Community for asking and answering any question related to the life, the people or anything related to the USA. Non-US people are welcome to provide their perspective! Please keep in mind:
Typically 9-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. But I'm an electrician with my my own company.
Starting a company is a trap lol. But it's also nice that the only people I have to answer to are my clients, and I can fire them if need be, so there's that.
Most of my jobs have been salaried at 40 hrs/wk. I worked 60-80 hrs/wk, effectively driving down my hourly rate in pursuit of my next promotion.
Depends. Usually got really busy stretches and then stretches where I don't do shit. Usually averages out to about 5-6 good a day I guess
It varies. It's pretty rare that it's working hours and I'm just goofing off for more than a couple minutes at a time. I look at lemmy when waiting for builds/deploys/etc. a hard ass boss might be like "do more work while that's happening!!" but that would be a net negative on overall productivity.
I think it's best to find a nice balance, as you have:-).
I've never really worked, for as long as I can literally remember.
Oh you mean at a job? It varied, 40-50 before I qualified for disability.
But In general, I've been defective/broken all my life, since like 1st grade or so as far as I can recall. It just took until my 30s for my depression to finally overcome my will to live.
Shitty Life Pro Tip: we're all broken. See those dead fish eye stares by the likes of the Zuck (who is totally human btw) or Bezos or such.
Some of us are simply more honest about that fact than others. Kudos for that - it ain't nothing, it really is not. Some (okay, me) might say that it is, in fact, everything.
8 hours a day five days a week.
Im working the whole time (I mean I use the bathroom and grab food and such) but meetings, email, chats, research, training, documentation. Its sometimes feels like im barely ever working.
Productive work with measurable results? Two hours. Four hours meetings. Two hours getting interrupted, forced socializing, and then trying to remember what it was I was about to do.
Sometimes I only have 2 hours of meetings but they are all 30 minute meetings with an hour or two between. So I am barely back in my flow by the time he next meeting rolls around.
The “flow” thing is what most non-IT folks don’t understand. It’s tough to jump back in and just start solving the same puzzle I was working on hours ago with no backtracking to figure out which micro piece of the 20 regular-sized pieces I was working on.
That’s probably why I would procrastinate on technical work with project management work back when I was in IT.
Sometimes when I really get into something, I just stay late and work on it while the office is empty.
Thankfully I've been in positions where if I work the rare 10-12 hour day, I can take the time off later in that timesheet cycle. It helps that I always have a bunch of results to show after those nights.
Cloud eng with ADHD here. It really varies between 30 minutes to 16 hours, both extremes being rare
Some days I feel I'm getting absolutely nothing done, but also quite recently I was hyperfixating on a project and would continue working off hours with a glass or 5 of whiskey because I was having too much of a blast
However I've been reminded before by my manager that the random chatter and stupid meetings are still part of work, and while there's optimizing that can be done, I shouldn't count them as slacking so eh I guess 8 hours a day it is then.
That's a boss that's living in reality, congrats!
I feel this so hard! 😁
As a housewife, both 0 and 16? Since I don't actually have a job, I feel like I'm not being productive if I am not cooking, cleaning or organizing. Try to make it so my spouse doesn't have to do a single thing once she comes through, especially on her days off.
as a lesbian workaholic whose apartment is a disaster i feel slightly comforted to know that lesbian housewives actually exist, as I might want to marry one someday...
Don't worry, we exist! It took a while to be totally comfortable with it, especially since we both have a FIREY hatred for the mysgonstic "trad wife" social media BS. But I genuinely enjoy doing errands, groceries, cooking and scouring the web for new recipe, so this setup works for us.
Before we met, my future wife was spending a fortune on door dash 3+ times a week. I'm thankful she can earn enough to support for both of us, it's a huge win win where she can just be HOME when she is home and I can do the things I love anyways.
Oof, I feel the hate for social media tradwife propaganda and throwing money into the delivery food hole 💀
y'all sound like people just doing what suits/pleases you and what's better than that?
it's also super satisfying in a relationship to have complementary strengths. like "look at us being SO EFFICIENT together" lol
I wait tables. If I'm not working at full speed every second I'm on the clock, I will be complaining about how slow it is.
"If you have time to lean then you..." Oh man I remember that one for sure! 😳
You mention hours as a programmer?
Is that active coding? Because as you gain experience you may spend less time writing code that will ultimately be replaced by more efficient processes.
E.g. quality over quantity. Are you being more thoughtful during the design process?
This is an "Ask" style community, so the answer is however you feel like it is for your situation - I only got us started to give us a beginning for the conversation:-).
But to answer your question specifically about my own POV: some meetings are very productive, so not "only" the coding, no. Also, the 6 hours is quite the lower bound - it could be twice that if I am on a roll, with programming, with design matters, documentation, or whatever.
You don't have to overthink it:-). Although you can if you like? :-P
Surely this is just baiting someone to post a clip from Office Space.
