1y ago

How many hours a day do you actually work?

I should actually be working 8h a day, but most of it is spend not working. If I'm honest I'm probably working more like 3h a day even though I enjoy my job.

243 comments

8 hours of nominal work does equal about 3-4 hours of actual focused work. This is completely normal don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Humans need to eat, go to toilet, socialize with their coworkers, relax the brain, move if constantly in the same position.
Btw, meetings are work. If you spend a lot of time in meetings that does count as actual work.
- I'm not (maybe an hour at most because I just started my job/training as software engineer), but long meetings are way more tiring than sitting there and coding. And coding while needing to listen to a meeting is even more exhausting.
  
  Coding is something you can do for longer stretches as you get better at it. I struggle with 3 or 4 hours straight out of college. Now I run 7 hours no problem.
  The dichotomy is that the more proficient you are at coding, the more meetings you need to be in to give engineering input... So the less time you spend coding. As a staff SWE I'm rarely able to get more than 3 or 4 hours straight to sit and code. Rather it's an hour here or there broken up my meetings.
  I relish my no-meeting days to sit and actually get concepts out into code.
  I'm spent at the end of 7 hours coding though. I've crunched to 14 before... But the code I wrote was shit for 5 of those hours.
  
  If my time would be better spent coding than being in the meeting I just decline. It depends on the culture of the org though if that kind of approach is ok or not.
- Btw, meetings are work. If you spend a lot of time in meetings that does count as actual work.
  This is so important. I know so many people that complain about people being "in meetings all day instead of working" or manager expectations are to be doing a bunch of stuff, but your calendar is absolutely packed with dumb meetings. Meetings are work, so if other work needs to be done then I need to be allowed to take that time.
  And no, multitasking isn't real. If I'm doing other stuff during the meeting then I'm not actually paying full attention to either the meeting or the other work.
- 8 hours of nominal work does equal about 3-4 hours of actual focused work. This is completely normal don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
  Fuck you.
  Sincerely, Blue collar workers

It fluctuates based on workload, but I find myself working anywhere from 4-5 hours a day to basically nonstop during my workday (9 hrs). I do think most people are really only capable of doing "good" work, meaning being at their most productive, for about 3 hours a day though. The rest of the time is spent slogging through and putting out mediocre work, just to get it done.
- The same for me (but 8 hour workday). Honestly, I couldn't do the job if the working non-stop days were the default. I am wasted after such a high-stress day, so I need it to fluctuate. I also don't feel bad on days where I do less, because I know I do a 110% on the other days. A workday is simply too long to be productive the whole time and the workload usually varies.

Straight answer up front: sometimes my entire ten hour shift has less than 10 minutes of work in it.
I must confess, my job is a bit of an edge case because not everybody wants to do it.
I work third shift, and usually exclusively the weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights, 11pm to 9am).
4 ten-hour shifts.
and during these shifts... bruh most of the time I'm chilling
I'm reading ebooks, I'm watching anime or youtube, I'm chatting with friends on discord
most of my job is having a pulse while babysitting an empty building.
the part of my job that makes the money, though, is when the phone rings.
I work at a towing company, and I dispatch.
When people are calling me, it's almost exclusively because shit's fucked up.
I am in charge of sending some unfuckery their way.
Most of the calls are from companies though: Motor freight lines like Ryder, Penske, Fleetnet, UPS, FedEx, and a few other carriers that are even less customer-facing; motor clubs like Swoop, Urgently, AAA, NationSafe; or insurance companies like Allstate or GEICO.
What they want to hear is how soon and how much and knowing how to rapidly generate this information while remaining accurate is where most of the expertise lies.
Then there's the police calls.
When there has been an accident and a disabled vehicle (and its pieces) must be removed from obstructing the roadway, that's us.
When some dumb bastard drives drunk and subsequently gets rightly caught, we impound their shit.
When a stolen vehicle is found, we recover it.
Whilst my opinion regarding cops (pigs) has evolved (fuck the police) quite a bit (they're fucking bastards) in recent years (every last one of them), my guys do the NOT Standing On Someone's Neck bits of it AFTER the dust has settled and the blood is done being spilled (and the bullets have stopped flying...) so generally we're one of the responders on the make-someone's-life-LESS-horrible side of the curve. Which feels pretty nice.
There are the rare occasions where a major shitshow evolves and I'm triaging calls and coordinating multiple assets in the field though, and that's when the pay really feels worth it.
Presently I'm 5 years in and making 20/hr
Literally at this very second, it's a wednesday night/thursday morning and I've already DONE my 40 hours this week - I'm here on overtime covering the other third shift dispatcher while they're out, and each of these hours is worth $$$THIRTY BUCKS HELL YEAAAA$$$
it's not enough to afford rent nowadays of course, but eh, i inherited the house from my father...
(and want to transform it into a group home for low income persons and families if I can get it organized right)
(i'll be taking a page from history and trying to turn my house into something like a multigenerational compound except for people who aren't strictly related by blood)
- Multigenerational housing for the win! Also, neat job, congrats!
- Doesn't working overnight have ramifications?
  
