I should actually be working 8h a day, but most of it is spend not working. If I’m honest I’m probably working more like 3h a day even though I enjoy my job.
I work in IT, so basically anywhere between 0 to maybe 4 hours a day at most. On average I think I actually work maybe 2.5 hours a day.
All 8 hours. It’s a physical job, I’m on my feet all day, but it’s one of the better ones I’ve had recently.
Most days, honestly, about 2-3 hours. I’m not working at all today. Although, some days come by and I put down a solid 10-12 hours without asking for overtime.
Everyone at my job thinks I’m overworked and doing a great job though. But I think it’s just a balance. I work hard some days without complaining and I get to mostly chill the others. Best part is that I work remotely, but I’m not working in tech so I don’t collect those fat checks. That’s another trade. Great work-life balance, but not much money. Worth it though.
I work in freight management at a brokerage. I determine my hours and my clients. That being said, I am also a SAHD and have a toddler and a dog, so between meals, nap times, walks, etc, I probably put in a good 4-5 hours of work, but I’m on call all day in case of emergencies.
When I used to work in the office I probably worked about 5 hours a day at most. The rest was spent on personal projects, fucking around, whatever
Now that I work from home it varies between two and four.
My production is exactly the same.
Nice try Mr Manager! I’m not falling for that! Nice effort though, making an account on the threadiverse just to catch me out!
I of course totally work every hour of those 40 hours a week… <cough>.
Damn it. I was targeting you specifically because I notice you using Lemmy instead of working. That’s when I decided to make a lemmy account and write hundreds of comments. Of cause they’re all written with ChatGPT. Who in their right mind would write over 500 comments in less than 2 months?
It was all a setup to ask this final question and expose you. You just destroyed months of work within a few minutes
You need to wake up earlier in the morning to catch me! :P
I have some admittedly unusual work habits.
I spend all of my day working, but the catch is that maybe only 3-5hrs a day is doing work for my clients. A lot of that 3-5 hrs is spent automating client work, so I can spend less time on it tomorrow.
The rest I work on or study whatever feels important or interesting at the moment. I’d say I spend an additional 3-6 hours a day on that. This is the secret behind always being able to say “Oh, I have a thing that works a little like that (but not very like that – so I’ll need a budget)” whenever a client wants to do something new.
Often it’s little sequential puzzles I invent and then solve in my head. For example today, my goal was to find the way to take the rolling average of a certain number of bytes, with the minimum number of CPU cycles (and no ‘divide’ instruction). If this and 2 or 3 other puzzles have decent solutions, I’ll be able to do realtime audio analysis on a cheaper and smaller chip than “should” be possible – although I have no practical implementation in mind at this time. If it comes up one day I’ll look like a real hero though, surely :D
In principle, I work 7 days a week, because I have a hard time remembering what day of the week it is. I just track the day of the month. This is much less stressful because there’s always tomorrow to get something done. When I don’t have “work”, I just solve puzzles mentally all day or try to build random things.
I also allocate about an hour a day to answer questions on Lemmy / Reddit, mainly about engineering (I classify this as a from of “work”). That exposes me to new problems that I might not encounter in my formal workplace. Also it helps me learn to be patient with people that want to do something technical, but have varying levels of ability.
I love your mindset can you adopt me?
The biggest lesson I learned is to take control of my time and decide how to spend it. An 8-hour workday in a vacuum mostly gets filled with questionable tasks, it’s almost like a theater filled with actors going through the motions of work, without really doing any. Life isn’t too short by itself, but activities like that make it too short.
It’s not something I can do for another person. You’ll have to adopt yourself.
I’m so jealous. That sounds like a ton of fun!
Well, there was the harrowing part in the middle where I was bankrupt in the developing world and nearly died of cholera. That wasn’t a super fun few years.
…and if we’re being honest, my level of obsession with engineering stuff would be considered a mental disorder, if it wasn’t so productive. Like, if I had the same level of interest in 90s sitcoms instead of machine learning or assembly language, I’d surely be considered mentally ill – but it’s just one subject instead of another.
