Productive hours in a work week

[velocistar237]

I was reading an article on Salon about the 40-hour work week, and it reminded me of this post. From the article,

In fact, research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight. It sounds strange, but if you’re a knowledge worker, the truth of this may become clear if you think about your own typical work day. Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he’s really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.

This is definitely true of me. In fact, after I put in a really solid eight-hour work day, the next day or two are pretty much guaranteed to be spent forgetting what it is I was just working on.

Are any of you able to achieve the same productive rate for a 50-60 hour week as for a 30-40 hour week, or do you fit the article's description? Do you think that a "passionate" worker (entrepreneur/artist/doctor/etc.) could maintain productivity for more hours compared to a regular office worker?

[AJ]

I was *just* telling my husband that I really only have about 6 good mental hours in me a day. I totally relate to this. It would, of course, make more sense for my employer to only pay me for 6 hours a day and let me go home, but that would never fly.

[shedinator]

I'm capable of maintaining productivity for 8+ hours at a time, assuming I have multiple projects to work on (I'm semi-ADD, or a natural multi-tasker, so my productivity actually tends to decrease if I'm only doing one thing). However, I can't really imagine a "knowledge job" that would come without the meetings, correspondence, etc. So the problem wouldn't really be my productivity level, but the administrative requirements of the job.

[Somnambulist]

I work as a Network Engineer and have spurts of being able to do insane amounts of work but it involves A LOT of preparation. For a period of two years I was working 70-80 hours a week nearly every week. It was really hard to keep up but typically my day looked like this:

Wake up around 7-8 and go into work by 9. Once there I would spend all day (8-10 hours) writing work plans for network changes and juggling 2-3 projects. Usually I'd get off of work around 6-8 and then head home, eat dinner, crash for an a few hours, then be back into work by 11 for 3-4 hours of work during our maintenance windows. On the weekends I might have worked none or anywhere from 4-12 hours a day depending on what was going on.

The absolute worst was a 3 week period where I worked about 120 hours 3 weeks in a row. I slept about 30 hours over that 3 week period and varied between total zombie state and murderous / uncontrolled emotional rage/flip outs.

I got an insane amount of work done but as you may expect some problems crept in. I am surprised I kept it together as well as I did and I am really surprised how much I got done. If I could figure out a way to apply that mentality to getting into shape or starting my own business I am sure I would be cut and/or a millionaire now. This grueling schedule got me first looking into ERE because it was really just unreal the amount that was expected of me and my effective pay rate was almost nothing as much time as I was putting in.

I find realistically that now after about 6-7 hours of tedious mental work I am tapped out. Something that is very interesting and engaging can keep me going for 12-15 hours a few days in a row but then I need a day to recharge. I am horrible at multi-tasking so when someone asks me to do something else I pretty much have to completely shift gears.

[Osprey]

I don't know about other "passion" work but I'm a rural doctor and I can only handle eight hours before I start dropping things and go into automatic/zombie mode. Some can go longer. In my workplace 34 hours non-stop is often expected... God help those poor patients.
I have noticed that the mind tends to fizzle out long before the body does. Maybe in an office job a brisk walk or gym session can extend productivity?

[TLV]

34 hours non-stop is often expected... God help those poor patients.

I remember a friend telling me about her brother in residency - 30 hours on, 30 off was the norm. It made me never want to go to a hospital, ever.

I'm fortunate that my current workplace (in software development) has management that understands this. Apparently, a few months before I started there was a change in leadership, and the new manager was appalled at the poor quality of the code that had been churned out through long hours. Now, we're specifically told to "don't try to be a hero," keep a good work/life balance, etc. During slow times (like the days after completing a major project, especially if it's early) we're even encouraged to come in late and leave early. I've only stayed late a handful of times in the 2 years I've been here, and every time was because I had hit a productive streak late in the day and wanted to ride it out.

[dancedancekj]

I don't know about other "passion" work but I'm a rural doctor and I can only handle eight hours before I start dropping things and go into automatic/zombie mode. Some can go longer. In my workplace 34 hours non-stop is often expected... God help those poor patients.
I have noticed that the mind tends to fizzle out long before the body does. Maybe in an office job a brisk walk or gym session can extend productivity?

