How many hours a day do you work, like actually actively doing work?

should've said not talking to coworkers about something other than work stuff.

this post makes me feel guilty.

Does driving (on the clock) count?

:(

guilt is what made me ask! It's most confusing for grad students; like, if you reading a scientific article that doesn't really relate to your research, is that work or recreation? What about if you putz around with a spreadsheet for two hours but then close it without saving any changes?

xpost
I don't know about commutes and lunch. Let's say commutes count but lunch doesn't.

"if you reading", great.

how about googling articles to read, stuff you wanna buy and wasting time on message boards for most of the day? cos i think that takes up more time these days than real work.

grad students reading and learning about things that aren't directly within the scope of your research field... on the universities dime!!!

makes me sick just thinking about it

on the average day I probably spend four hours doing actual, honest to god labor and another two hours driving from job to job managing disasters. Sometimes it's all labor, sometimes it's all managing disasters+driving.

I voted 6-8 hrs. and then realized that the poll said "per day" and not "per week."

only recently it's been genuinely 6-8 hours, I think I'll vote my old job too for accuracy.

Sorted

I think 6-8 is about right. I spend roughly 4 hours a day in actual courts where I have nothing I can do but work, and then probably another 2-3 hours of actual work at home, plus some days involve driving to multiple courts so I feel like the extra driving counts for something.

8-10 is probably the most common, as far as real actual work. Lately its been 10-12 almost every day.

Ah, the service industry.

Roughly 4 hours of "real work" a day balanced out by around 4 of ILX and blogging, etc.

This is not ideal preparation for a career as a public school teacher.

Eep I'm worried it might only be about 2-4 hours a day for me at most. But thats cause I also cannot count shit like meetings, people coming and talking crap to me that dont need to, being dragged off to the warehouse, etc etc.

Oh and ILX/LJ/lastfm etc etc erm.

I'm a writer = ALWAYS WORKING 24/7

like, if you reading a scientific article that doesn't really relate to your research, is that work or recreation? What about if you putz around with a spreadsheet for two hours but then close it without saving any changes?

haha hi dere me

Pretty much all damn day.

I'm a writer = ALWAYS WORKING 24/7

-- m coleman, Tuesday, June 26, 2007 12:58 AM

lol

unemployment is agreeing with me. as an example i had been pantless for almost 36 hours until 3 hours ago. now i'm enjoying a tanqueray and tonic in anticipation of a show at a venue around the corner from here or perhaps heading over to delilah's. as such, i no longer spend anytime doing any work.

but when i was working, on a typical day, it was about 4-5 hours. sometimes more if i needed to, occasionally less if my hangover was particularly debilitating.

What about if you putz around with a spreadsheet for two hours but then close it without saving any changes?

this is mostly what my job is supposed to be about, as long as you write up where the data in the spreadsheet came from and append "NTR" after the write-up.

lol some irate guy just called me an "arrogant little butthole"

aka rolling service industry thread etc

lol some irate guy just called me an "arrogant little butthole"

-- BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, June 26, 2007 1:29 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

What thread was that on?

I can't tell if that's a joke or not.

I'm at work, some guy on the phone said he was tired of me and my attitude and "you're an arrogant little butthole. I want you to know that I think you're a butthole."

He also referred to me using the names of two different coworkers, so I'm not sure if he meant me or our staff in general.

0-2 in the summer. seriously, i did all of 20 minutes of work today.
8-10 in the winter. busybusybusy.

so, one for each login.

I'm an office temp.

So.

right now, ZERO

when I had a job, it was like 7.5-8 for a while, then gradually declined until I was basically just showing up. there were, on a regular basis, days when I got in around 9 AM and stayed past midnight, but even then I wasn't working nonstop because of TIMEPOINTS and PEOPLE WHO USE THE CENTRIFUGE AND DON'T TURN IT BACK UP TO ROOM TEMPERATURE WHEN THEY'RE DONE WITH IT and shit like that

Oh no, I should have added an "I'm unemployed" option! You shiftless layabouts are going to ruin the objectivity of this otherwise flawless measurement instrument!

fuck you and your characterization of the unemployed being "shiftless layabouts". i'm living off my accrued vacation time that i would have used while employed except for the fact that it never would have been approved.

so again, fuck you.

Oh yeah, I thought this meant per week. I said 10-12 which is, ahem, obv. not true.

xpost
Kevin, I do think Dan was being sarcastic.

1 or 2. And that's rounding up. It's especially sad when I'm doing out of town work and averaging around 14 logged hours/ day.