  for most people it does. For me, while they may exist outside of my awareness, I am nevertheless unaware of them. What health issues I had been experiencing came about as a result of other major life circumstances, and i've seen some pivotal improvements since some of those circumstances have been amended.
  I always was a natural night-owl. I'm always more alert at night, and get eepy sweepy after the sun comes up, so it suits my proclivities perfectly.
  I've been at it for five years already, so, if it's a chronic issue, guess I'll find out after another 20 years of it!

Same, as a programmer I would guess 2-3h at most. I mean actual coding with that, meetings and discussions take up the rest of the day.
- Meetings and discussions are work
  
  We found a manager.
  
  They CAN be work. They frequently are an impediment.
- For me, 2 hours of meetings, 1 hour of actual work.
  Meetings are so draining, we should get rid of them.

I work in an office 40 hours a week 8 hours a day Monday to Friday. Let me clarify, though.
No matter who asks that's my answer and that's how I expect to be paid for my time. There are days where I don't have as many tasks to do and maybe I don't have something to do here and there but during my scheduled time I'm always available if something comes up. If I'm making myself available that's still working. If I can't just leave work or just ignore things on my to do list then I'm working. I think more people need to think of it this way. Just because you're not actively working on a task every second of working hours doesn't mean you're not working.
Edit: just wanted to add that working on your skills especially with something related to your job that doesn't necessarily complete a task for work also counts as time worked in my eyes as well as my boss. I'm very open about training time and always keeping on top of my craft. Not sure if this is normal but it ought to be.
- The other point of view is that we should work like 2 or 3 days in a week, or better, something like 20h, with no overload of work and no lower pay.
  Maybe your work requires you to be available, but when some people spend hours on pause or chatting on the phone they are not available.
  Developing strategies to avoid boredom and keep your wages because we are enslaved 40h per week should not be something we have to fight for. But I admit the situation may be very different depending on where you live. One fight at a time.
  
  I completely agree. It's definitely a slow battle. I'm just happy that my situation at work is as good as it is. I still think in general I'm under paid and I would also like to work less days in a week but I think it'll be a long time before that's the norm. If it ever happens. The least I and everyone else can do is to set realistic expectations and boundaries.
  My last job was very bad at this. They were horrible with working around people's schedules and getting days off was very difficult. My current job is the complete opposite. To be fair I got really lucky but I also think it shows work life balance is becoming more important to employees and in turn employers have to respect it or people won't work for them. To give some context my current job allows me to request time off up to 24 hours before my normal schedule WITHOUT any type of approval. I can work around my schedule in almost any way I'd like and I can call off sick without needing to give a reason let alone provide a doctor's note. This is how it should be for all jobs but I think we're a long way from that.

I've had (no shit) a week or 2 go by where I've worked maybe a few hours.
I am on call quite frequently and when things do come in I'm on it immediately, but a lot of the time I am just trying to find things to do. I've even asked to be given more work and I'm trying to get into development during my downtime.
I think I'm an outlier though. My role is to maintain a particular service and when nothing is broken, I'm stuck with nothing to do.
After years of hard work, shitty work, long hours, working 2 jobs, graveyard shifts and long commutes.. it's kinda nice to have a break.
- Some people actually get tired of being in your situation, which is something I'll never understand. This timeframe me and a colleague were between projects and only had "on call" tasks left because we simply ended our entire workload way earlier than other required integrations (they were slow, not us who were fast, and we couldn't move forward with anything beyond what was on spec there) was the best of all time. Three weeks of 4 hours of coding total, and the rest spent on just meetings. I actually left the office after the morning sync a few of the days with my lead's blessing (so long as didn't tell others).

