[ThroAway200612]

I would love to hear your answer because I do this too, and the numbers may seem shockingly low. Posting under a throwaway just in case some manager sees this and judges me.

I have been scrupulously tracking focused time for years, since I was in college. I "stop the clock" when I sit back to daydream for a few minutes, check the news, or use the bathroom. I also generally don't include meetings unless they're small meetings where I need to be fully engaged.

The result is that for me about 150 minutes of real work feels like an ordinary productive day at my not overly demanding dev job. 180 minutes is doable on a daily basis but I have to be pretty disciplined. If I set my goal to 240 minutes work begins to consume my life and I often stay late to make it up. Days when I have done more than 5 hours of work by this definition are really rare, I either get so stuck on a problem that I am consumed by it (super rare) or have some really impending deadline that blots out everything else (rare). I know if I put in 240m I'm doing a really solid day's work every day.

In college while taking 18 credits of graduate courses I could get by on 4h studying/homework per day, but had to bump it to 5h near the end of the term.