How many hours a day do you actually work?
How many hours a day do you actually work?
I should actually be working 8h a day, but most of it is spend not working. If I'm honest I'm probably working more like 3h a day even though I enjoy my job.
8 hours of nominal work does equal about 3-4 hours of actual focused work. This is completely normal don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Humans need to eat, go to toilet, socialize with their coworkers, relax the brain, move if constantly in the same position.
Btw, meetings are work. If you spend a lot of time in meetings that does count as actual work.
It fluctuates based on workload, but I find myself working anywhere from 4-5 hours a day to basically nonstop during my workday (9 hrs). I do think most people are really only capable of doing "good" work, meaning being at their most productive, for about 3 hours a day though. The rest of the time is spent slogging through and putting out mediocre work, just to get it done.
Straight answer up front: sometimes my entire ten hour shift has less than 10 minutes of work in it.
I must confess, my job is a bit of an edge case because not everybody wants to do it.
I work third shift, and usually exclusively the weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights, 11pm to 9am).
4 ten-hour shifts.
and during these shifts... bruh most of the time I'm chilling
I'm reading ebooks, I'm watching anime or youtube, I'm chatting with friends on discord
most of my job is having a pulse while babysitting an empty building.
the part of my job that makes the money, though, is when the phone rings.
I work at a towing company, and I dispatch.
When people are calling me, it's almost exclusively because shit's fucked up.
I am in charge of sending some unfuckery their way.Most of the calls are from companies though: Motor freight lines like Ryder, Penske, Fleetnet, UPS, FedEx, and a few other carriers that are even less customer-facing; motor clubs like Swoop, Urgent.ly, AAA, NationSafe; or insurance companies like Allstate or GEICO.
What they want to hear is how soon and how much and knowing how to rapidly generate this information while remaining accurate is where most of the expertise lies.
Then there's the police calls.
When there has been an accident and a disabled vehicle (and its pieces) must be removed from obstructing the roadway, that's us.
When some dumb bastard drives drunk and subsequently gets rightly caught, we impound their shit.
When a stolen vehicle is found, we recover it.Whilst my opinion regarding cops (pigs) has evolved (fuck the police) quite a bit (they're fucking bastards) in recent years (every last one of them), my guys do the NOT Standing On Someone's Neck bits of it AFTER the dust has settled and the blood is done being spilled (and the bullets have stopped flying...) so generally we're one of the responders on the make-someone's-life-LESS-horrible side of the curve. Which feels pretty nice.
There are the rare occasions where a major shitshow evolves and I'm triaging calls and coordinating multiple assets in the field though, and that's when the pay really feels worth it.
Presently I'm 5 years in and making 20/hr
Literally at this very second, it's a wednesday night/thursday morning and I've already DONE my 40 hours this week - I'm here on overtime covering the other third shift dispatcher while they're out, and each of these hours is worth $$$THIRTY BUCKS HELL YEAAAA$$$
it's not enough to afford rent nowadays of course, but eh, i inherited the house from my father...
(and want to transform it into a group home for low income persons and families if I can get it organized right)
(i'll be taking a page from history and trying to turn my house into something like a multigenerational compound except for people who aren't strictly related by blood)I work in an office 40 hours a week 8 hours a day Monday to Friday. Let me clarify, though.
No matter who asks that's my answer and that's how I expect to be paid for my time. There are days where I don't have as many tasks to do and maybe I don't have something to do here and there but during my scheduled time I'm always available if something comes up. If I'm making myself available that's still working. If I can't just leave work or just ignore things on my to do list then I'm working. I think more people need to think of it this way. Just because you're not actively working on a task every second of working hours doesn't mean you're not working.
Edit: just wanted to add that working on your skills especially with something related to your job that doesn't necessarily complete a task for work also counts as time worked in my eyes as well as my boss. I'm very open about training time and always keeping on top of my craft. Not sure if this is normal but it ought to be.
I've had (no shit) a week or 2 go by where I've worked maybe a few hours.
I am on call quite frequently and when things do come in I'm on it immediately, but a lot of the time I am just trying to find things to do. I've even asked to be given more work and I'm trying to get into development during my downtime.
I think I'm an outlier though. My role is to maintain a particular service and when nothing is broken, I'm stuck with nothing to do.
After years of hard work, shitty work, long hours, working 2 jobs, graveyard shifts and long commutes.. it's kinda nice to have a break.
About 7.5 hours out of an 8 hour shift. I work a job where I am physically actually working the entire day except for my breaks. I work in healthcare.