About 7.5 hours out of an 8 hour shift. I work a job where I am physically actually working the entire day except for my breaks. I work in healthcare.
Sometimes I wish I had an office job because I hear things like this and sometimes get a bit jealous. But I am still satisfied with my job and I feel that I am compensated well.
- I have an office job and I work 8 hours a day programming. It's nice to be able to clock out consistently at 5 but I really don't get much down time. I rarely get my full hour for lunch.
  It's not bad work and I like my job but working 3 hours would get you fired here.
  
  Yeah my brother also has an office job and seems to work for the majority of his shift too. He works in finance. I guess it's dependent on what sort of office job you have then. I hope you are compensated well.
  
  I have no idea how you can do that consistently for 8 hours straight and not burn out
- Office jobs also vary greatly. I work an office job and yesterday I worked about 12 hours with a 1-hour break to drive from one office to another. I typically work through lunch and still find myself overwhelmed with too much to do.
  
  But the one hour "break" isn't really a break. It's traveling time
- Curious what field exactly, from rotations in residency and previous experience it seems to vary wildly.
  The ED is non-stop action, sometimes more work than you should reasonably be doing probably. But in regular wards it seems that I had my work done about 3-4 hours into the shift most days and then I was just sitting around waiting for an admission or some results back.
  Similar experience doing nursing in neuro before I got my MD, of the 24h hours I would reasonably work like 1/3 of that and most of the rest was downtime, usually I would sleep through most of the night too.
  
  I'm not a physician. I work in the laboratory grossing surgical specimens. Our work never stops. There are almost always cases to complete, except for some rare days where there is a lull in cases before the end of my shift (typically the night before certain holidays if they stop doing surgeries...or sometimes a bunch of surgeons will take their vacations at the same time lol). This does also mean that I get to have standard holidays off, unlike a field like nursing or any role in the ER.
  It varies, though. Some labs are very slow where you actually do get a fair amount of downtime and some are even busier and more bustling than mine. I'd say we are a fairly busy lab, but we don't generally get ultra complex surgical resections like hospitals even larger than mine do. We still do get large cases, just not things like pieces of people's faces, etc.
  It's an interesting field.
  You mention that you had a lot of down time in nursing, but I'd say I depends on the field and facility with that too. My mom is a nurse and has had nursing jobs similar to how you described. She said she would get a lot more downtime when she worked in large hospital settings and worked overnight. Usually overnights seemed to be the quietest. But then she was worked other types of facilities where she really hardly has time to sit down and take much of a break.
  Even at my hospital, some of our pathologists will manage to fly through their cases and head out early (our director manages to make it so he always has a lighter caseload than the rest lol)...while others are always working late into the night working on additional duties like tumor boards.
  So ymmv depending on what role and what type of facility you're at yeah.
  Even though I work all day, I think I have a good work-life balance and really enjoy being at work with my coworkers.

I used to make 80k in a career I hated working 55 hours a week (salary). I now make 50-75k (lots of OT available) working about 20 hours a week and watching Kodi/listening to audiobooks the rest of the time. I feel like I definitely upgraded.
- Just curious about what your former job was and what your current job is
  
  I was in corporate middle management and now I am a plant operator at a water treatment facility. I also had a crap 401k after 15 years of max contribs at the last job whereas now I'll retire with a decent pension.

lately between 9 and 11. it is often quite miserable, and it is an absolute tragedy that 'reduced hours' hasn't seemed to be a goal of unions in ages.
- Theoretically unions are unionized workers who represent all workers. So they should do surveys from time to time about what the current concerns of the workers are.
  At least thats how it works in Switzerland.

