Our startup team of 10 has kept pretty strict time logs for the past 3 years. We have an official policy of 40 hour work weeks, but yeah, no developers are able to have that much productive time. Usually we see about 25-30 hours of solid development time, 5 hours of meeting/admin time, and 5 hours of lunches/coffee/break time.

I'd like to hear more about the choice to keep strict time logs in a startup environment. Especially strict ones that provide enough granularity to see 5 hours of break time/wk.

Me too. (Another case where seeing up votes would be useful)

If you can honestly spend 75% of your office time doing actual development, and divide the rest evenly between breaks and meetings, I'd like to see how.

I've recently got into pomodoro timing. I set the timer for 45 minutes, focus totally on work, then take a fifteenish-minute break. I can't do it all day though.

I know the classic pomodoro technique is supposed to be 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off, but a five minute break is too short for me (I like to get out of the building) and the rhythm of the half-hours just goes by too quickly. 45 minute serious-work periods work much better for me.

I was just thankfully let go from a startup that expected extra hours on top of running an open-plan office and coworkers who lived by the "who can interrupt the loudest?!" method of project management. 4-5 hour stretches were never once achieved during normal business hours in the 2.5 months I was there. A 2 hour stretch was a gift, but more often than not the quietude would be broken by one of a small group (3-4) loudest coworkers.

Open floor plans are evil for developers. Whoever started that trend needs to be strung up by their nose hair. There is no better way to ensure no work gets done than putting 10 people in an environment that every two person conversation interrupts (and I believe that "15 minutes to get back into the zone" is a bunch of crap).

We have a dev team of 12 working with an open floor plan, pair programming. We get a lot done. There is no single right way to operate.

"We get a lot done," is pretty meaningless without context. Do you know that the dev team likes it that way?

Yes, everybody prefers it to working in isolation

"Isolation" would seem to be a harsh alternative choice.

I think 37Signals is completely accurate with their assessment of working time. It mirrors your take of a maximum of 4-5 hour blocks that can effectively considered "productive work".

Sounds about right. http://www.businessinsider.com/leave-work-early-2011-5

Yeah, I get crap using those numbers on estimates. I still don't redo math because people dislike them though.

Same here. But somehow the numbers always get recalculated when they pass through my supervisor's hands.

That stinks of lying. I'd make sure that guy does not pass it off as YOUR estimate, but his.