Sometimes I wish I had an office job because I hear things like this and sometimes get a bit jealous. But I am still satisfied with my job and I feel that I am compensated well.
As a software developer I do not count sitting in meetings as productive work. Maybe 2-3h a day on average I'm left alone, in a state of flow and am really getting stuff done.
I work 12 hour shifts doing 911 calltaking overnight. Call volume fluctuates wildly, as do the length of my calls. I've had nights where our supervisors get nervous that the phones aren't ringing and start doing test calls to make sure everything is working right, and I've had nights where the phone never seems to stop. On average I probably handle in the ballpark of 100 calls a night to make it a nice round number.
In a perfect world, I could handle each of those calls in probably about 2 minutes or less if every caller is calm and cooperative, prepared to answer all of my questions, and the situation isn't actively evolving while I'm on the phone, but that's not always the case, I've had some extreme outliers I've been on with for over an hour, I have some that are less than a minute, and everything in between, so with no real data to back it up I'm going to say it averages to about 5 minutes a call to keep the math easy.
So about 500 minutes of actually being on the phone, or 8⅓ hours.
That actually sounds a bit high to me, I probably went a little high on both of my guestimates, but that's probably pretty close when I figure in the other little stuff I have to do besides actually taking calls, re-listening to calls, adding additional notes once the call has ended, email, going over my QA reviews, training stuff, etc.
But except for the outliers when we get really busy, that's mostly broken up pretty well. I usually get at least a couple minutes between calls, I get a few minutes to mess around on my cell phone, do some reading, and when things die down later at night I can even bust out my switch and game a little between calls. My agency doesn't really care what we do between calls as long as we're not being disruptive and can put it down when the phone rings.
Depends on a given week. Some weeks it’s 8 hour days morning to evening and some weeks it’s finish all my work for the week on Wednesday before noon.
Officially, it should be 7 hours a day. But normally I work 5-6 hours. The rest are wasted on distractions and context switching. But deep work (i.e. actually getting things done) is normally 2-3 hours.
I also count meetings and chatting with colleagues are actual work. Those sessions might seem superficial but the way we collaborate with others is also important.
Ugh this thread makes me upset. I have a contract for 18 hrs per week and you bet your ass I'm really working 99% of the time that I'm clocked in. And then people ask me why I don't work more hours, but looking at these comments it seems I'm actually right on par with other people who get paid for 30-40 hours per week, when it comes to productive time spent.
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I have some admittedly unusual work habits.
I spend all of my day working, but the catch is that maybe only 3-5hrs a day is doing work for my clients. A lot of that 3-5 hrs is spent automating client work, so I can spend less time on it tomorrow.
The rest I work on or study whatever feels important or interesting at the moment. I'd say I spend an additional 3-6 hours a day on that. This is the secret behind always being able to say "Oh, I have a thing that works a little like that (but not very like that -- so I'll need a budget)" whenever a client wants to do something new.
Often it's little sequential puzzles I invent and then solve in my head. For example today, my goal was to find the way to take the rolling average of a certain number of bytes, with the minimum number of CPU cycles (and no 'divide' instruction). If this and 2 or 3 other puzzles have decent solutions, I'll be able to do realtime audio analysis on a cheaper and smaller chip than "should" be possible -- although I have no practical implementation in mind at this time. If it comes up one day I'll look like a real hero though, surely :D
In principle, I work 7 days a week, because I have a hard time remembering what day of the week it is. I just track the day of the month. This is much less stressful because there's always tomorrow to get something done. When I don't have "work", I just solve puzzles mentally all day or try to build random things.
I also allocate about an hour a day to answer questions on Lemmy / Reddit, mainly about engineering (I classify this as a from of "work"). That exposes me to new problems that I might not encounter in my formal workplace. Also it helps me learn to be patient with people that want to do something technical, but have varying levels of ability.
Back when I did labor work I found I maxed out on efficient work at 6 hours. I couldn't physically do more without increasing my injury risk or doing less quality work.
Then I started doing more office work and desk work. I found I typically would be able to commit 6 hours of honest work before I'd start losing focus and become prone to distractions.
I spend maybe 30 minutes doing actual work on average. Then once a blue moon I get off my ass and finish my assigned projects in like 3 hours and continue to do nothing.
Nice try, Boss Man!
most days i work 3 hours then slack off for 5
I start working the moment I come to work and finish work when the place is closed, 6-12h. I work in a kitchen. Only times there might not be work is during the quiet season when we've managed to do a deep clean already the day before. But mostly I only work and then rest on my days off these days.