When I used to work in the office I probably worked about 5 hours a day at most. The rest was spent on personal projects, fucking around, whatever
Now that I work from home it varies between two and four.
My production is exactly the same.
- Same, I honestly spend most of my days in my home lab working on personal stuff and then grind out work when I need to. My production is still higher than all my immediate team mates and my boss consistently praises my efforts. I have pretty bad ADHD so this sporadic burst working is what works best for me. That being said i'm on call support so of course if a call comes in that gets responded to immediately as I am never out of earshot of my work PC and phone during work hours even though I may be actually on my personal PC.
  Recently I took over a project two people have been working on and have just done it myself, the timeline for completion has also moved up a month with just me doing it. My co workers aren't lazy, I just find that I know how to batch things together efficently and kill a flock with a boulder so to speak. Frankly my brain inscentivizes me finishing stuff fast.
  This is what middle managers and c suite at my company that miss lording over cubicles don't get, I am literally more efficient at home in my own environment without distractions, but also contrary to their beliefs I am not shut off from collaboration. I always answer calls and constantly run training sessions for our new hires and my co workers on my methods. This is all a bullshit way to get us back under their thumb.

Nice try Mr Manager! I'm not falling for that! Nice effort though, making an account on the threadiverse just to catch me out!
I of course totally work every hour of those 40 hours a week..
- Damn it. I was targeting you specifically because I notice you using Lemmy instead of working. That's when I decided to make a lemmy account and write hundreds of comments. Of cause they're all written with ChatGPT. Who in their right mind would write over 500 comments in less than 2 months?
  It was all a setup to ask this final question and expose you. You just destroyed months of work within a few minutes
  
  You need to wake up earlier in the morning to catch me! :P

IT in a building with less than 100 computers. If nothing is broken, I have nothing to. I have gone up to a week without anyone having anything to do other than create a few new accounts. 10/10 get paid to show up and know where the stash of new mice are.
- Sometimes the job is just to be there, and to be the guy that knows what to do when things go wrong.
  It's not like firefighters are just running from one fire to the next.
- A big part of my job is administrating a herd of VMs, license and relay servers, SQL servers, web apps and android devices. If I have nothing to do, then it means Im doing my job properly. I do try to spend at least half my free time developing work-adjacent skills from online resources and bantering with chatgpt, tho.
  
  I do try to spend at least half my free time developing work-adjacent skills
  Is Factorio a work related skill?

nice try boss
- I, too, am 100% productive at all times. Even when I'm not on the clock.

Mostly less than 30 min per day. Then every few months 10h per day.
- Found the sysadmin

The whole 8 hour shift. Customer service, so the work is never over.
- I worked cs for Dish Network and some days the downtime between calls wouldn't even reach one second. Sometimes the system would glitch and give us two calls at once, that was fun
  
  I take two chats at once most of the time. It's brutal, all day. There is no space. Having only one chat for a short time is the break.

As a software developer I do not count sitting in meetings as productive work. Maybe 2-3h a day on average I'm left alone, in a state of flow and am really getting stuff done.

Where is everyone getting these jobs? Even if it's slow I am still doing my job every few minutes unless systems are down.
- Get a job in IT and then get a job at an established company. If you doing new job right you won't do anything at all.
  
  Yeah I agree, I work in IT and specially in enterprise companies, work pace is crazy slow. Not much is expected by the employees. Lots of meetings to talk about things instead of doing them.

I refuse to begin any new tasks in the final 2 hours of my day.
In the first 6, I work anywhere from 0 - 100% of that time. Rarely more than 50.
- I only really do work in the last two hours of the day.
  And in the first when I need to quickly fix an issue

I work 12 hour shifts doing 911 calltaking overnight. Call volume fluctuates wildly, as do the length of my calls. I've had nights where our supervisors get nervous that the phones aren't ringing and start doing test calls to make sure everything is working right, and I've had nights where the phone never seems to stop. On average I probably handle in the ballpark of 100 calls a night to make it a nice round number.
In a perfect world, I could handle each of those calls in probably about 2 minutes or less if every caller is calm and cooperative, prepared to answer all of my questions, and the situation isn't actively evolving while I'm on the phone, but that's not always the case, I've had some extreme outliers I've been on with for over an hour, I have some that are less than a minute, and everything in between, so with no real data to back it up I'm going to say it averages to about 5 minutes a call to keep the math easy.
So about 500 minutes of actually being on the phone, or 8⅓ hours.
That actually sounds a bit high to me, I probably went a little high on both of my guestimates, but that's probably pretty close when I figure in the other little stuff I have to do besides actually taking calls, re-listening to calls, adding additional notes once the call has ended, email, going over my QA reviews, training stuff, etc.
But except for the outliers when we get really busy, that's mostly broken up pretty well. I usually get at least a couple minutes between calls, I get a few minutes to mess around on my cell phone, do some reading, and when things die down later at night I can even bust out my switch and game a little between calls. My agency doesn't really care what we do between calls as long as we're not being disruptive and can put it down when the phone rings.
- It actually helped me from learning the 5 Ws in kindergarten.
  Where? What? How many ("Wie viele" in German)? What? Wait.
  I don't have to make a call often, but all the more important is that I have that in the back of my head. I go through the first four points and then I shut up to for further questions, instructions or just a "okay, got that, sending someone".
  I think that is something that everybody should learn early everywhere. Everyone can only benefit from people making short, focused emergency calls.
  
