Sometimes it feels like I work really hard. Other times not hard enough. The Hacker News population seems a relatively hard working group, so I thought it would be informative and interesting to see what the average hours worked is on HN.
I just pulled up the last year's worth of consulting invoices and yes, it looks like I managed to bill an entire 40 hours once in the last 52 weeks.<p>I have a personal policy of only billing for the time I'm creating value. So if I boot up, fire up the IDE, sip my coffee, pull up a bug report, then proceed to browse f'ng Hacker News for 2 hours, I don't charge my time. Similarly, if I notice by lunchtime that I'm just plain not smart enough to program computers for money today, I'll stop the clock and go climbing or something.<p>So yeah, I bill 20-30 hours each week, but they're <i>good</i> hours. Back in my salaried days I'd often find my butt in the Aeron for a good 60 hours a week, much of which was spent debating where to go for lunch, reading the internet, and maintaining the corporate HalfLife server. I doubt I got any more productive hours in then than I do now.
I reliably put in four or five 50+ hour weeks per year (especially if I'm at a new startup), but I've learned through hard experience that it's unbelievably counterproductive to do that for longer than a week or two at a time. My personal life and ability to stay awake, much less think/code clearly, suffer otherwise.<p>Of course, if work is sufficiently interesting then I end up spending what free time I have thinking about it, which can make my work time incredibly productive, obviating the need to be "working" too much to begin with.<p>But most importantly: YMMV.
I checked 80+, but it depends on how you define work. A lot of work is sitting around in an all-night diner drinking coffee and drawing on napkins. It ain't such a bad thing, and is probably less stressful than playing a first person shooter.
Most days* :<p>5:00am - 10:00am<p><pre><code> * OS development
* puzzles
* articles
* work on personal projects
</code></pre>
10:00am - 6:00pm<p><pre><code> * coding for my day job
</code></pre>
13hr/day * 5 days/week = 65hrs
+ anything I can sneak in on weekends<p>I aggressively work on work/life balance and take frequent breaks (a great habit leftover from my days as a smoker), so I don't spend much time staring at the screen -- I use this time fairly efficiently.<p>* I'm getting back on track after my wedding and honeymoon, so I'm not yet completely back in the groove yet.
I have a F/T+ day-job where I work for one company 30-40 hours a week (it's supposed to be about 20) and am on loan to another company about 25 hours a week. Then I come home and work on my Startup with my co-founder 2-3 hours a day and full days on most weekends...about 20-30 hours a week. So I usually put in 60-70 hour weeks on the low end.<p>Recently a co-worker had to take an extended leave of absence and my hours at my main company ballooned to full-on 50-60 hours + the 25 hour side job + the startup. Needless to say my startup work had to take a reduction in hours with my co-founder flying solo for a bit (which was hard on her because we just got a bunch of coverage on killer startups, feed my app and a ton of Spanish language tech sites). But for a couple of months I was pulling 90-100 hour weeks.<p>My co-worker has returned and my weeks have fallen back to their regular 60-70 hour pattern.
My own experience is that above 50 hours you start destructing value, not creating some.<p>Examples: writing code filled of bugs you have to fix later, getting upset on a problem you cannot find a solution for while you could be resting, taking the wrong decision, being cranky, etc.<p>Agreed, sometimes you have to go beyond the limit, but it's not sustainable.
At the startup I work at, I average around 60 hours a week, with many weeks exceeding 70 hours a week. This is also usually done in a 5-6 day work week.<p>As a few people have mentioned, this number of hours is rather unsustainable, and I wind up burning out every 2 months or so for a week or two, where I put in a usual 40 hour week.
What gets defined as work? That is where it gets fuzzy for me. First thinking about work related issues starts at 6am, is interrupted for a couple hours with getting kids to school, then back at it until 6pm, break for dinner and spending time with the family, and then back to work thinking until bed - about 10pm. I have been self employed most of my life and all of my children's lives. So this fragmented work schedule is normal to me. I generally work 6 days a week, sometimes only 5, and have noticed that if I work more than about 17 days straight I start to get really grumpy.<p>I have selected 50-60 since I would guess that I end up in the high 50s as an average.
