How many hours do you work?
I keep finding my self working 50-60 hours a week. Is this normal?
I work from home, and typically I’m “In the office,” about 32-40 hours a week.
I find that I can sustain a max of about 4 hours of focused work (programming) a day before I’m just mentally worked over. If there isn’t more project management/coordination work to do, then I’ll just call it a day.
There have been short seasons where I’ve averaged quite a bit more, but I don’t know that I was ever actually more productive. For me it feels like I hit a point at which there is no more work to be wrung out of me, no matter how long I sit in a chair.
At the same time, I find that work is often on my mind during the rest of my life, and here and there an idea pops up while I’m engaged in another activity.
I used to do contract programming and found that was the hardest part - my brain was at work a lot of the time outside of “work hours,” but how was I ever going to Bill the client for that?
I have RescueTime installed and so this is what it says for last week:
61h 54m logged
87 is productivity pulse
29% software dev
29% communication & scheduling
16% design
I'm a CEO of a data startup. I'm still coding a lot & do all the product design. Comms has increased thanks to more sales meetings etc.
What's missing from this is ~1hr of emailing in the morning & again in the evening on my iPad Pro every day (no tracking on the iPad).
Have been doing this for months and it's rough as hell. Hoping this is the last month as we'll be hiring people to start filling in the roles I don't have time to do any more.
I'm also very aware that none of this sustainable.
Used to work (IT, game/web development) 40h max a week. And could barely handle it. As I grow older (33) the tolerance is going down. My body asks for more exercise and less sitting (or standing doesn't matter) hours. So 40h a week is too much now. I'm at 25-30h tops. So I try to make the most with that time. Of course I must say that I have a condition, since I was a kid, that makes me feel terrible if I sit for too long (more than normal). Circulation or something. My pressure goes way down I guess when I'm concentrated (going to the movies was hell). So I learned to be effective and do a lot in less time. I now only work at home. Thank god. My goal is to work 3, 4 hours a day tops.
About 15 hours a week. I sometimes ramp it up if I've got a new project that I'm excited about but over the long term it always drifts back down again.
When I look back to my employee and contracting days although I was on site for eight hours a day I wasn't really doing any more than three or four hours worth of work.
I’m doing roughly four hours of 30m calls a day (which completely destroys any real productivity I have), plus around two hours of actual “focus time”. The overhead and fragmentation implied pushes this to a 10-12h daily range, which is becoming a serious issue as I can’t find the time to plan or do quality work right now.
As an independent contractor, I worked 5 billable hours a day and an hour or 2 on top of that.
I worked alone with almost no distractions. Just me and 3 dogs in the country.
Before COVID, I was in the office about 35 hours a week and had about 10 productive WFH hours in the evenings.
Since perma-WFH, I "work" for maybe 65 hours and get at most 15 hours of actual work done.
Probably 20-30 hours per week? I'm paid for full-time. Company is very happy with me. I wish I could give them more, but that's pretty much my maximum.
24 hours a week over 3 days. I went part time the other year since working 37.5 official hours (actually more) was full of arguing, battles and stress at work. I realised having a life was more important than work.
Work is part of your life, not your life. I work to live, not live to work. No gravestone ever tells you how much money a guy made. It only mentions being a loving father, husband or son.
I don't know about it being normal but it's not out of line. I tend to work 10 hours/day 5 days a week and have been doing so for the past 35 years. There have been times when I've worked 60-70 hours/week and I can tell you that's less productive than working 50 hours/week because fatigue makes things worse - those extra hours are actually working against you. As a result I've learned you can't work more then 10 hours/day and you need at least one day off per week. That means the max you can work is 60 hours/week, and that's not sustainable. You can do that a few weeks but you can't sustain that. 50 hours/week is both sustainable and doesn't work against you. As with anything, YMMV. 50 hours/week is what I have found I can sustain. Your sustainability rate may be more or less. You need to find what works best for you.
So much of “normal” depends what _your_ objective is.
If you are very career driven, work at a startup, or would like to generate additional opportunities for your own advancement - 60hrs a week might be normal.
In my own experience, you stop measuring work by hours at that point, and convert to measurement by results (which, if you are ambitious, leads to more hours actually worked).
If you want to work fewer hours because you don’t want to prioritize your work or career (to spend time with friends or family, other passions, etc), that’s fine. There are probably folks with that mindset who would view 30 hours as normal.
Personally, I am at my office working 12hrs a day 5 days a week. Then about 10 hours on Sunday.
But that’s because my objective at this phase of my life is to build a winning business and maximize the value of our equity.
Your objective is probably different from mine, but hopefully not different from those you are working with.
I spend about 4-6 hours a day (M-F) in meetings or doing focused work, and probably another hour or so per day doing less taxing things like organizing my notes & responding to emails.
