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How much actual work do you do in a day?
After watching Office Space for the first time a few weeks ago, I was struck by the scene where Peter is talking about his average working day, and it got me to wondering about how much actual work I do at my job. I'm pretty sure that even on a good day, I put in less than 2 hours of actual graft. The rest is just mindless internetting, chatting with my colleagues, and wishing I was elsewhere.
So I'm curious how much work other people actually do in a day, and how you pass the time when you're not doing anything at all?
I'm in a bit of a unique position. I work from home doing IT stuff for an extremely large company. Realistically I don't spend much actual time working. Most of this is because of my horrible inability to stay focused on one thing. If there's a mundane task I'm doing for a longer period of 15 minutes, I find it extremely difficult to stay on task and end up just browsing the internet.
I get paid a pretty large amount of money for this job, so I always try to work as much and as well as I can, but my willpower and focus has always been complete shit.
Luckily for me, it seems that although most of my coworkers seem to work a lot of hours, they're less productive than I am. I don't know if they just have poor habits as well, or they don't actually know what they're doing, or they're incompetent, but most of them regularly mess things up, take forever to accomplish simple tasks, or go to our boss asking for direction every five minutes. This usually makes me look fantastic in comparison, and every year I get stellar performance reviews, despite in my heart knowing that I'm putting in maybe 25% effort into this job. It usually makes me feel guilty. Also hearing about how hard most of my friends work, and how much more money I make than they do makes me feel guilty. Everyone assumes I work at a highly technical job where I am required to be a complete technical guru, but that's not the case. Most people could do 90% of my job I think. While it is true that I'm pretty knowledgeable about the specific field I work in because of other, much more demanding tech jobs, I almost never apply that knowledge to this job.
If I had to take an honest, sober assessment of how much actual work I did each week (not including time spent sitting in meetings that aren't relevant to my job, during which I don't pay attention and browse the internet), I would probably say it's 5-10 hours.
I don't know how sustainable this is, but I'm pretty happy with the way things are and wouldn't at all mind spending the rest of my life doing this job.
This describes most jobs that are not menial labor, in all honesty. The difference is that many people are often not cognizant of the fact that they aren't working hard. Spending time chatting with coworkers at the water cooler is in effect the same amount of non-productive hours as fucking around on the internet shit posting or chasing down emails or whatever else you're doing.
The reality is (also backed by science) most people in jobs like ours put in about 1-2 productive hours per day.
1-2 hours seems low to me. I suspect we're defining "productivity" down. I spend hours a day in meetings or talking over work with people. This isn't directly going into any deliverable or thing that gets measured, but if it didn't happen a lot of the work would suffer. People wouldn't be on the same page, there would be communication breakdowns, errors and oversights will slip until later in the process, etc.
It's a lot of invisible overhead that doesn't feel productive, but smooths everything else along.
Even despite that, my general 8-10 hour day is probably really 4 to 6 hours with occasional (maybe monthly) bouts of sustained effort where I'm actually busy for 8 to 10ish hours. But I'm not actually sure it's possible to sustain more focused effort on knowledge work than that without burning out. A lot of the reason I'm fast at everything else is because I'm well practiced at it and it would take me 2 to 3 times as long if I was greener.
Hey, same here! ...minus the salary and incompetent coworkers, unfortunately. Im madly productive, but only bill for time where I've got my nose to the grindstone. In actuality, I think I probably produce about 3-5x what anyone else in my position would, but I'm honest and like my boss, so I dont try and bill for extra hours. Some of it has to do with the company itself simply being on thin ice, too - its a small startup, if I wasnt this hyper-productive, I'd be sinking it. Personally, though, I think there are two, maybe 3 other people on the team who put out as much as I do. But I cant quantify it, so I dont let it bother me. I think of it as, the work I'm putting in now, will help build my future position.
Same thing for expertise - the only thing I'm an "expert" in at this point is my company itself.
The thing is, though, I dont think either of our results are atypical, we're just in the unique position to realize it. In my experience, I have a hard cap of around 4-5 hours a day of productivity, at most. The remaining time in an 8 hour work day is spent spacing out, browsing the internet, talking, taking walks, getting food, or otherwise just reviewing what I've already done.
But the thing is, to be that productive your brain needs that time. We do our best work while idle, the saying goes. Same thing for expertise - there's only expertise in your niche or at your job position specifically - anything beyond that is just perceived value.
Youre not alone my friend! I envy your position so much further formward from mine. I dont want to slack, but having some leeweigh to actually be able to afford to live somewhere would be nice.
I don't think you should feel guilty. You are paid to get a task done, not to put in a lot of effort. How much actual time something took you means very little. What actually matters is how much value you are able to provide.
