Most people who think they work 50-60 hours actually work 40 hours. Most people who think they work 40 hours actually work 30 or less. I've seen that for myself, working very hard from morning to mid-night taking breaks only to eat and tracking every minute, adds up to only 50 hours of REAL work per week (not counting Saturday Sunday). People work a lot less than they think they do. Track your EXACT time worked and see how much you really worked ... I've been doing this for at least the last year.
This is very true. I use RescueTime to monitor my output. This works for me because of the menial nature of much of my work in addition to ensuring that I'm completely honest in my logs / productivity scoring.
I shoot for eight "very product hours" (+2) per day. Even though the standard workday is considered eight hours, it's pretty difficult for me to hit such a target without invest 10-11 hours of what I would call pretty distraction free work. I'm self employed, so I'm able to avoid a large amount of the normal worktime lost to meetings, chitchat, and the like.
Comparing eight hours of "very productive" rescuetime output feels as if it would be comparable to about 12+ hours standard in a normal work enviroment.
Often, when I hear people exclaiming that they've put in a 70hour/week or whatnot I wonder how many very productive rescuetime hours that would correlate to... 50? 40?
Wow; I guess if you are doing product development, everything is so clear cut! But what if you are a researcher? Your primary output is creative, so measuring the amount of code or text you write is not very effective. I don't think just researchers have this problem, but anyone who has to do any substantial amount of real thinking or design, even most programmers have to think a bit about what they need to write. And sometimes you need to twist your brain to do it.
I'm a developer. I don't mind taking mental breaks during the day and still counting it as work since I solve work problems while driving, showering, or even sleeping all the time. I'm lucky enough to work for a supervisor that doesn't require time logs. I often wonder if I could get away with "I'm leaving for the day an hour early since I was thinking about the problem I'm working on while at home".
I find that most of the "most people" who fall into the category of "working" that many hours but actually only doing 40 hours of work related work are the younger/entitlement generation (I'm 35 fwiw)
When you are at work, do you work. You shouldn't be browsing reddit or checking facebook/twitter or fantasy football/espn. You shouldnt have a chat client open with friends/family (create a work only one)
At our office we are allowed (and encouraged) to read tech blogs such as hackernews, but no one abuses that and reads for hours on end.
We use RescueTime and part of our 8 hours includes email, irc (work #channel), instant message (work only 'friends' screenname), reading rss on top of the actual coding. No one is looked down on for having a high google/stackoverflow time in a week.
Two 4 hour blocks of coding is not that hard (and normally broken up with meetings or some form of communication anyways)
I find people that have to work 10+ hours to get in 8 actual work related hours are the same people who used to "NEED music" to study. Just have some self discipline and focus.
