[Tade0]

Except for the occasional visit to the office to give a few high fives and have some chit-chat I work remotely.

Until recently we used Toggl to track work time and the guidance was to have "6h of focused work daily".

I'm managing 5h 15min-ish, but only when working remotely. When I'm in the office that number organically drops to around 3h 40min.

Only person really doing those hours(and above) is one guy who's not into chit-chat.

[greenshackle2]

That is roughly consistent with my experience.

When I was using the "pomodoro" technique, I first started with the goal of 14 pomodoros per day (14 x 25min of focused work). My (fairly successful) friend who had done pomodoro told me that was not a reasonable goal. 10-12 seems a more reasonable goal for most people.

When doing focused reading in grad school I could do maybe 8-9 hours on a good day.

Working on a personal project I enjoy at home, I can do maybe 7-8 hours of focused coding in a day (but probably not multiple days in a row).

At work I probably do 4 hours of focused coding on average. This is partly because of non-coding tasks, but also my attention tends to peter out beyond 4.5 hours.

[WestCoast]

I can't tell you how unburdening it is to read your response. Thank you for your honesty.

[potta_coffee]

I can tell you, I'm in the same boat. I can't really do more than 4 -5 hours of actual coding on a typical day. I've done days with 7 - 12 hours of coding but those are outliers. Also by Thursday, I'm pretty burned out. I rarely get a lot done on Friday.

[Tade0]

We all are, but we play this little game with our employers so that we don't get fired.

My take is that you can't shoehorn creative work into your desired time slots. Not if the result is supposed to have any quality.

I have found that sometimes I just need to stare away from the screen and forget what exactly I have written in order to obtain a fresh perspective and spot any problems.

No way to speed up this process, and what's worse is that if I try to log only the time during which I did "focused work", the result generally doesn't go over the mentioned 5h 15min daily.

Every person I ever asked about this is in the same situation.

[graeme]

How did you find the 6h target system. I've wondered if I should do something similar.

I am, however, bad at time tracking by disposition, and haven't made a full system yet.

[Tade0]

I didn't participate in any of the decisions, but I assume that given a 8h workday less than one hour was reserved for lunch and the rest for stuff like going to the bathroom and socializing with your co-workers.

It actually was dropped not that long ago, because clients complained that we "weren't working full time".

Little do they know that those 6h were honest, focused work and the requested 8h won't be, because there are limits to what can be achieved on any given day.

[graeme]

Oh, I mean did you find it personally effective at boosting your own output.

I work for myself, so if I can improve my efficiency within a given timespan, it's all win.

[Tade0]

I did write a lot of low-quality code if that's what you're asking.

It was a lot like preparing for an exam after you skipped classes the whole semester. You don't wonder off and you don't stop and think about the direction you're going.