As a dentist, I start physically fatiguing out around the eight hour mark. Since I'm usually working in a 10mm x 10mm space performing microsurgery, my wrists will start aching, my back and neck will start getting stiff, my eyes stop focusing. In addition, my mind seems to start "tunneling", in that I start missing diagnoses or solutions at 5:00 PM that I may have caught at 9:00 AM. I also start getting easily frustrated after the eight hour mark (my assistant knows to say something if I start sighing really loudly.. :)

There are some dentists who do 12 hour shifts in my company, which is admirable, but I would never be able to do that and not be totally mentally and physically fried afterwards.

[abitha]

I'm a junior hospital doctor in the UK (currently working in the emergency department, but have worked in quite a few different depts in the same hospital). Our shifts in the ED are mostly 9-10 hours, which with the intensity of the work is about all I can manage (I usually start to flake out a bit after about 8 hours, so I tend to take slightly longer sorting out each patient at the end of my shifts than I would do at the beginning).

Several of my other rotations had 12-hour or even 13-hour on-calls (not every day - the standard workday was probably 9-10 hours, with a longer on-call shift a couple of times a week on average), and those could really drag sometimes, especially if you had several in a row. Fortunately those were mostly jobs where the shifts weren't quite as intense as in the ED. My average work week has varied from about 40 hours (ED - but most of them evening/weekend/night) to nearly 60 hours on average in some of my jobs last year.

I don't think I've ever *quite* got to the stage of being completely unsafe to work due to tiredness - although I do sometimes wonder at the end of a nightshift, as I start to hallucinate on my way home and can't work out which key to open my front door with! I'm sure I'm not as good a doctor at the end of a long shift as I am at the beginning though. The recent reforms of doctors' working patterns in the UK have been a big improvement from that point of view - these days nobody is expected to do a full workday, be on call overnight, and still do a full workday the next day.

I suppose it's probably easier in some ways to maintain attention and 'productivity' over a prolonged period in a job like medicine than it is in your average office job, because you're talking to people and problem-solving rather than staring at a computer screen - but it still gets quite mentally (and physically) fatiguing after a while.

[Gerard]

My work has a passion-y component, so I'm occasionally able to knock out good stuff for many hours straight (maximum about 14), but then I really need to do dumb stuff the next day. I think that figure of about 6 hours per day of "good" brain is generally about right, though.

What I've been doing a lot more often lately is working in 90-minute bursts, then taking a real break between bursts. Eat a small meal, make tea, walk around, do a little dumb-work. This also means that I now eat up to 8 or 9 meals a day, so it's a win-win from my perspective!

[igthebold]

6 hours/day corresponds to what I see. I only bill clients for hours that I feel have increased the value of their project, and it comes out to around 6 hours most days.

I would say, for me, that 6 hours per day is the max *sustainable* pace I can handle, barring soul-sucking bugs or interpersonal issues.

When I've worked on "passion" projects, I find the same to be the case. I can work in bursts, but they get consumed on the tail end by sheer tiredness.

[arebelspy]

Potentially relevant infographic about different countries and the value of an hour of work (basically amount of time worked versus GDP):

http://awesome.good.is/transparency/web/1009/value-of-work-2/flat.html

[Richard3]

I'd kill for six productive hours in a work day.

[ducknalddon]

I don't think I've ever *quite* got to the stage of being completely unsafe to work due to tiredness

can't work out which key to open my front door with!

I must remember not to get sick or injured at the end of a shift.

[daizy744]

I work a 35-hour workweek (technical writer for software company), and I'd say that I'm productive for about 6 of those hours. At the end of my 7-hour workday, my brain is fried, so even if I wanted to continue, I couldn't. Words start to not make sense to me.

I watch many of my co-workers keep on working as I'm leaving the office, and I know they've been there since an hour before I arrived in the morning. I don't know how they can still think straight... Not to mention the time that they're giving the company for free.

In a previous workplace, project management and timesheets used 6 working hours, out of an 8-hour workday.

[Nudelkopf]

As a maths research student, I tend to do about 3-4 hours of "active" work (actual math), and then I can do another few of "passive" work (like, marking or teaching 1st year or going to class or re-writing stuff or typing from hand-written notes).

[oldtoyota]

I do not believe in the hourly system. It doesn't make sense that every job takes 40 hours to complete or that we have had so many advances in tech and still can't get work done in fewer than 40 hours.

I also do not believe we should get paid by the hour. If you can do your work in fewer than 8 hours, you should still get paid the same because you can deliver value in, say, 6 hours that would take another worker 8 hours. Why should you be punished because you can work faster than others?

Along the same lines as the original topic, a study about willpower showed that we have a finite amount of willpower. At the end of the day, it's a lot harder to have willpower than at the start of the day. It makes sense that people would fizzle out after 6-7 hours of work.