Only time I have for even thinking about my hobbies and friends are when I get two days off in a row once a month. Probably going to have to look for a new job before I burn out. These comments about only working for a couple hours a day are really making me envious.
So I work 12 but because I'm a night nurse a lot of the time it's just being there and monitoring, then occasionally doing something if the monitoring indicates the need. And particularly in psychiatry, a lot of the monitoring is passive. Sure I'll go personally check on people every few hours (the techs do 15 minute checks) but a lot of my monitoring is poking my head out of the nursing station to whisper-yell "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT NOISE" or jumping up when the floorstaff move too fast (some of our security who know me well will actually frantically gesture at me to sit the fuck back down they're just showing their buddy a meme they got excited about).
Factory work for me, so ~12 hours per day, 4 or 5 days per week
Really depends on the day, tbh. Sometimes I'm on calls and training all day. Sometime shit really blows up and needs to be repaired.
But many days, not much. We could easily go to a four day workweek and I'd still get all my shit done.
11-13 hours total. I average a six-anna-half hour shift waiting tables, an hour-anna-half active commute, and about four hours of housework.
From my daily 7,5h I‘d say about 3h of meetings and 2h of work
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I've been at work an hour and haven't done anything. I have some things to work on but they aren't due for a week or so and I can finish them fairly fast so no point rushing.
I usually spend the morning catching up on news and relaxing until 10 then work until lunch, depending on whether I get my tasks done for the day I'll continue working after lunch or go back to nothing. Some times I get to go out for site visits so that's fun and eats up part of my day. Spent 40 minutes talking to some old lady named Flo about her garden yesterday on a site visit.
When we're busy we're busy and I work hard but summers are always slow and my boss is wfh today.
I work in the LTL freight industry in the US so I'm supposed to be working about 8 hours but lately it's been about 10 and change
Good news is I get time and a half whenever I pass 8 hours on a shift
Bad news is my sleep quality has gone to shit
As an aside the reason for all the OT is because of YRC going under, suddenly all the freight they were hauling is getting off loaded onto other companies.
The boss today said that the mandatory OT is, "Only going to last for the foreseeable future." He has such a way with words, the moment he speaks he just kills the vibe.
Most days, honestly, about 2-3 hours. I'm not working at all today. Although, some days come by and I put down a solid 10-12 hours without asking for overtime.
Everyone at my job thinks I'm overworked and doing a great job though. But I think it's just a balance. I work hard some days without complaining and I get to mostly chill the others. Best part is that I work remotely, but I'm not working in tech so I don't collect those fat checks. That's another trade. Great work-life balance, but not much money. Worth it though.
It really depends. I do catering so some days there just isn't a job. When I have a gig it's usually 8-10 hours, but only maybe 2-6 of those are actually cooking and serving, the rest is logistics, prep and cleaning.
11.. typically no breaks lunch. Often 9 hours of meetings day..making under 6 figures in a business role
8-10 hours a day. I have my own company so there's always something to do. Sometimes I play Cities when it's real slow and I'm caught up on paperwork but that's not really that often.
I work somewhere between 1-5 hours a day... I love my job
0-8 hours, really depends on the day and projects on my plate.
I’ve been on the upper end of that for the last 4 months because I got suckered into planning a conference. 🙃
I set aside the first 3-4 hours of the day for creative work, things that require intense focus. Sometimes that's exhausting and I might not do anything else except replying to messages or meetings. Total work time is around 6-7 hours. That's a sustainable cadence.
I'm rejecting meetings in the morning because those golden hours are far too precious to squander on conversation.
Well yesterday I was on the clock for 12.5 hours, 7 hrs was spent operating equipment, ~3hrs on prep and clean up and the rest of the time was spent waiting for the next task. A pretty typical day for me. Today is my last day of my 5 days on and I have 4 days off.
I'm a graduate student and it varies wildly. When I have to work on my dissertation and teach I definitely work a full 40 hours. Teaching alone takes a shit ton of your time.
maybe 2 hours max. most of my job is sitting and waiting and playing games on my phone. its tough hard work but it pays the bills
I do design and tech support for industry. Official hours are 7,5h/day (lunch is off-duty). 3 days in office 2 days remotely. My actual workload varies a lot. If everything works and all resources are in use, I might not have anything to do for weeks on end. If shit hits the fan, I'm on overtime working 10h days, using every second.
I might quess that on average 2h/day of actual work and varying part of this are communally beneficial activities I invent for myself to keep myself busy.