  I really like "wait" being part of that. A whole lot of callers will just go on forever if you let them, they talk in circles, try to tell you their entire life story, repeat themselves, and ramble on about a bunch of irrelevant stuff that I'm not going to do anything with and isn't going into my notes. There's exceptions of course, but very often I'm boiling everything down to about 5 or less short bullet-point-like notes, not even full sentences. We're not taking a report, that's the cops' job, we're just telling them where to go, a brief description of what's going on, and any important hazards or strange situations that are going on they need to be on the lookout for.
- Is there an AMA community on Lemmy yet?
  I'd be super keen to hear your stories.
  
  I don't really have any interest in doing an AMA to be honest.
  A lot of the questions would probably end up being variations of "what's the craziest/funniest/saddest/etc call you've taken?" Which I don't want to get into too much, it's a bit of a pain in the ass going over my stories to make sure I'm not giving away any identifiable info about the people involved, and some of the bigger calls I've had have made the news so I could end up partially doxxing myself. On top of that, a lot of my stories don't have much of an ending. Once the call is over that's usually it for me, I don't really get any follow-up most of the time.
  Then there's the "should I call 911 if..." questions. Every agency handles things differently, but overall a lot of places are kind of moving towards handling everything through the same dispatch center, emergency or non-emergency alike, so one way or another it's probably going to come through us, so just call 911 and cut out the middle man. If you need a cop to do something, even if it's call you on the phone, call 911. Worst case scenario we'll tell you to call the station directly, and maybe even give you the phone number, you really need to be a major nuisance before anyone even dreams of getting you in trouble for misusing 911. If you have an administrative question like "is my copy of the report ready to be picked up?" "I need to make an appointment to get fingerprinted for my job" "I want to drop off a bunch of cookies for the cops" then yeah, call the station's non emergency number.
  "What if I butt-dial 911" just stay on the line, say "sorry, I accidentally dialed you, there's no emergency."
  "How do you deal with burn-out?" I just kind of do. There's a lot of different philosophies on this, but personally I think if you have to spend time actually thinking about how to deal with it, you're already on the losing side of the battle. I have family, friends, etc. who I can talk to, hobbies, a life outside of work, etc. It's not something I really worry about, my brain is pretty well wired to deal with the stress without having to really think about how I'm doing it.
  "ACAB," yes. If I could do the same job for just fire/EMS, and/or replace most of my police calls with therapists, counselors, crisis intervention specialists, etc. I would absolutely do it in a heartbeat, but I gotta work with the tools I got.
  "I called 911 once, and they ..." I really can't speak for your local dispatch center, certainly not your local police, etc. I can tell you how I would have handled a situation and how things probably would have played out here, but that may not mean shit for your situation. Some dispatch centers are trash, if you're living in an area that's covered by one I'm sorry. We're also stuck with a lot of rules and regulations, bureaucracy, etc. so how/why we do some things may not make total sense to people on the outside but by and large there's a reason for most of it, you gotta try to work with the system, fighting it isn't going to get you anywhere.
  "I just want to say thank you for doing what you do" I appreciate it, but not really a question
  I happy to answer other questions as they come up, but an AMA would probably end up just mostly rehashing those same things in different forms.

Depends on a given week. Some weeks it’s 8 hour days morning to evening and some weeks it’s finish all my work for the week on Wednesday before noon.