Working from home gives you the ability to work however you are most productive and the company can only see how much you actually got done and not worry about "time wasting"
I'm in kind of a similar position. Work from home, maybe put in a solid 5-10 hours of actual consistent technical work. The rest of my time though is spent handling little things here and there, managing a team, managing projects, and just whatever else needs to be done (such as reviewing contracts and and the such) so I guess I am pretty productive. But yeah, could do this job for the rest of my life easily.
SIDE NOTE: I have a hard time writing well, especially when its a long segment like this. It`s also kind of a depressive read. If you are having a bad day, you might want to skip this one, and sorry if i sound like i whine. This subject hits me right in the solar plexus and i get a bit upset i suppose. I understand that i have it better then most of the people on earth, but at the same time you compare yourself to other where you live, right?
Pardon my Swedish, but holy shit! You guys actually don`t work compared to the people in middle/lower class worker positions. I do not want to sound like an asshole, but please do something with your damn educations. The rest of us are making sure you get to work, get to eat, so that all the mundane things in your life gets taken care of. Show some appreciation and respect by actually spend time working, even though you work in front of a computer. Okay, i am done ranting now, suppose i am a bit jealous also, sorry for reacting this way. I just think the upper and lower class separation increase is bullshit. Sorry again i just had to get this out of me.
I need to explain a couple of things first and foremost about my situation in the job market for the past 15 years. Firstly, we had a bit of a crisis when it came to generation entering the job market back when i did. I never went into college either, my intellectual friends did though, i kind of got left behind i suppose. I made this decision based on me thinking i wont make it through due to my depression and anxiety. Half my friends got burned out during the time at college. I know now i have super rapid cycling(some have a depression and mania every 2 years, i have them every other week with and even bigger ones now and then) Bipolar Disorder. This decision might have been wrong, i`m not sure. But now when i am more stable due to medications and a close to 15 years of therapy and treatment, i might study.
Alright, lets get into the actual question that OP wants answered. Due to the things said above, i have had several jobs. i am going to try and list them below in a timeline.
Another hotel and conference establishment that was closer to home asked if i wanted to work there instead after meeting me randomly when i ate lunch there. Slightly higher pay and a 15 min drive on my old moped? sure. I worked 8-10 hours per day of stress infused mess, often weekends since i was the new guy at both establishments.
I later left this job due to a manic episode, i simply terminated my employment, this was back when i had no idea i was sick and i had a manic episode. It is very common to make super bad decisions during episodes.
After i came down i had a lengthy depression(if you go up you have to go down). It took a while to find a new job, but i focused on trying to work within the field i was educated in and ended up working as a service tech.
My next job was a 6 month long internship as a machine operator for Coca Cola in their factory.
Between this job and my next one i delivered fruit baskets in the city to the people working in similar positions like yourself(most of the people answering OP`s question) in the office environment. It was the shittiest job i have ever had, terrible pay, terrible hours, and my boss was the most psychotic ass hole i have gotten close to in a work place. He would touch the young girls at work for example among other things. I ended up basically running the company managing a few people. while my boss(the owner) sat a the computer looking at who knows what.
Between that job and the next i figured out what was wrong with me, it was definitely bipolar disorder. I was very scared of the medications still, so i ended up not seeking out treatment for the actual disorder. It was hard to support myself, since i would not be able to get any economical help from the government. You have to work full time for 8 months or more, cant remember exactly.
Instead i started my own little company in the hopes that i can manage my own hours and so forth. I knew quite a bit of people in the construction industry. Several smaller companys that where under a lot of stress and deadlines. My idea was that when one of these company's needed an extra hand they would call me, and i would support them doing things that are less important to meet the deadline. I got a workout, was outside a lot, something that also would help with my mental health i thought. It also was a good idea since the market was terrible as well, a lot of young people worked in these large company's called man power etc, they get to bounce around companys and the actual companys did not have to take responsibility for the people they "hired" for a time. I did the same but was working alone taking care of things myself, earning way more money that way.
This ended up not working due to my health again and i ended up putting the company on ice and try and work on my health more.
For 2 years i spent my time mostly alone in an 100 year old house out in the bush, doing the whole monk thing. I was able to use the house because an old friend to my family owned it. Very low expenses. This is when i asked for treatment and started taking medications, going to therapy etc. This was only possible because i had saved up my own money running my business. Living out there i was able to meditate and figure my life out a bit.
I was able to find a program that helped people with similar health issues as mine. What they did was that they would use the tax payers money to pay my employer around 50% of my salary as compensation since i am not able to perform at a "normal" level.
I ended up working for a local carpenter, i had some experience by now and i thought i could use it to my advantage. This was my first stable employment. I worked for him over the course of 2 years up until i got fired for not performing well enough, i hate to blame my health but it`s the reality of the situation. During this time i spent about 4 hours every evening for a time period of 2 months streaming on twitch.tv, trying to do something with my skills as a Herthstone player, running an education stream. I ended up burning myself out and had to end this side project.