I’ve been tracking my time with Toggl, so I can answer that with surprising amount of detail and confidence.
I took my time data from 2022, and made a bunch of calculations with it. The results are: 3:41-7:52 hours per day. The median and average were both 5:54. Ooh, looks like this data might actually follow the normal distribution after all! Anyway, that range covers 80% of the distribution, so extremely short and long days fall in the 20% that’s outside of that range.
In this calculation I’ve counted as working all the meetings, casual chitchat, normal work, organizing and all the random administration clutter. Commutes, lunches and time wasted in social media time don’t count as work.
Naw, work as little as possible while still convincing your manager you're productive, that's what most of them do.
Hours worked is a silly metric anyways. There are some cases where it makes sense, but it should be measured by productivity.
I've had times where I've gotten more work done in the first 4 hours of the day than I normally get done in 3-4 days. The system is totally screwed and employers are lazy and want easy ways to measure their employees.
It's complicated, but the moral of the story is, never work more than you have to. Never forget that if you're not getting overtime pay, then you are donating your labor and time for free to your employer. They are getting lots of value for absolutely nothing in return.
And don't be fooled by the corporate propaganda about being recognized for your efforts or some such crap, it's bogus. 95% of the time the best you can hope for is a pat on the back for your "good work" maybe if you're really lucky, you'll get a company branded coffee mug or even a $10 gift card to Starbucks...
Multiple times at different companies my actions directly saved the company thousands of dollars and in one case possibly a person's job. What did I get for that? Jack squat, zero compensation or bonus, no extra time off, nothing. I got a shout out in a Teams meeting for, "stepping up and being a team player." Capitalist corporate garbage.
I've had days of maybe 15 minutes of actual work, and 10 hour days. very variable. I used to have a job paid 8 hours with literally 45 minutes of work a day. loved it, despite the low pay. way before WFH times though so it was a lot of time looking busy
I spend about half my day or more at work playing videos games on my Steam Deck. And this is the busy season. Come winter, we won't have anything to do.
I make more than the average for my area, and I work weekdays, nine to five. It's a pretty good gig. The last week I've basically been paid to play Baldur's Gate 3.
Depends on how you define work. I do my dayjob for maybe 2 hours a day at most and then freelance with the rest of my working day. so I'd average 5 hours of work a day betwen the two jobs.
I feel like I work about 2 hours a day some days. Meetings and slack are distractions as well as ADHD tendencies. There's so much overhead involved in working for a company that it makes sense. If I just had specs and and interesting problem to solve, I could easily get lost in my work for 8 hours. But that rarely is the case.
too many and never enough
Entirely dependent on the job I’m working. I work in film, so sometimes we’re on a prelight and the day is 12hr, I could work anywhere from four to maybe 10. Then some days were on 10hr shoot days, and I could work maybe 30 min. And then there are days like this week, working a documentary on multiple locations, and I worked a collective maybe 40 min/day (with a 9:30 call and me leaving by 2-3 while getting paid for 12hr).
In an 8 hour day, I'd say probably 7 hours
The other hour probably bathroom trips, coffee/water breaks, occasional quick chats with coworkers throughout the day
I can't hit a full 8 hours actual work unless I do a 9 hour day.
Sometimes I have a shorter lunch break or try not to poop until I get home lol, so I can hit 8 hours quicker
I'm stuck in the food service industry, so I work 9hr days 5 days a week :) All gruelling and soul-sucking, of course!
I estimate about 4 or 5 hours of actual work per day. I'm a high level IT engineer. The rest of the time is just organization or resting my brain between difficult assignments.
I was previously an IT manager and averaged 11+ hours of work per day.
Mostly 2-3 hours of an 8 hour day. Once a week I have to go in guns blazing for 5 straight hours of work in a 10 hour shift.
Same. 3h or less usually. Love my colleagues, the work is fine. But the requirements are so low that I'm able to manage a startup during work hours 😌 #softwaredeveloper
7 and a half.
About 2.5 hours before lunch, then long 90 minute lunch, then maybe 3 hours. So I guess around 5.5 hours.
All 8 hours. It's a physical job, I'm on my feet all day, but it's one of the better ones I've had recently.
My job requires me to work 7h a day. When I am working from home I will probably work 6h-6.5h since I will take two 15 minute breaks but otherwise there is nothing to distract me. If I work from the office however that number easily drops to 4.5-5h since I will be interrupted all the time by various issues and also just take more breaks due to others taking them as well.
