Ask HN: Developers, how many hours do you feel you are productive in a day?

If I'm doing heavy coding work my cap is 6 continuous hours after which I'm brain dead.

My daily average is around 6 hours & I accomplish a lot in this time.

I agree with your boss, 40h work weeks are the right way to do things. It's up to you to find the discipline to focus during the day to make it truly productive, not just feel productive.

Finding a good workflow for what you do is the hard part. A good workflow will include timeboxed sessions between 50-90 minutes with regular breaks after each session to keep your mind fresh and focused. A lunch session away from the PC, take a walk. And a firm commitment to sticking to a true 8h work day, the real mental strain happens when one tries to exceed this daily limit.

And most important factor required to only working an 8h day, is to keep the messaging and social media use to outside work hours. These nasty distractions will destroy productivity and focus likely causing you to "work" and +8h day. All the chatting and social media can wait until you are home, life will carry on. Every distraction you give into will cause you to take 20 minutes to rebuild focus.

Code in your most productive hours, do documentation, emailing, whatever other tasks when your daily ration of coding energy is gone.

Instead of talking about hours I think about how many times a day I get to be in flow.

For me personally being 44 I am only able to hit a good flow once or twice a day for 2-3 hours each time.

When I am in flow I am faster and more creative than when I am not, so more hours would not add significantly to my productivity.

On your quiz, the average answer is "3-5 hours," and this squares with recent research suggesting that in an 8-hour day, mind workers are doing actual work about 3 1/2 hours on average. The rest of the day is spent on snacking, gossiping, Facebook, etc.

I'm a highly motivated independent developer and writer, and I've been studying my own work habits to try to become more productive. I use toggl — https://www.toggl.com/ — to track my time throughout the day. I'd work 12 hours a day if I could, but I can't. I run out of gas after 2 hours, 3 hours — and sometimes 8 hours. My limit on tedious, fussy, boring tasks is about 2 hours, after which I'm not much good for anything. My limit when I'm writing a book is 3 to 4 hours. If I'm building something out of code or working in Photoshop, sometimes I get addicted, and then I can go 8 hours. Addiction seems to be the only thing that gets me close to being as productive as I'd like to be. Sadly, I can't choose to focus only on the types of tasks that I'm addicted to.

My sense is that most people — probably including your boss — have never measured how much cognitive work they themselves can do before their brain is fried. I'm talking about real work, not meetings. Meetings use almost no brain glucose at all, so are a way to pad "working" hours without increasing fatigue substantially. I'm convinced this is why meetings are so popular in corporate America.

As long as no one is measuring, it's easy for everyone to kid themselves that they're good for 8 hours and that everyone else should be, no matter how unrealistic that may be.

Depends on the project. If I'm on an intense project, easily 7-8. If I'm not on a project, maybe 1-3. If I'm unemployed and left to my own devices (pursuing projects/freelance or furthering my education), probably 4-5.

For me it depends on the interruptions / context switching.

3 or 4 hours. Can go up to ~10h/day for a few days, but that usually leads to a burnout. Burnouts are bad. Avoid them. You'd actually do better if you work less.

Going back to your boss . . . not recommended . . .

y, most likely you're never going to convince your boss that you're only productive 3 or 4 hours per day . . . if anything you'll be bringing scrutiny on what you accomplish daily and possibly lower reviews/raises/advancement.

Very few companies are open to anything less than 40 hours per week or even 4 day work weeks.

I would put your efforts in to finding a company/boss that does or work on starting your own thing in your extra time.

Good luck in 2016, fight the good fights.

That depends on the kind of project you are working on, If you are highly motivated and the project is fun you may work for longer hours, my case I could go as long as 8hrs non-stop but if it's not as described above then 3hrs max.

Two years ago I experienced a burnout for the first time, for a 23-year old freelancer, I knew nothing about burnouts and thought I was severely depressed. My motivation level was 0.

So if your job is fun then you may find 8hrs a day not even enough, but it's not your fault, it's your employers.

Hello, productivity should not be measured on hours worked per day but on scheduled tasks completed per day. To increase productivity, have a work plan and set up realistic deadlines, break them down to daily routine with room for non-routine. Then do all you can to complete daily tasks without carrying over. But if you should carry over a few, begin the following day with those ones, before taking up new ones. As you make progress, try to increase your work load. http://ayietim.wordpress.com

I feel like such a sucker! I got excited to go to your quiz and vote for the 5-6h option just to show your boss.

Then Spidey sense tingled...

Looked at your profile, then followed your last submission to product hunt and found out that you are the Founder CTO at guaana.com. Co-incidence?

Next time please do put a disclaimer and definitely do not try to "Growth Hack" HN.