[arebelspy]

Along the same lines as the original topic, a study about willpower showed that we have a finite amount of willpower. At the end of the day, it's a lot harder to have willpower than at the start of the day. It makes sense that people would fizzle out after 6-7 hours of work.

Why would you think people fizzle after 6-7 hours?

Why not 11, if a work day was 12 hours?  Why not 3, or 4 hours?

[Richard3]

Well, there's some clock-watching effect if people have a definite end point for the work day. Examples are obviously the last class at school, or trying to get something done at the bank / DMV at 445.

[ace1224]

of my 8 hour day 1 1/2 hours is spent every morning waiting for my equipment to warm up.  then a lot of my work is hurry up and wait....get a test on, then it runs for 2 hours, and you can't run anything else.  so i just read.

[oldtoyota]

Along the same lines as the original topic, a study about willpower showed that we have a finite amount of willpower. At the end of the day, it's a lot harder to have willpower than at the start of the day. It makes sense that people would fizzle out after 6-7 hours of work.

Why would you think people fizzle after 6-7 hours?

Why not 11, if a work day was 12 hours?  Why not 3, or 4 hours?

People at the top of the thread said they only have 6-7 hours in them.

[arebelspy]

Along the same lines as the original topic, a study about willpower showed that we have a finite amount of willpower. At the end of the day, it's a lot harder to have willpower than at the start of the day. It makes sense that people would fizzle out after 6-7 hours of work.

Why would you think people fizzle after 6-7 hours?

Why not 11, if a work day was 12 hours?  Why not 3, or 4 hours?

People at the top of the thread said they only have 6-7 hours in them.

You missed my question.. Why?

[velocistar237]

The amount of time varies. Some days I can work all day because of an interesting topic or a deadline. Other days, I couldn't care less about my job and spend a little too much time on a particular forum or the internet in general.

I don't do a great job controlling the strength or the object of my motivation. Sometimes, I'll get interested in something work related, and I make progress. Sometimes, I get interested in some random topic not work related, and it will take energy away from my work. I also have natural rhythms on the hour and day scale. Mornings are good if I want to focus on work, and late afternoons are consistently good. I mostly sit at a desk by myself, and I don't have someone looking over my shoulder. If I worked directly with other people more, that would probably be a great thing for my professional life.

[Nate R]

Along the same lines as the original topic, a study about willpower showed that we have a finite amount of willpower. At the end of the day, it's a lot harder to have willpower than at the start of the day. It makes sense that people would fizzle out after 6-7 hours of work.

Why would you think people fizzle after 6-7 hours?

Why not 11, if a work day was 12 hours?  Why not 3, or 4 hours?

People at the top of the thread said they only have 6-7 hours in them.

You missed my question.. Why?

IIRC, and I may be completely off with this, I thought that studies or something to that effect have shown that in many native cultures where people still live off the land, 6 hours a day is about the most that is spent working on sustaining food, shelter, life, etc? (And the implication being that we basically evolved to deal with about 6 hours a day of labor/work)

[velocistar237]

You missed my question.. Why?

How about this, from the article,

the vast majority of people have legitimate physical, emotional and psychological needs — things like sleep, exercise, relaxation and the maintenance of strong family and social support bonds

We have to reserve some of our mental and physical energy for things outside work.

I don't know why it's 6-7 hours for most knowledge workers, but that's what the studies show.

[arebelspy]

I don't know if I'm surprised it's so high, or so low.

[matchewed]

I just finished the article but didn't really see much in the way of research supporting the 6-7 hour for knowledge workers, mostly declarations. Then studies backing up the affects of lack of sleep and having bad work/life balance (which to be honest long work hours can contribute to).

[oldtoyota]

Along the same lines as the original topic, a study about willpower showed that we have a finite amount of willpower. At the end of the day, it's a lot harder to have willpower than at the start of the day. It makes sense that people would fizzle out after 6-7 hours of work.

Why would you think people fizzle after 6-7 hours?

Why not 11, if a work day was 12 hours?  Why not 3, or 4 hours?

People at the top of the thread said they only have 6-7 hours in them.

You missed my question.. Why?

Actually, I did not miss your question. I thought your question referred to this thread and not to the world at large. =-)

Brains runs on glucose. After a certain number of hours, glucose levels go down. Therefore, fatigue sets in. Could people eat more glucose? Sure. Eventually, though, the body needs to rest despite that.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/61/4/987S.abstract