It’s weird where we draw the line, isn’t it?
I work 12 hour shifts doing 911 calltaking overnight. Call volume fluctuates wildly, as do the length of my calls. I’ve had nights where our supervisors get nervous that the phones aren’t ringing and start doing test calls to make sure everything is working right, and I’ve had nights where the phone never seems to stop. On average I probably handle in the ballpark of 100 calls a night to make it a nice round number.
In a perfect world, I could handle each of those calls in probably about 2 minutes or less if every caller is calm and cooperative, prepared to answer all of my questions, and the situation isn’t actively evolving while I’m on the phone, but that’s not always the case, I’ve had some extreme outliers I’ve been on with for over an hour, I have some that are less than a minute, and everything in between, so with no real data to back it up I’m going to say it averages to about 5 minutes a call to keep the math easy.
So about 500 minutes of actually being on the phone, or 8⅓ hours.
That actually sounds a bit high to me, I probably went a little high on both of my guestimates, but that’s probably pretty close when I figure in the other little stuff I have to do besides actually taking calls, re-listening to calls, adding additional notes once the call has ended, email, going over my QA reviews, training stuff, etc.
But except for the outliers when we get really busy, that’s mostly broken up pretty well. I usually get at least a couple minutes between calls, I get a few minutes to mess around on my cell phone, do some reading, and when things die down later at night I can even bust out my switch and game a little between calls. My agency doesn’t really care what we do between calls as long as we’re not being disruptive and can put it down when the phone rings.
It actually helped me from learning the 5 Ws in kindergarten.
Where? What? How many (“Wie viele” in German)? What? Wait.
I don’t have to make a call often, but all the more important is that I have that in the back of my head. I go through the first four points and then I shut up to for further questions, instructions or just a “okay, got that, sending someone”.
I think that is something that everybody should learn early everywhere. Everyone can only benefit from people making short, focused emergency calls.
I really like “wait” being part of that. A whole lot of callers will just go on forever if you let them, they talk in circles, try to tell you their entire life story, repeat themselves, and ramble on about a bunch of irrelevant stuff that I’m not going to do anything with and isn’t going into my notes. There’s exceptions of course, but very often I’m boiling everything down to about 5 or less short bullet-point-like notes, not even full sentences. We’re not taking a report, that’s the cops’ job, we’re just telling them where to go, a brief description of what’s going on, and any important hazards or strange situations that are going on they need to be on the lookout for.
Is there an AMA community on Lemmy yet?
I’d be super keen to hear your stories.
I don’t really have any interest in doing an AMA to be honest.
A lot of the questions would probably end up being variations of “what’s the craziest/funniest/saddest/etc call you’ve taken?” Which I don’t want to get into too much, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass going over my stories to make sure I’m not giving away any identifiable info about the people involved, and some of the bigger calls I’ve had have made the news so I could end up partially doxxing myself. On top of that, a lot of my stories don’t have much of an ending. Once the call is over that’s usually it for me, I don’t really get any follow-up most of the time.
Then there’s the “should I call 911 if…” questions. Every agency handles things differently, but overall a lot of places are kind of moving towards handling everything through the same dispatch center, emergency or non-emergency alike, so one way or another it’s probably going to come through us, so just call 911 and cut out the middle man. If you need a cop to do something, even if it’s call you on the phone, call 911. Worst case scenario we’ll tell you to call the station directly, and maybe even give you the phone number, you really need to be a major nuisance before anyone even dreams of getting you in trouble for misusing 911. If you have an administrative question like “is my copy of the report ready to be picked up?” “I need to make an appointment to get fingerprinted for my job” “I want to drop off a bunch of cookies for the cops” then yeah, call the station’s non emergency number.
“What if I butt-dial 911” just stay on the line, say “sorry, I accidentally dialed you, there’s no emergency.”
