[oskarth]

An interesting exercise is to run RescueTime for a few weeks and see what your daily average is. I'm reminded by this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208818

I certainly believe people can be extremely productive for, say, 100h/w. For example, see Elon Musk for a straightforward counterexample to the "40h/w is peak absolute productivity on a sustained basis"-crowd. But it is useful to separate effective coding time from other productive, and not so productive, time. Empirically speaking, as evidenced by the thread and its sampling of highly motivated YC founders, few people average more than something like 4 hours of effective coding a day.

EDIT: I mean what I say in the first paragraph quite literally. Run Rescuetime for two weeks. See what it reports for Software Dev. That is close enough for effective coding time. It isn't rocket science. Self-reported numbers are almost without fail vastly overestimated, even for expert practitioners.

[psyc]

Well, everyone's different. I don't know what kind of gotcha is hiding in the word 'effective'. It's routine for me to spend 14 hours in a day actually writing and refactoring code, and it seems pretty wildly effective to me.