We are close to where i am at now. After i got fired it really triggered my disorder and i ended up going into Hypomania and full Mania at the course of one and a half years. I was offered a government funded course to become an excavator and wheel loader operator. Mostly because i have had a hard time in the job market up until that point. I took the chance. It has very good pay and its close to the best job or perhaps the best job at a construction site. The drawback is that i had to commute 4-5 hours per day to the other side of the city with 8 hour long days at school. I was able to complete the course even though i was very sick and had no time to take care of myself.
Since i got so sick and was able to get economical support from the government this time around, i ended up on actual sick leave for the first time. this meant i could spend time using the healthcare i needed to become more stable, and then hopefully find a stable job as well. This has been my goal the whole time. It`s been going well, i have been on sick leave for about a year now. And i am currently in the process to find a job that suits me better, not being to busy with life.
I am now waiting to be be called in to meet a lady that works a government funded program. This time around it might not even be a "normal" type of employment. due to the brain damage that mania has on the brain, especially the cognitive functions, i have a very bad memory for example.
I am going to try make use of the excavator operator course first and foremost. It would be sad if i was not able to use it, i spent over a year of my life and all my savings during the course.
My doctors recommend that i work part time with Wednesdays off.
I want to use my skills and ability's, i want to have a normal job where i can actually work towards some kind of career, but this might not be possible at this point.
The positive side effects of me not being able to work has given me a lot of free time i can spend on things i want to do, but it also lead to periods of me being poor to a point where i did not have enough money for food.
Ugh, i am going to play some Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice now and feel a bit better.
TL;DR A wide variety of differently types of jobs with different kinds of hours, often being long and not on a stable schedule, with a minimum of 8 hours. Sometimes without breaks and often poor or terrible work environments.
I'm employed part-time. The work I'm doing was previously part of someone else's job. She was overworked, so the company split this work off from her job to create a new job, and she estimated the new job as requiring 3 x 7-hour days = 21 hours per week. During my interview, we discussed spreading those hours over 4 days, instead of 3. So I'm employed for 2 x 5.0-hour days + 2 x 5.5-hour days per week.
However, after I'd been in the job for a few months, got everything under control, and made it all into a routine rather than an exercise in crisis management like she'd been doing it, it turns out it's nowhere near that much work. I actually work about 3.0-3.5 hours per day, 4 days per week = 12-14 hours per week.
And I get to work from home for 2 of those days!
I've told my manager and the general manager (the woman who created my job and interviewed me left the company a few months later). They both know I'm under-utilised. But there's not much they can do. It's a small-to-medium business and the work just isn't there to do. That said, the business is growing and my work is growing along with it. A year ago, I was working even less than I am now, and I expect the workload to continue to grow.
But, for now, I'm enjoying what is, quite frankly, the easiest, most bludge-y job I have ever had.
On the days when I work in the office, I turn up about 60-90 minutes "late" (compared to my supposed official start time). I end up spending a lot of time on the internet, reading articles and browsing Tildes. Plus I take super-long lunch breaks! And the days when I'm working at home are even bludgier: I don't even have to pretend to work then! I work an hour or so in the morning, and about an hour and a half in the afternoon, and that's it.
It's also the kind of job that I can walk away from (unlike some other jobs I've had): when I finish work for the day, I'm finished. There is no after-hours work.
Man, with your post and comment history I often wondered if you were employed at all! This really explains all of the time you are able to put into Tildes.
Thanks for contributing!
It helps that I support Tildes and its goals. I used to put all this time and effort into my subreddits on Reddit. (I still run one small-ish subreddit on an alternate account, but that's about it.) But I'm happy to put my shoulder behind Tildes now, instead.
Nice try boss. lol
Umm, it depends on the day. Im the site tech for everything at our corporate office.
So it everything is running smoothly and no one breaks anything I can usually get a couple PoGo raids in and do some writing.
But then theres days like yesterday where I had two new people starting, one developer needing things before going on a working vacation, a manager still not finding things on his new laptop, and a massive television getting installed in a conference room.
So it comes in waves. Some days Im working my ass off, others Im dicking around all day.
I've been a teacher for over a decade now. I don't know what downtime is. It is foreign to me. Every day is filled past the brim. From August to June my job is a constant hustle and an unending triage of responsibilities. I spend my summer not enjoying the downtime but mentally recovering from a year of compressed crisis. The career I used to love is being slowly strangled by accountability culture, feature creep, and micromanagement.
Someone tell me what job I can change to with a teacher's skillset, because I simply cannot sustain what I am doing until retirement. This thread was a depressing read for me on a personal level on account of what I go through on a daily basis, but I'm actually very happy that many of you are in jobs that seem to have healthy balances and expectations for your performance. That gives me hope that I can find something out there that will offer me the same.
I'm a web developer, I work 8 hours a day.