Well.. I work for a large international IT-consulting corporation at a client site. I go to work at 8 AM and leave around 4 PM. So this makes.. umm.. 40 hours per week. During normal 8 hour office day I usually attend meetings for around 1-2 hours, chat around with fellow consultants and client personnel for 2-3 hours, solve client issues alone or with colleagues for 1-3 hours. For the rest of the day I drink coffee and read HN + other web sites.<p>Yes - I feel sometimes that my job is somewhat boring and that I should be doing something more "activating" but I:
- get reasonable salary
- do my job very well
- have great work/life balance<p>So maybe there is not so much to complain.
I put 40-50 hours as real client work + essential other activities (finances, website work, etc) but in reality as a small business starting out I never stop thinking about what next to do with my company.
40 at day job, 40+ on consulting projects. Finding it harder to keep up the pace and want to reshuffle to find time for my own projects. Hard to get off that consulting gravy train though.
I currently work about 20 hours a week on my day job, 10 hours a week freelancing, another 20 hours day-dreaming about my own startup and reading Hacker News/Techmeme/Reddit.
I work 4 days a week so that makes 32 hours and try to fill my friday with small jobs on the side so between 32 and 40, never over that. I cherish my personal life way too much to work more than 40 hours per week. I don't even receive work e-mails on my phone neither do I check them when I'm not at work. I like to keep this separation as clean as possible so that when I'm off work, I don't think about work and / or stress about stuff going on at work.
"How many hours do you work a week?"<p>Weird question. "How many non-sleeping hours a week do you not work?" would be more like it.<p>After all, if you're having a blast, does it really count as work?
I work 27 hours a week, at home. I usually make a full day when I go grab some coffee at the office and talk to my colleagues, because otherwise I wouldn't get anything done on those days. So effectively that's about 4 hours a day. Of course I can just squeeze in more hours if I have an interesting task at hand; then I can just keep the following day off (except checking email occasionally, that's no problem).
Well, i had the doubts and started using rescuetime(www.rescuetime.com) for tracking my activities. I won't get into definition of work but just give some stats. i clock between 50-70 hrs a week on the computer. Productive time(Defined as time spent on the terminal/editor) : 20-30 hrs. Rest is either browsing blogs/email/video..:)
P.S: And oh, am dissatisfied with what i have accomplished.
As a startup co-founder do about 10h/week doing stuff I wouldn't otherwise do for free (mainly, recruiting, admin, contracts, and driving to meetings). I spent about 100h/week doing stuff which is fun and which I'd do for free (hacking on stuff, talking to people about stuff, reading and learning about what I'm working on, etc.)
If you asked me a few months ago I would've said 60-70 but since I started time tracking I've found it's only 40-50 hours on average. This is with being strict about what's considered work time (meals, "general research", etc. are all off the clock)
Remember there is often a difference between working hard and working smart. I would try to focus less on the amount of hours put in and instead just focus on what value you're adding to your project.
Generally speaking, I do less than 20 hours of paid client work per week. On the other hand, I spend a significant amount of time reading CS material and working on personal projects.
It depends. I work fulltime so 37.5 hours a week but then I do more from about 7pm till midnight or later. Then theres the weekend where I probally do 48 hours over a month.
I'd say about 34 right now, once you account for occasional distraction. I usually have trouble focusing (on anything) for more than 3 or 4 hours at a time without a break.
I work 8am to sunset on weekends as a skydiving instructor. During the week I do remote stuff for a few companies for about 4-5 hours a day. I try take off 1 day a week.
Officially I'm contracted for 37.5 hrs/mo but I stay 1-2 hours more most days. I'm a student on a industrial placement so I might as well make the most out of it
define "work" for purposes of this poll. work at job? work at job + side projects? work around the house? does commute time count? any hours inside an office as an employee, including reading email or chatting at coffee machine? time spent fleshing out ideas in the shower or mulling over difficult problems on a walk?<p>I have no idea how many hours a week I "work" for most definitions. About the most I can do is say how many hours I bill a contract client, which is, I hope, ostensibly/approximately how much I work for them. But even then it's not an exact science. I try, but it is arguably impossible to measure with perfect accuracy.
I hope I have a project some day where I find myself wanting to work anything more than 40 hours a week. I have very modest living requirements and would be more than happy on whatever I could make working 25-35 hours a week. Of course, I'm not counting personal projects, my own learning or whatever. But 80 hours? That sounds (in a non-judgmental way), depressing.
Since I quit my job I've been working more than twice as much and loving it (on my startup). I ran into a problem after about two weeks with my eye twitching from too much screen time but took a week vacation and have been fine the two months since. I now sit by a window so I occasionally glance out and exercise my eye focus muscles.