Edit: I don’t really know how it is to work from a hole, but I know how to work from home
Sometimes 2, sometimes 12, avg is about 6 to 7. Meetings, email, and messaging are work.
referring to how much time working? or how much time I spend doing my job? I have no problem working in the garden or on the house – but having to do a job so I don’t starve or go homeless makes me a little resentful …
8 hour day, I work 7.5 of that. As soon as I enter the yard I'm in work mode. I work in the city gardens. I'm not surrounded by too many distractions like computers, phones and friends because I'm outside on site and I keep the work conversations about work only. Less drama that way.
On average, about 5hrs a day. 2hrs on a slow day and 7hrs on a fast day.
Usually between 3 and 4 but even that feels difficult to reach sometimes, even with fully remote and engaging work
My days vary, depends on the amount of clients. 6-10hrs and I am doing physical labor so its at maximum 10-15% downtime
I find 4 hours a day ideal (if I have to work at all) and 6 hours optimal.
Depends a lot day to day. Sometimes like last week, 7 out of the 8 hours. Today, so far none. Not much useful to do, so just do useless trainings.
Education in a Title 1 school. I'm contracted five days for eight hours, but I probably work more like ten hours with before school and after school activities and additional stipend duties I've taken on. You don't get much in the way for downtime between meetings, grading, and planning.
Weekends are my time. Non-negotiable.
Most days 4 or 5 hrs. Around 5% of the time, 12+ hrs.
Probably something like 6h or so. I enjoy my job and I think I do it well, but there's only so many hours you can juggle complex logic in your mind per day before your brain turns to mush. After that point any further minute spent staring at the screen would just be a waste of my time and motivation.
I drive a forklift in a warehouse. I probably work 6.5-7 hours a day.
If i didn't have a hurry up and wait type job i could pound through everything in about 3 hours. I do walk about 7 miles a night though so thatd suck to have to do in 3 hours on top of everything else.
It depends on the day, but typically eight. For every decrease one day, which is most often due to being tired, I have an increase another.
I work in IT, so basically anywhere between 0 to maybe 4 hours a day at most. On average I think I actually work maybe 2.5 hours a day.
Well it’s a 10 hour shift with about 55 minutes of break time. Take away another 15-20 minutes for bathroom/smoke breaks and general screwing around. I’m actually working 8.5 hours of a 10 hour shift.
I get squeezed for every minute. If I work faster - then good - do more.
Anywhere from 2 to 6 hours a day. According to my employment lawyer, being available for work even if you don't have work assigned generally means you must be paid for your time. I work from home now, but between compiling code and taking breaks plus some days can be more quiet than others, it's not too crazy of a pace. The last three jobs I've worked at have been like this, even with one of said earlier jobs being in an office.
Mon to Fri. Between 8am and 5 pm, 5 hours tops. And that's a generous top. Been WFH since 2014.
I work in freight management at a brokerage. I determine my hours and my clients. That being said, I am also a SAHD and have a toddler and a dog, so between meals, nap times, walks, etc, I probably put in a good 4-5 hours of work, but I'm on call all day in case of emergencies.
About 2hrs per job.
I'd say about 2 hrs on average.
0.5 hours a day in average. I get nice pay for it. The beauty of support 🤣
I do around 7-8.5 hours. But some of that is just socialising/chatting with people (I'm in software dev management). Lots of "Sooo... What's your perception of what's going on?" "Things going OK?" "Who do I need to talk to to smooth things over?" kinda stuff (the soft skills side of things). It is super rare to go above that unless there's an incident of some type or something goes totally pear shaped.
I used to do 10+ last job and despised it. Took a step down in pay for this role but so much less stress. Day ends, I log off and detach from it all.
Edit: Put per week, not per day...
My workload is inconsistent so it can range from like 1 hour of actual work to more than 6 hours.
Maybe three
I have a fairly workload intense job and I'm happy with my pay. Of my 8 hour day I work pretty much all of it aside from running to the bathroom etc.
Usually about 10-11 hours 5 days a week (9to5ish + 2-3 hours during the evening), and 2 or 3 hours a day during the weekend. I actually like my jobs and this allows me to take longer vacations during summer and winter.
I think around 4-5 out of 6. I like the setup
Like 1-3 on average. Some days it can be all day but not often.
- I haven't yet got another job at my level in my field.
I actually do about 4h of productive work a day and ~3h of meetings (some consider that work). There's always about an hour in a day where my brain is jelly. Wish I could take a nap in the afternoons like I did when we had WFH. I was more productive with an afternoon nap.