[perrygeo]

Well said. Reading, debugging, reviewing - provides a nice taxonomy for the things we do with code when we're not writing lines of code. I'd also include time spent in books, forums, and documentation as reading about code; sometimes you need the concepts in plain language.

Given this broader definition of coding, I'd say I do roughly 6 hours a day, with 2 hours spent on email/meetings/etc. The time spent actually writing lines of production code is significant but highly variable - maybe 0 hours for the first week, 25 hours the next. Only when "the road ahead is clear", as you said. So the primary work of software engineer tends to be "clear a path so that I can write code" - which involves reading, debugging, reviewing...