Officially, it should be 7 hours a day. But normally I work 5-6 hours. The rest are wasted on distractions and context switching. But deep work (i.e. actually getting things done) is normally 2-3 hours.
I also count meetings and chatting with colleagues are actual work. Those sessions might seem superficial but the way we collaborate with others is also important.
- You get 2-3 hours of deep work time EVERY DAY? I'm lucky to get that once a week.
  
  It's not that hard. I utilise Pomodoro techinque to set aside four 25m-40m sessions. Now it's just the matter of discipline. I block all distractions (emails, texting, entertainment, etc.) and coalesce them into a period of time.

Id bet this month's mortgage payment that there's an inverse relationship between how much time people spend actually working in an 8 hour day and how much they get paid.
- Teacher here. Yes and ouch
- I don't bet money, but I bet you're right!
  
  I don’t bet money
  I see you're visiting us from the Fae lands. In that case we'll wager the memory of your first kiss.
- Absolutely. In my career and in all my friends careers, the more we move up, the less we work, the less we get paid. It's ridiculous.
  
  Wait what? Are you saying that if you get promoted to a manager, you work less and also get paid less?

IT is fun, I do anywhere from 2 hours to 16 hours in my 8hr shift depending on what the day brings me. 16 hours is the extreme rare, of course, and either outage or project based.
- I think on average I do about 5 hours a week. I would do less, but it's obviously unreasonable to expect users to use the password reset tool.
  
  I'm so happy we have a T1 service desk to handle that, really frees up the time to deal with user error. The mining industry is a real mixed bag but the skill development is top notch.
  
  It's for security /s (or not /s not sure 😅)

I'm in healthcare so 8 hour day probably has 9 hours of work in it. Lunch break if I'm lucky.
- Modern slavery. They are exploiting your need to help people to make you work until you drop.
  This is a common trap for your group.
  
  Yup. It's the principle the NHS runs on. Exploit the good will of the staff to cut costs. Hence the reason why everyone in the public sector in the UK is going on strike at the minute.

Ugh this thread makes me upset. I have a contract for 18 hrs per week and you bet your ass I'm really working 99% of the time that I'm clocked in. And then people ask me why I don't work more hours, but looking at these comments it seems I'm actually right on par with other people who get paid for 30-40 hours per week, when it comes to productive time spent.
- Not everyone is like that tbf
  Not my experience working salaried.
- That’s the upside of the stable salaried job versus the potentially more lucrative contracting/consulting. I don’t get paid extra for staying late or traveling, but I also don’t get paid less if I do almost nothing on a given day. And in a laid back company, nobody notices or cares as long as it isn’t negatively affecting projects.
  
  You have to figure out what’s the minimum amount of work you can still get away with. Then you do that amount + a little bit extra so that you don’t get fired the during the next recession.
- Yup. The less hours, the more work.

I have some admittedly unusual work habits.
I spend all of my day working, but the catch is that maybe only 3-5hrs a day is doing work for my clients. A lot of that 3-5 hrs is spent automating client work, so I can spend less time on it tomorrow.
The rest I work on or study whatever feels important or interesting at the moment. I'd say I spend an additional 3-6 hours a day on that. This is the secret behind always being able to say "Oh, I have a thing that works a little like that (but not very like that -- so I'll need a budget)" whenever a client wants to do something new.
Often it's little sequential puzzles I invent and then solve in my head. For example today, my goal was to find the way to take the rolling average of a certain number of bytes, with the minimum number of CPU cycles (and no 'divide' instruction). If this and 2 or 3 other puzzles have decent solutions, I'll be able to do realtime audio analysis on a cheaper and smaller chip than "should" be possible -- although I have no practical implementation in mind at this time. If it comes up one day I'll look like a real hero though, surely :D
In principle, I work 7 days a week, because I have a hard time remembering what day of the week it is. I just track the day of the month. This is much less stressful because there's always tomorrow to get something done. When I don't have "work", I just solve puzzles mentally all day or try to build random things.
I also allocate about an hour a day to answer questions on Lemmy / Reddit, mainly about engineering (I classify this as a from of "work"). That exposes me to new problems that I might not encounter in my formal workplace. Also it helps me learn to be patient with people that want to do something technical, but have varying levels of ability.
- I love your mindset can you adopt me?
  