On a normal day usually the last hour of the day I get very little done because I'm mentally done for the day. For the rest of the day I have about 30 minutes worth of not doing anything in between periods of productivity.
Some days I have nothing to do and everyone is too busy to talk so I get much less done. I may try and negotiate an hour shorter days but for now I just pick a nice album to listen to and blankly look at a text editor pretending to read in the last hour.
Same position as you—software developer. One thing you might not experience yourself, but I do at least, is that if I'm interrupted from my mental CPU cycles while in a high productivity state, either for a meeting, or by a coworker, it can take me anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour to get back into that same level of productivity. In fact, the 30 minutes on either side of a meeting is effectively wasted time. There's no way to be productive when a meeting is occupying your mind.
I work in a small company so meetings are fairly uncommon. Maybe about 3 a month. I can fairly easy focus on a task for an hour uninterrupted.
Call center, remote corporate assistance. Some days, there's a whole lot of idle time, some days there isn't. Only consistent rule appears to be once I have a moment to myself, I get a new call.
I worked in call centers for about 4 years (once in tech support, once as support for timeshare owners) and BOY HOWDY you are correct on that last part.
Stay strong, homie. Remember: It isn't forever.
It really depends on the day. I just got back from a 1 1/2 week vacation and the Monday before I left I ended up working 11 hours, but on an average day it probably fluctuates between 4-6 hours.
I get in super early so I usually can get maybe an hour or two done before anyone else starts getting in, then I'll kind of get a little bit or work done during the rest of the morning/early afternoon and then a few more hours before I head home for the day,
2 hours. I work from home performing remote office duties, averaging about 30 hours a week. But I actually only put in around 10 hours of work. So I get paid for just surfing the web, as they used to say.
I do computer maintenance and other small IT things for the government. There are days that i do absolutely nothing, so i will spend on the internet and studying at my office. Today is one of those days.
Some days i will have to go out to other buildings to fix computers, printers and do mundane tasks, so the act of going and coming back from those places almost takes the entire day because i let it pile up. I'm not gonna go out because of just one place.
So it's 10~20 hours of work per week probably. But i still stay here the 40 hours.
I'm working part-time at my college at an IT department and a tutoring department. Some days the IT job is literally just goofing off for 6 hours (I'll usually be working on homework or my own programming projects), other times it's back to back calls. Tutoring is similar, except it's more predictable when we'll get a bunch of appointments since we know each professor's schedule of projects and tests in advance.
I'd say I usually work for 3 of the 12 hours I spend at the IT job and 2 of the 8 hours I spend at tutoring every week.
I'm a marketing rep in the insurance industry, so a lot of my work day is spent driving. I do about 5 meetings, from 30 - 50 minutes long which is only about 4 hours of actual work, 3 days a week. Documenting and following up is probably another 10 - 20 minutes per meeting. I might spend 5 hours commuting to do that, though. Other days my commute might be 30 minutes each way. On my office days I probably do 6 or 7 hours of actual work in an 8.5 hour day.
I can honestly say I generally put in 6 hours of solid work (programming) a day, up until recently. Now my wife and I are separating for a while, with the stress and sadness and anxiety of it all, some days I'm probably getting less than 3 hours a day actual work done. It's horrible. My employer knows the situation though, and told me to lighten my workload significantly for a while, so at least that's something. Can't wait to get back on my game though. Might take a while.
My job is one of those where there are down times when not much is going on, but when things get busy, they get busy. It's also completely chaotic here, and I never know what I'm walking into day to day. I like it that way, tbh. I am in the office about 7 hours. Some days I'm working that entire time, other days I may only do a couple hours of actual work. But I also run a lot of errands, go to events, meetings, etc. so in-office time isn't really indicative of the amount of workload. I also do at least an hour or more of work at home a few times a week, just because it's easier for me to focus.
I work in a role supporting a 24x7 factory. Typically, I work 5-6 hours a day, though I spend a lot of that time in meetings.
Compared to a lot of the people I support, I have an extremely laid back schedule (8ish-5ish, near unlimited work remote, ability to take random days off)
Work definitely ebbs and flows though. Some weeks I am bored out of my mind with nothing to do. Occasionally, I've had to put in a few 12-13 hour days.
How much I work varies a ton from day to day. Some days I just have to respond to a few emails and spend the rest of the day chatting with coworkers, reading news vaguely related to my work, or just straight up browsing. Other days I'm busy all day and put in a full 8 hours, or on rare occasions have to do a 12+ hour day where I'm actually working the whole time. I also often do facilitate workshops outside the office, in which case I'm working the whole time I'm there.
That said, my work environment is pretty chaotic and full of interruptions, so tasks that might take me 20 minutes at home can take hours in the office. If I worked from home or a quieter place, I could get the desk job parts of my work done in 8-10 hours most weeks, and I normally work 32 hours a week.