“How do you deal with burn-out?” I just kind of do. There’s a lot of different philosophies on this, but personally I think if you have to spend time actually thinking about how to deal with it, you’re already on the losing side of the battle. I have family, friends, etc. who I can talk to, hobbies, a life outside of work, etc. It’s not something I really worry about, my brain is pretty well wired to deal with the stress without having to really think about how I’m doing it.
“ACAB,” yes. If I could do the same job for just fire/EMS, and/or replace most of my police calls with therapists, counselors, crisis intervention specialists, etc. I would absolutely do it in a heartbeat, but I gotta work with the tools I got.
“I called 911 once, and they …” I really can’t speak for your local dispatch center, certainly not your local police, etc. I can tell you how I would have handled a situation and how things probably would have played out here, but that may not mean shit for your situation. Some dispatch centers are trash, if you’re living in an area that’s covered by one I’m sorry. We’re also stuck with a lot of rules and regulations, bureaucracy, etc. so how/why we do some things may not make total sense to people on the outside but by and large there’s a reason for most of it, you gotta try to work with the system, fighting it isn’t going to get you anywhere.
“I just want to say thank you for doing what you do” I appreciate it, but not really a question
I happy to answer other questions as they come up, but an AMA would probably end up just mostly rehashing those same things in different forms.
Depends on how you define work. I do my dayjob for maybe 2 hours a day at most and then freelance with the rest of my working day. so I’d average 5 hours of work a day betwen the two jobs.
I do design and tech support for industry. Official hours are 7,5h/day (lunch is off-duty). 3 days in office 2 days remotely. My actual workload varies a lot. If everything works and all resources are in use, I might not have anything to do for weeks on end. If shit hits the fan, I’m on overtime working 10h days, using every second.
I might quess that on average 2h/day of actual work and varying part of this are communally beneficial activities I invent for myself to keep myself busy.
Mostly less than 30 min per day. Then every few months 10h per day.
Found the sysadmin
I get squeezed for every minute. If I work faster - then good - do more.
Straight answer up front: sometimes my entire ten hour shift has less than 10 minutes of work in it.
I must confess, my job is a bit of an edge case because not everybody wants to do it.
I work third shift, and usually exclusively the weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights, 11pm to 9am).
4 ten-hour shifts.
and during these shifts… bruh most of the time I’m chilling
I’m reading ebooks, I’m watching anime or youtube, I’m chatting with friends on discord
most of my job is having a pulse while babysitting an empty building.
the part of my job that makes the money, though, is when the phone rings.
I work at a towing company, and I dispatch.
When people are calling me, it’s almost exclusively because shit’s fucked up.
I am in charge of sending some unfuckery their way.Most of the calls are from companies though: Motor freight lines like Ryder, Penske, Fleetnet, UPS, FedEx, and a few other carriers that are even less customer-facing; motor clubs like Swoop, Urgent.ly, AAA, NationSafe; or insurance companies like Allstate or GEICO.
What they want to hear is how soon and how much and knowing how to rapidly generate this information while remaining accurate is where most of the expertise lies.
Then there’s the police calls.
When there has been an accident and a disabled vehicle (and its pieces) must be removed from obstructing the roadway, that’s us.
When some dumb bastard drives drunk and subsequently gets rightly caught, we impound their shit.
When a stolen vehicle is found, we recover it.Whilst my opinion regarding cops (pigs) has evolved (fuck the police) quite a bit (they’re fucking bastards) in recent years (every last one of them), my guys do the NOT Standing On Someone’s Neck bits of it AFTER the dust has settled and the blood is done being spilled (and the bullets have stopped flying…) so generally we’re one of the responders on the make-someone’s-life-LESS-horrible side of the curve. Which feels pretty nice.
There are the rare occasions where a major shitshow evolves and I’m triaging calls and coordinating multiple assets in the field though, and that’s when the pay really feels worth it.