  The biggest lesson I learned is to take control of my time and decide how to spend it. An 8-hour workday in a vacuum mostly gets filled with questionable tasks, it's almost like a theater filled with actors going through the motions of work, without really doing any. Life isn't too short by itself, but activities like that make it too short.
  It's not something I can do for another person. You'll have to adopt yourself.
- I'm so jealous. That sounds like a ton of fun!
  
  Well, there was the harrowing part in the middle where I was bankrupt in the developing world and nearly died of cholera. That wasn't a super fun few years.
  ...and if we're being honest, my level of obsession with engineering stuff would be considered a mental disorder, if it wasn't so productive. Like, if I had the same level of interest in 90s sitcoms instead of machine learning or assembly language, I'd surely be considered mentally ill -- but it's just one subject instead of another.
  It's weird where we draw the line, isn't it?

Back when I did labor work I found I maxed out on efficient work at 6 hours. I couldn't physically do more without increasing my injury risk or doing less quality work.
Then I started doing more office work and desk work. I found I typically would be able to commit 6 hours of honest work before I'd start losing focus and become prone to distractions.
- Agree. 6 hrs max for focus. Unless there is a major break in-between the hrs like a party, I'm pretty burnt out after the 6th hr.

I work 12h shifts as a healthcare provider. So about 13h.
- And they pay you for 11h?

As a neurosurgeon I work more than 90 percent of the time I spend in the hospital.. I work about 50-60 hours per week.
- How many years do you plan on working for?
  
  Dunno... I'm 35 now, and I work in Germany. I think I have to work for at least another 30 years. (-.-)
- I was about task how a person can even work that much forgetting I used to do air traffic control and had very similar hours. Glad I don't have to work like that anymore. Although I'm sure your work is more rewarding.
  
  The surgery and patient contact (speaking hours, visits) are really rewarding like you've said. But almost 30 percent or more of yoIur time (it really depends how high is your position) you're doing (not so rewarding) paperwork.. I hate paperwork. :D. It's a necessary evil, but I still hate it. I work in Germany and we have soooo many paperwork. Paperwork is the only work we can delay, so in the end of the long day (after 8-10 hours of "real" work), your exhausted body still have to finish the paperwork. I very often have to bring the work home because I just don't have the energy left to finish it in my hospital. And working at home is not "counted" as working hour...... If you don't like the work, it's really stupid to pick this line of work ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ.
  I have heard that air traffic controller (the one in the tower, at least) works like pilot on the ground. Is that true? :D

I spend maybe 30 minutes doing actual work on average. Then once a blue moon I get off my ass and finish my assigned projects in like 3 hours and continue to do nothing.

Nice try, Boss Man!

most days i work 3 hours then slack off for 5

Factory work for me, so ~12 hours per day, 4 or 5 days per week

So I work 12 but because I'm a night nurse a lot of the time it's just being there and monitoring, then occasionally doing something if the monitoring indicates the need. And particularly in psychiatry, a lot of the monitoring is passive. Sure I'll go personally check on people every few hours (the techs do 15 minute checks) but a lot of my monitoring is poking my head out of the nursing station to whisper-yell "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT NOISE" or jumping up when the floorstaff move too fast (some of our security who know me well will actually frantically gesture at me to sit the fuck back down they're just showing their buddy a meme they got excited about).
- So you're actually mentally working 24 hours paid for 12. Got it

Am the most productive in my team, probably a third of my time goes to doing stuff unrelated to my tasks, but a lot of that time is spent answering the questions of my colleagues even if it's not my role... And posting memes to our chat groups!
- And posting memes to our chat groups!
  Chief Morale Officer
  
  I see people complaining about team building when WFH but with two clowns in our group team building is probably better than it was in my previous in office job 🤷

6-8 hours each day, but I don't think my situation should be the standard for everyone.
But who says you "should be" working the full 8 hours?
- My contract
  
  Is it? Or does it says that you are available for your work for 8h per day? Words matter a lot.

