Productive work with measurable results? Two hours. Four hours meetings. Two hours getting interrupted, forced socializing, and then trying to remember what it was I was about to do.

It varies. It's pretty rare that it's working hours and I'm just goofing off for more than a couple minutes at a time. I look at lemmy when waiting for builds/deploys/etc. a hard ass boss might be like "do more work while that's happening!!" but that would be a net negative on overall productivity.

Cloud eng with ADHD here. It really varies between 30 minutes to 16 hours, both extremes being rare

Some days I feel I'm getting absolutely nothing done, but also quite recently I was hyperfixating on a project and would continue working off hours with a glass or 5 of whiskey because I was having too much of a blast

However I've been reminded before by my manager that the random chatter and stupid meetings are still part of work, and while there's optimizing that can be done, I shouldn't count them as slacking so eh I guess 8 hours a day it is then.

Most of my jobs have been salaried at 40 hrs/wk. I worked 60-80 hrs/wk, effectively driving down my hourly rate in pursuit of my next promotion.

As a housewife, both 0 and 16? Since I don't actually have a job, I feel like I'm not being productive if I am not cooking, cleaning or organizing. Try to make it so my spouse doesn't have to do a single thing once she comes through, especially on her days off.

Typically 9-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. But I'm an electrician with my my own company.

Starting a company is a trap lol. But it's also nice that the only people I have to answer to are my clients, and I can fire them if need be, so there's that.

I wait tables. If I'm not working at full speed every second I'm on the clock, I will be complaining about how slow it is.

Depends. Usually got really busy stretches and then stretches where I don't do shit. Usually averages out to about 5-6 good a day I guess

You mention hours as a programmer?

Is that active coding? Because as you gain experience you may spend less time writing code that will ultimately be replaced by more efficient processes.

E.g. quality over quantity. Are you being more thoughtful during the design process?

Probably around 4h over a 8h day on average in an IT engineering job.
My brain tend to procrastinate and wander around a lot, random questions come around and I look them up, maybe 60% related to my job, but not directly to my current task. Overall, unless I have a boss, as good at my job as I am (only happened once), watching over my shoulder and asking what I did the past hours, it's not a problem.
I think this wandering allows me to be as efficient during my active hours as some people are during 8h. And the 4h searching random stuff makes me more knowledge, including in my job field.

Every day is different. Some days I’m in the zone, some days I’m standing outside the zone wondering why it’s not going well. I don’t think I can quantify the actual time though.

I've never really worked, for as long as I can literally remember.

Oh you mean at a job? It varied, 40-50 before I qualified for disability.

But In general, I've been defective/broken all my life, since like 1st grade or so as far as I can recall. It just took until my 30s for my depression to finally overcome my will to live.

Surely this is just baiting someone to post a clip from Office Space.

Productive work where I can say "this contributed directly to completion of this thing" amd point to something tangible is probably a couple hours.

Four hours a day is spent coordinating work or ensuring people are on the same page and things aren't forgotten. Basiczlly the stuff that would happen on its own if people were perfect and wanted to do everything they needed to. That is because my position involves a lot of project management duties.

Another couple hours having meetings that are more important to attend in case something new came up than doing direct work or blowing off steam with coworkers aka teambuilding.

This all swings wildly, sometimes I spend an entire day producing something tangible and some days are wasted entirely on meetings. But overall that seems about right.

8 hours a day five days a week.

I don't any more disability hit me.

But, back when I was still able to, it was variable.

My main job was as a nurse's assistant. I was technically full time the entire run. When I first started that meant 40 hours, and you could still get overtime. As the years passed and they didn't want to give benefits, or overtime, you tended to get cut off as soon as you hit 32 a week.

In facilities, that was usually an 8 hour shift. In home health it could be anything from one patient all of those hours, to a dozen or more spread out across three counties. I did do a modified Baylor shift at one nursing home 12 on Saturday and Sunday, plus one eight hour during the week, and you got paid essentially the same as working 40, plus got benefits.

However, the pay sucked, and home health can be erratic about losing patients and taking a while to get the next one, even for me (big, male, and very good at the job, which means you have to do something horrible to not get work).

So I always had a side gig of some kind. In terms of an actual job job that I had a schedule and such, the main side gig was as a bouncer. Not always at the same place, but for two different employers between their bars and clubs. That was usually weekend work. I'd be on from open until close at the one I worked at the most, with an 8 hour shift being the norm at the others. So it would usually take me up to 60 odd hours a week, depending.

When I would do a turn as a cook, it was one or two shifts at 8 hours a week, keeping me around that same rough weekly time.

Iirc, I topped out at a sustained rate with one eight hour patient 5 days a week; one private patient (not through the company) overnight 3-6 days a week, plus whichever bouncing gig I was doing with the main one being 10 hours for two nights. Technically, the overnights meant I was working 24 hours a day those days, but it was really only 2 to 3 hours of actual work for roughly 12 hours total. Added up, it came up to between 66 and 78 hours for the week.

But there were times I'd end up running myself into the ground doing over 80 between everything. Which didn't include stuff that I made money with, but wasn't a job per se. It was a lot less rigid. Like, I sharpened stuff for extra cash. But I'd do the work while watching TV, so it wasn't taking away from anything the way going to a job does. Same with the various writing gigs I'd do, though when I was doing research for people, that could be time consuming away from home, so I'd usually turn it into a vacation trip to wherever it would be necessary to go.

Those research trips were usually awesome because I'd take vacation time from whatever job I had (when it was there to take), get it expenses covered for all of it, and get paid for it all as well. Honestly, it paid way more than all the rest combined, but it wasn't steady. I'd get a job for that maybe twice a year, three at most.

The custom writing was the best pay overall because I could charge by the word, do the work in my downtime even at a job sometimes, with loose or no deadlines. I wrote this one erotic novel that paid me more for about a month of work than everything else I did that year.

Can't say I'm surprised my body wore out early tbh.

I program too; some days 11 hours, some days 2 or less. I have never been able up to do a steady schedule.

And if I code too much over a few days, I take time off to heal my brain

Im working the whole time (I mean I use the bathroom and grab food and such) but meetings, email, chats, research, training, documentation. Its sometimes feels like im barely ever working.

9-10 as a Video Editor