| > I have to say I'm a bit surprised at the positive reaction to this here. This person admits that they're contracted to work 40 hours/wk but they they only do 20-25 hours when working from home. In all seriousness: The people putting in the most focused hours are less likely to be discussing their work deep in the HN comment section during daytime hours. The people who think procrastinating for half of the day is the norm are going to be over-represented in the HN comment section. And yes, I realize the irony of posting this comment. > I know work gets tiring, but I find it hard believe anyone can really do great solid work for half a day and then can't possibly get anything productive done in the second half. It's a common trope on internet comment sections, but I haven't seen it nearly as much in the real world. Sustained work and focus aren't exactly the easiest thing in the world, but people can and do learn how to put in 6-8 solid hours of work per day all of the time. It's one thing to subtract meetings and e-mail from your count of productive hours, but it's strange to hear so many people claiming that they can't physically work more than 20-25 hours in a week. In my experience, I've noticed this thought becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in some of our junior hires. If people arrive at the workplace with preconceived notions that no one works more than 3-4 hours per day or that focusing for 8 hours is physically impossible, they don't even try to improve their ability to focus and be productive. Pairing them up with more productive coworkers usually fixes this misconception very quickly. |
This isn't true. It depends on whether the work is cerebral or not. Certain workloads are limited to as little as 2 hours per day, for 2-4 hours of real knowledge work per day. The rest of it is either extremely suboptimal or of a different class.
Something semi-mechanical like translation or categorization that isn't obviously mechanical could probably occur for a full workday.