I start working the moment I come to work and finish work when the place is closed, 6-12h. I work in a kitchen. Only times there might not be work is during the quiet season when we've managed to do a deep clean already the day before. But mostly I only work and then rest on my days off these days.
Only time I have for even thinking about my hobbies and friends are when I get two days off in a row once a month. Probably going to have to look for a new job before I burn out. These comments about only working for a couple hours a day are really making me envious.
- Kitchens are always a grind, but you should be getting more time off than that. Freaking owner/operators get more time off than two days a month.
  
  Worst part is the owner has been saying he has too much staff and that kitchen should also start running some of the food. We are stretched so thin we do prep at the same time we handle the service as well.
- 2 days off excluding weekends. Right? Right?
  I get weekends (sat, sun) and 30 days off a year. Plus public holidays like Chrismas or Sylvester.
  
  Thankfully Sundays are double pay in Finland, so we are always closed on Sundays. Then the second day off we have a random weekday (excluding friday and saturday). Monday off rotates so that everyone in the kitchen gets 1 Monday off once a month.
  We also get vacation days, but mostly during the quiet season. Always working on public holidays, unless it's the kind where people go to their summer cabins, out of the city.
  
  Sylvester? Is that an auto correct issue, or is this a public holiday that I might want to move to lol.
  Please forgive my ignorance, the schools really failed in the US.

Hours?
- Work?

I work in the LTL freight industry in the US so I'm supposed to be working about 8 hours but lately it's been about 10 and change
Good news is I get time and a half whenever I pass 8 hours on a shift
Bad news is my sleep quality has gone to shit
As an aside the reason for all the OT is because of YRC going under, suddenly all the freight they were hauling is getting off loaded onto other companies.
The boss today said that the mandatory OT is, "Only going to last for the foreseeable future." He has such a way with words, the moment he speaks he just kills the vibe.

I've been at work an hour and haven't done anything. I have some things to work on but they aren't due for a week or so and I can finish them fairly fast so no point rushing.
I usually spend the morning catching up on news and relaxing until 10 then work until lunch, depending on whether I get my tasks done for the day I'll continue working after lunch or go back to nothing. Some times I get to go out for site visits so that's fun and eats up part of my day. Spent 40 minutes talking to some old lady named Flo about her garden yesterday on a site visit.
When we're busy we're busy and I work hard but summers are always slow and my boss is wfh today.

11-13 hours total. I average a six-anna-half hour shift waiting tables, an hour-anna-half active commute, and about four hours of housework.

From my daily 7,5h I‘d say about 3h of meetings and 2h of work

Technically 0 hours a day. Anyone wanna hire an unemployed mediocre programmer?

Most days, honestly, about 2-3 hours. I'm not working at all today. Although, some days come by and I put down a solid 10-12 hours without asking for overtime.
Everyone at my job thinks I'm overworked and doing a great job though. But I think it's just a balance. I work hard some days without complaining and I get to mostly chill the others. Best part is that I work remotely, but I'm not working in tech so I don't collect those fat checks. That's another trade. Great work-life balance, but not much money. Worth it though.

Really depends on the day, tbh. Sometimes I'm on calls and training all day. Sometime shit really blows up and needs to be repaired.
But many days, not much. We could easily go to a four day workweek and I'd still get all my shit done.

It really depends. I do catering so some days there just isn't a job. When I have a gig it's usually 8-10 hours, but only maybe 2-6 of those are actually cooking and serving, the rest is logistics, prep and cleaning.

0-8 hours, really depends on the day and projects on my plate.
I’ve been on the upper end of that for the last 4 months because I got suckered into planning a conference. 🙃

Well yesterday I was on the clock for 12.5 hours, 7 hrs was spent operating equipment, ~3hrs on prep and clean up and the rest of the time was spent waiting for the next task. A pretty typical day for me. Today is my last day of my 5 days on and I have 4 days off.

8-10 hours a day. I have my own company so there's always something to do. Sometimes I play Cities when it's real slow and I'm caught up on paperwork but that's not really that often.

I set aside the first 3-4 hours of the day for creative work, things that require intense focus. Sometimes that's exhausting and I might not do anything else except replying to messages or meetings. Total work time is around 6-7 hours. That's a sustainable cadence.
I'm rejecting meetings in the morning because those golden hours are far too precious to squander on conversation.

11.. typically no breaks lunch. Often 9 hours of meetings day..making under 6 figures in a business role

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