That's the one!
Of course it isn't. And don't call me Shirley!
Attempt to justify my employment, mainly. Take that as you will.
Probably around 4h over a 8h day on average in an IT engineering job.
My brain tend to procrastinate and wander around a lot, random questions come around and I look them up, maybe 60% related to my job, but not directly to my current task. Overall, unless I have a boss, as good at my job as I am (only happened once), watching over my shoulder and asking what I did the past hours, it's not a problem.
I think this wandering allows me to be as efficient during my active hours as some people are during 8h. And the 4h searching random stuff makes me more knowledge, including in my job field.
Every day is different. Some days I’m in the zone, some days I’m standing outside the zone wondering why it’s not going well. I don’t think I can quantify the actual time though.
You answered it well enough - probably many of us feel the same, I know I do:-).
Productive work where I can say "this contributed directly to completion of this thing" amd point to something tangible is probably a couple hours.
Four hours a day is spent coordinating work or ensuring people are on the same page and things aren't forgotten. Basiczlly the stuff that would happen on its own if people were perfect and wanted to do everything they needed to. That is because my position involves a lot of project management duties.
Another couple hours having meetings that are more important to attend in case something new came up than doing direct work or blowing off steam with coworkers aka teambuilding.
This all swings wildly, sometimes I spend an entire day producing something tangible and some days are wasted entirely on meetings. But overall that seems about right.
Fwiw I would count meetings that are productive as in organizing things as "work". Not all are that way sadly:-).
There are a lot of busy work meetings that people love to use to dismiss meetings as a whole, but a well run meeting can both avoid a ton of work and get people onboard with things they were likely to blow off. One project I am running has people volunteering to do work and we have even decided not to do something after getting into the weeds, saving a ton of time. But if we didn't decide as a group we would have wasted so much time on that thing.
My general rule is that if the meeting exists to let people know what happened, what is coming up, and no decisions will be made it should have been an email. If there will be a group decision or work distributed based on feedback from the group it is likely to be productive.
I don't any more disability hit me.
But, back when I was still able to, it was variable.
My main job was as a nurse's assistant. I was technically full time the entire run. When I first started that meant 40 hours, and you could still get overtime. As the years passed and they didn't want to give benefits, or overtime, you tended to get cut off as soon as you hit 32 a week.
In facilities, that was usually an 8 hour shift. In home health it could be anything from one patient all of those hours, to a dozen or more spread out across three counties. I did do a modified Baylor shift at one nursing home 12 on Saturday and Sunday, plus one eight hour during the week, and you got paid essentially the same as working 40, plus got benefits.
However, the pay sucked, and home health can be erratic about losing patients and taking a while to get the next one, even for me (big, male, and very good at the job, which means you have to do something horrible to not get work).
So I always had a side gig of some kind. In terms of an actual job job that I had a schedule and such, the main side gig was as a bouncer. Not always at the same place, but for two different employers between their bars and clubs. That was usually weekend work. I'd be on from open until close at the one I worked at the most, with an 8 hour shift being the norm at the others. So it would usually take me up to 60 odd hours a week, depending.
When I would do a turn as a cook, it was one or two shifts at 8 hours a week, keeping me around that same rough weekly time.
Iirc, I topped out at a sustained rate with one eight hour patient 5 days a week; one private patient (not through the company) overnight 3-6 days a week, plus whichever bouncing gig I was doing with the main one being 10 hours for two nights. Technically, the overnights meant I was working 24 hours a day those days, but it was really only 2 to 3 hours of actual work for roughly 12 hours total. Added up, it came up to between 66 and 78 hours for the week.
But there were times I'd end up running myself into the ground doing over 80 between everything. Which didn't include stuff that I made money with, but wasn't a job per se. It was a lot less rigid. Like, I sharpened stuff for extra cash. But I'd do the work while watching TV, so it wasn't taking away from anything the way going to a job does. Same with the various writing gigs I'd do, though when I was doing research for people, that could be time consuming away from home, so I'd usually turn it into a vacation trip to wherever it would be necessary to go.
Those research trips were usually awesome because I'd take vacation time from whatever job I had (when it was there to take), get it expenses covered for all of it, and get paid for it all as well. Honestly, it paid way more than all the rest combined, but it wasn't steady. I'd get a job for that maybe twice a year, three at most.
The custom writing was the best pay overall because I could charge by the word, do the work in my downtime even at a job sometimes, with loose or no deadlines. I wrote this one erotic novel that paid me more for about a month of work than everything else I did that year.
Can't say I'm surprised my body wore out early tbh.
Yeah, but I do respect the hustle - not the need for it ofc but the fact that you could do it, if that makes sense?
Totally :)
And thanks!
I program too; some days 11 hours, some days 2 or less. I have never been able up to do a steady schedule.
And if I code too much over a few days, I take time off to heal my brain
9-10 as a Video Editor