I've definitely had busier times throughout my career where I've worked 50-60 hours a week, and I know others who work those hours pretty regularly, so OP's schedule is "normal" for some situations or types of people -- but definitely taxing enough to cause burnout and not a schedule I'd recommend maintaining long term if there's any way to reduce those hours.
I agree with the other responses in this thread suggesting that you can really only get ~4 hours of focused work done in a day.
OP, if you can cut some of your low-impact hours where you're working but not really getting much done, that's probably a good place to start.
My work week is generally 30 hours or so, which provides me more than enough to provide for both myself and another, as well as excess for savings.
If you're working that long, I feel the other parts of your life may be suffering. Do you have a fixed time contract or are you contracting?
I think it's normal to work 50-60 hours a week if you don't actively track your time. When I was going to the office, I actually worked a lot less. I averaged around 35-40 hours. Now that we all are remote, I find myself working 45-50 hours a week. It's too easy to accidentally go over since I do not have to worry about leaving the office at a particular time due to commuting. However, in general, I feel much more relaxed then before and I do not mind the extra work. I do not let it get out of control since, every hour I work extra, my salary per hour decreases. I like to keep it as high as I can since it makes me feel that my time is worth it.
I personally think it’s not “normal” in this century to work so many hours a week especially for someone who reads/posts on HN. If you’re referring to whether it’s “common”, that depends on which industry, country, company you’re in and the kind of work you’re doing. For some professions (like lawyers in certain countries or doctors almost everywhere), 80-100 hour weeks are common.
If you’re in tech and you’re not automating your tasks as much as possible, then you need to dig deeper on doing that. Even if you’re not in tech but you use computing technology for work, you should look at ways to avoid repetitive manual work.
Currently I'm working as a contractor, with a pretty low cap on the number of hours I'm allowed to bill. My current schedule looks like this:
Monday: 9am-4pm
Tuesday: 9am-2pm
Wednesday I take off.
Thursday and Friday I do childcare.
There is a little bit of flexibility, but on average I'm working 12 hours a week. I'm going back to working "full time" soon, which will involve 9AM-4:30PM Monday-Friday. On the one hand having more work will be good, but on the other hand losing the extra time spent with our child will be hard.
50ish hours give or take 10. I'd say a good 10-15 of those hours are researching and studying material on how to improve current projects and my own development. It's greatly beneficial for the company I work for and myself in my opinion.
A good example is gRPC. We all can use it no problem, but using it correctly and efficiently is outside the scope of some teams so I like to spend the time to understand it deeper and spread that knowledge within our groups.
I’m a full time software engineer and it depends for me. Some weeks I’ll work 30-35 and others I’ll work 45-50, depending upon what projects are in flight and at what stage we are at in the project. I don’t mind the weeks where I’m working a little longer as my job is well-paid and flexible where I’m able to “leave” (I work from home) early for the day fairly often when I feel I’m at a good stopping point.
I aim for four chunks of pomodoros per day, split in two sets by a long two hour lunch (plus gym some days). So that’s about 8.66 hours of focused work time per day.
But in reality I miss about 1-2 pomodoros every day due to unforeseen events, procrastination, latenesss and so on.
I work mostly 5 days per week, but sometimes I’ll work on Saturday too if I’m feeling good that day and nothing else better to do.
I’m a freelancer and building my own product.
Maybe 2 hours a day, max. There just isn't that much work to go around where I am, honestly.
40 hours most weeks but when a project deadline is nearing then it might be 45 hours. You don't generally get any utility from working longer and actually are more productive with a lesser schedule. Burn out is very real.
I'm a student having summer holiday. Right now I'm programming 10-12 hours every day trying to launch a MVP before I start Uni in September. I basically only take time off if I have to visit family or friends.
As a consultant with large clients (Cloud Platform Engineering) - 40 hours.
Previously I worked as an Ops / Platform Team Lead for a NFP that was around 130 people - 40 to 70 hours as I was very emotionally invested.
Only as many hours as are necessary to get the work done. I'm done trying to use my own graft as a means of getting ahead, which is why I'm a manager.
SrSDE / Scala. Not normal. I used to do 37-38 hours as contractor. Little bit more as a fulltime, but there is some overlap with my hobbies.
10 to 14 hours a day
HOWEVER
A) Around 4 hours of this is on 'must do and not very productive work'
B) So in effect there is just 6 to 10 hours of work a day on vital stuff
Plan for 35 hours a week, but expect to work 80 hours a week periodically. Averages out around 45 hours.
6-8 hours a day, rarely productive more than that and actually only hands on 4-5 hours max
It depends. Do what works for you. How productive do you feel? There is no right answer.
Not normal. 32 hours/week.
that's fairly close to what i typically do :-/
probably around 48-55
20, though I am recently unemployed. :)
How many hours does it take?