 hard things a day for a whole week would probably not be sustainable, either you run out of motivation or you run out of hard tasks.

One of the things you do under "hard tasks" is simplify your code so that subsequent tasks fall under "easy tasks". You trade your "must not disturb" time for "can be stopped and started".

I have a suspicion that the amount of healthy and productive work depends much on the work environment, the agency and social relationships one has there.

If you’re a well paid wage slave then you have different engagement than an autonomous, respected worker. Excuse the platitude but you get the drift.

Discipline is freedom and empathy is purpose.

Somewhat career specific is a colossal understatement.

I may be wrong, but looking from the outside it looks to me like they are improving themselves as a person and earning a living at the same time.

I need to set aside time to improve my social and physical well being, outside of working time.

Don’t get me wrong I work with interesting people that I love, but we don’t improve our social abilities together

A lot of us are lucky enough to have knowledge based jobs, which require mental tasks of solution design and decision making that are hard to quantify. I regularly get ideas when walking, cooking, driving, etc... and then spend time thinking through a work problem and taking notes. Several times a day I go for a short walk to clear my head of distractions and regain focus, That would be hard to quantify to a theoretical bad manager who wanted you to count hours but for many it is an essential part of knowledge work.

Bertrand Russell once observed that philosophy is really hard; even very good philosophers only spend a few minutes per year doing it.

Not all work needs 100% focus. When you are CEO and you go in the kitchen and you smalltalk with employees, is it work or not work ? Imagine if the CEO didn't do it, people would say the CEO is not talking with employees.

But if the question is : Do people lie ? Yeah of course, like for any other subject

As you get more experienced, you may require less deep thinking to do your job, which boost productivity. However in our current world all fields are changing so rapidly that this is mostly wishful thinking.

The other factor is of course whether you're allowed to be productive. Even a day with "just" 3 or 4 meetings is practically destroyed from a productivity point of view, and this doesn't even account for email and chat. So even if willing to be more productive, you just can't. This particular problem never seems addressed, quite the opposite: "we need to collaborate more".

No, we don't. When you have 5 tasks and each task depends on others and requires a lot of collaboration then it's a crappy task, from a productivity point of view.

Aside from the distractions of professional communication, we should be honest about the additional distractions from personal devices. When I started work, nobody had a smartphone. Just a workstation with restricted internet. So there were few temptations.

Now it's unstoppable. It's right there in your pocket, begging for attention. Add in email, which the average person checks once every 6 minutes, and the conclusion is that we have near-zero concentration time.

It's a sad thing. If we would control distractions and carve out very clean packages of work, knowledge workers could probably switch to 4 hour workdays, 6 as a transition. The rest is fluff anyway. Why not double the work packages then, to meet 8 hours? Because our species simply can't.

But anyway, it won't happen. Let's just keep telling ourselves we work 10-12 hours whilst we piss our life away to a collective illusion.

It is possible in crunch time to work harder on difficult problems, but not for longer than a few weeks at a time followed by a few weeks of rest. Regardless how you account for the time.

When people say they work 8 hours they don't mean they are 100% focused on doing revolutionary innovative work for 8 hours. Not all work is like factory work where you can do more or less the same thing all day, and that's fine.

And for what it's worth, plenty of people, including myself, can regularly do 10+ hour days of productive work. It's definitely not impossible.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=software...

My average day looks something like:

Hour 0-0.5: Get ready for the workday - messages, email, write standup report, take a shower.

Hour 0.5-1: standup meeting + offline meetings.

Hour 1-2: meetings or brain work

Hour 2-3: mealtime, active availability

Hour 3-5: active availability, light work, meetings

Hour 5-7: brain work (I do my best brain work at the end of the day typcially)

I'd be curious what others schedules look like.

Hour 0-0.5: get back to whatever I left the previous day... most productive 0.5 hour of the day with a fresh mind.

Hour 0.5-1.5: meetings, status updates, syncing with others...

Hour 1.5-3.0: more intense coding. May be bug hunting, new feature, more testing...

Hour 3.0-4.0: lunch.

Hour 4.0-5.0: typically helping other team members or discussing bugs/new features etc. Or doing "research", keeping up-to-date reading whatever (software related), including HN.

Hour 5.0-5.5: coffee break, thinking about personal stuff usually, have a little snack or something.

Hour 5.5-7.0: more coding. Much lower productivity though, typically leave things to finish in the 0.5 hour I am most productive the next day. Might read news and non-work related things to give my brain a little break every now and then.

What's striking to me is that if we break it down, it seems like for you by category it'd be:

Hard task/"brain" time: 2-3.5 hours depending on that last section

Light task time (including wakeup time): 2-3 hours

"Active availability" time: ~1 hour?

Personal time: 1.5 hours

and for me by category it'd be:

Hard task/"brain" time: ~2.5 hours depending on my after-lunch section

Light task time (including wakeup time): 3 hours

"Active availability" but not working time: 1 hour

Personal time: 1 hour

So even though it's distributed differently, the amount of time we spend on the types of tasks are pretty similar.

If I'm not feeling it (motivation) will try blasting music/getting pumped then start to slowly get into the flow. Usually works.

In current work, there are still people who think that boss will give them 20% more career progression, when they work 20% more than contractual hours. Being quite productive in areas they already know.

So it is possible but I don't believe it's most viable strategy. I prefer much more to work on personal coding projects after work, trying new methods, not on stuff I already know very well.