Presently I’m 5 years in and making 20/hr
Literally at this very second, it’s a wednesday night/thursday morning and I’ve already DONE my 40 hours this week - I’m here on overtime covering the other third shift dispatcher while they’re out, and each of these hours is worth $$$THIRTY BUCKS HELL YEAAAA$$$
it’s not enough to afford rent nowadays of course, but eh, i inherited the house from my father…
(and want to transform it into a group home for low income persons and families if I can get it organized right)
(i’ll be taking a page from history and trying to turn my house into something like a multigenerational compound except for people who aren’t strictly related by blood)Doesn’t working overnight have ramifications?
for most people it does. For me, while they may exist outside of my awareness, I am nevertheless unaware of them. What health issues I had been experiencing came about as a result of other major life circumstances, and i’ve seen some pivotal improvements since some of those circumstances have been amended.
I always was a natural night-owl. I’m always more alert at night, and get eepy sweepy after the sun comes up, so it suits my proclivities perfectly.
I’ve been at it for five years already, so, if it’s a chronic issue, guess I’ll find out after another 20 years of it!
Multigenerational housing for the win! Also, neat job, congrats!
It really depends. I do catering so some days there just isn’t a job. When I have a gig it’s usually 8-10 hours, but only maybe 2-6 of those are actually cooking and serving, the rest is logistics, prep and cleaning.
8 hours of nominal work does equal about 3-4 hours of actual focused work. This is completely normal don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Humans need to eat, go to toilet, socialize with their coworkers, relax the brain, move if constantly in the same position.
Btw, meetings are work. If you spend a lot of time in meetings that does count as actual work.
8 hours of nominal work does equal about 3-4 hours of actual focused work. This is completely normal don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Fuck you.
Sincerely, Blue collar workers
I’m not (maybe an hour at most because I just started my job/training as software engineer), but long meetings are way more tiring than sitting there and coding. And coding while needing to listen to a meeting is even more exhausting.
If my time would be better spent coding than being in the meeting I just decline. It depends on the culture of the org though if that kind of approach is ok or not.
Coding is something you can do for longer stretches as you get better at it. I struggle with 3 or 4 hours straight out of college. Now I run 7 hours no problem.
The dichotomy is that the more proficient you are at coding, the more meetings you need to be in to give engineering input… So the less time you spend coding. As a staff SWE I’m rarely able to get more than 3 or 4 hours straight to sit and code. Rather it’s an hour here or there broken up my meetings.
I relish my no-meeting days to sit and actually get concepts out into code.
I’m spent at the end of 7 hours coding though. I’ve crunched to 14 before… But the code I wrote was shit for 5 of those hours.
My company started prioritizing developer time by heavily discouraging meetings with devs before noon, and one day a week is supposed to be meeting free. We also just don’t respond to pings before noon now unless it’s an absolute emergency. Took managers a bit to catch on, but my efficiency has honestly skyrocketed and I’m loving it.
Yeah we do no-meeting Thursdays.
Problem is when SLT decides they want a demo of progress and see all this “free time” called focus time on our calendars and stick a 30m meeting about 1 hr before lunch.
Mark it as busy in the calendar, that might keep them away. If marking the whole day is suspicious, make 1-2 hour marks with 10-20 minute gaps (or longer as long as it doesn’t allow sticking a meeting in). Then make these “appointments” weekly and set the subjects(focus time) to private.
I’m not even allowed to work more than 10h a day so I’m not even able to crunch 14h except they are personal projects
It’s vanishingly rare that I need to do that but if something breaks or an emergency happens I’m senior enough that I need to step up.
I get time off in recompense. Usually an entire day once the 14hr crisis has passed.
Btw, meetings are work. If you spend a lot of time in meetings that does count as actual work.
This is so important. I know so many people that complain about people being “in meetings all day instead of working” or manager expectations are to be doing a bunch of stuff, but your calendar is absolutely packed with dumb meetings. Meetings are work, so if other work needs to be done then I need to be allowed to take that time.
And no, multitasking isn’t real. If I’m doing other stuff during the meeting then I’m not actually paying full attention to either the meeting or the other work.
