Where did my work hours go!

Background:

While at work, I stumbled upon a file in my temp folder which had some application usage timestamps. I wrote few lines of Java code to find out average time I was spending on those applications & overall in office. Average time clocked everyday felt lot more than the amount of “real” work I have been doing! This got me thinking! How much time do I really spend working every year, every day?

Some numbers:

8*3 Slogan-> “Eight hours labor, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest"

365 days-102(weekends)-22(leaves)-11(public holidays)= 230 days * 8 hours (9-6/10-7 per day with lunch break) = 1840 Work Hours (~20% every year)

(365*24) -1840 =  6920 Personal Hours (~80% every year) => My personal time when I normally vegetate

Within those 8 work hours, I squeeze in quite a lot of “work” like reading and responding to useful-useless mails/ST chats/phone calls/news/browsing/tapri-water-restroom break/gossip/cubicle chit chat/ meetings/trainings/sitting passively on a conference bridge/50 people crisis calls where you can't conribute/writing this blog/the mortgage guy needs that document printout etc. apart from my favorite “stare out of the building’. Of course, I am not counting that extra hour for lunch;)

Then I am left wondering, how can I make time for coding and related productive "work" for which organisation pays me every month! How much of these 8 hours are really productive and how much is distraction/sheer waste?

It's subjective to start with. Different people with different job profiles/work allocation/timezones have different patterns!  I am mainly talking about coders here.

Our DNA seems to be designed that’s fit for a lazy species. We prefer the tasks which are pleasurable. We human beings are like any other machine which can’t operate at 100% efficiency! Let’s accept that “8 hours of efficiency” isn’t possible. We sometimes do uninteresting, hard, new, repetitive and no pressure work which adds to the efficiency loss. “Tomorrow” or “still have time and I can catch up” syndrome makes it worst and sprinkle the Monday’s fatigue and Friday’s excitement to that.

My personal experience tells me that 40-60% efficiency is average, 60-70% is great, and 70-90% is excellent. Anything below 40% deserves attention (Not considering 1% of the employees, who can manage 8-14 hours of productive/efficient work, so excuse me if you fall in that category!) If you churn out code or fix defects or manage environment/pipeline or creating design documents etc. for about 4-6 hours every day then you are doing fine. Managers breathing down your neck with task lists and status updates (agile eh!) or if there is an adrenaline pumping live issue or if delivery date was yesterday, the efficiency numbers might go up.

Few way outs which are working for me( Tough & preachy part) :

• Be a task master.  Plan & prioritize as the first thing in the morning or even better at end of the previous day! I easily end up wasting my whole day if I don’t have a prioritized todo list.

• Identifying what is ‘productive’ and what Is ‘distraction’ and when your brain CPU cycles are raring to go. Early morning and 3-5PM are the most productive hours for me. Any distraction then will kill my productivity. Context switching isn’t easy for my single core processor with little RAM & hard disk!

• Learn to efficiently manage meetings and mails. Ignoring and saying no without being rude is an art worth mastering.

• Really work when you are working (combination of smart & hard)! Or you have a choice to stay till 10 PM to feel frustrated and fried. 

• Professional pride, to be the best, satisfaction of getting something done and loving what you do are the things which will spice up your work. Set goals and achieve it without excuses.

• Slack off at times. Call sick without feeling guilty, mix play with work, take a break and do what you love or missing out!

• Learn ABCD method, Pareto Analysis, Eisenhower box, priority matrix etc time management tricks. Use tools like GTD, Pomodoro etc. if needed.

• At end of the day or end of the week, ask yourself, did u do produce or learn anything useful? My answers are "no" majority of the times!

• Isn’t it great that we are paid by hours spent (sometime for just showing up!) and not work done :)? Worth respecting it.

How do you think these 8 hours should be best used? What are your tricks of managing day’s "work" so as to enjoy the other two 8 hour slots of the day uninterrupted & without guilt!

PS : Reproducing this old blog I wrote in 2012 when I was a heads down coder :)