This thread makes me pleased because at the moment I'm on a solid 9-5 with no lunchbreak and very little, if any, tinternet during the day. There's the odd chat to a colleague, not nearly enough to get me below 6 hours, but enough that I don't feel like it's all drudgery. And I'm getting stuff done and I'm not stressed and I'm not spending all day guiltily ilxing either! Rah!

(note that I posted that at 5.03pm, good Madchen)

Does attending to infant children count as work for poll purposes? I think I do 4-6 hours at my workplace at the moment (at less busy times of year it can slump to 1 or 2 though) plus maybe an hour of baby wrangling at either end of the work day.

I do about 2-4 most days. And we've just hired someone else. WTF for I dunno!

"productive"? You see that's where we have a problem. For me coming on here and sorting out all your problems and arguments and also learning about stuff (i.e. to-day I learned that the world of wrestling is beyond weird)is pretty productive. As is the reading and the making tea. The looking after the kids and the work I do, not so much productive as keeping things ticking over. In other words I have no idea what to put.

I'm at work, some guy on the phone said he was tired of me and my attitude and "you're an arrogant little butthole. I want you to know that I think you're a butthole."

"Duly noted, sir," would have driven him through the roof, I bet.

It's not how much productive stuff you do, it's how much stuff you manage to justify as "productive." i mean, as far as tinkering w/ a spreadsheet for two hours and not saving it, TOTALLY justifiable-- jsut because you didn't record yr results doesn't mean you didn't learn anything.

my answer is anywhere between 10 hours per day and like 10 minutes per day depending on th workload

4-6, generally. On a slow day, less. On days like this, more. I don't like 10 hour days, but this looks like it's going to be another one. I am taking a bagel break, that's why I'm here.

I messed up, thought this was per week, and voted 12+, when I only work 7 hours a day. I do actually work for most of that, though.

1-2 a day, tops.

i am used to doing 8 solid hours a work a day with maybe an hour of doing nothing, talking to co-workers, etc, but at my new job i do maybe 3 hours of actual work, if that, a day. and its kind of making my soul cry. i hate being bored.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

My day is 7.5 hrs, and at least 6 of that is actual work. 40 mins for breaks, take off a bit for non-work emailing but that's it really.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I had a 12 hour+ day yesterday which included mowing the lawn, 3 hours of ironing and 2 hours cooking. I am looking forward to actually going to work today and resting.

With the mere 4 hours of work I do a day, how did I miss this poll?

Sheeit. Depends on the day really. But defenitely below 8 hrs per day.

on days that i babysit / tutor i actually work more hours than at any other job i've ever had. but 'working' involves playing with legos and teaching kids how to tie their shoes.

totally interesting this thread
butted heads with my boss abt the hours
cuz i think i'm busy, right the day goes by pretty quick
so i added up all the tasks i routinely do and was surprised to find how little it looks like i actually work on paper
but now i feel a renewed sense to get in there elbow deep
i think next week i will actually write down and record how long everything i do at work
feeling like actually working for forty hours will be hard

When I first started at my job prior to this one, my boss handed me a time sheet and said "keep a record of your day in terms of billable time." Terrified me...I'd never been asked to do that before. After a couple of days he took a look at it -- it had about 6:15-6:30 accounted for out of each 8-hr day. He said "that'll work," and never bugged me about it again.

Times like right now, between magazine issues, I've done about 30 minutes of work total this week. As the press deadline approaches, I'll go from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. with a couple of short meal breaks and a 20 minute power nap.

billable hours are a drag.

About four hours, plus four hours of ILX time.

I've spent pretty much all of the last 14 hours sitting at the computer trying to write a proposal that refuses to cohere at all. This means about 50% of my time has actually been spent on ILX but I still feel miserable as if I've been doing really shitty work all day.

like ten years ago or so i worked at a job in which i regularly finished all of my work by tuesday afternoon. sounds great maybe but looking at '99 era websites got tired kinda quickly. obv, this was pre-facebook, etc. i guess that would be a better scenario nowadays.

i take it as a given that all of my friends who work office jobs these days put in the occasional 45 minutes of work here and there and spend the remainder of their days im-ing people and looking at youtube stuff

prob no more than 1.5 hours, but i could make it look like 3-4 if i had to go through it with someone.

I work fairly short hours (prob five a day on average), but every one I'm paid for I actually spend working as I'm a teacher.

that's what i find is interesting about thinking about this the hours concept
dudes who do manual labor really work for 8 hours, whereas eggheads like me sit in front of a computer for alot of time
and yea the emails, the facebooks, the ilxs fuckin a that ends up taking up mad time
i guess b/c i really like my job and the tasks it allows me to do i am going to have to clamp down and
just walk away from the computer.

My job is basically manual labor, but I work about 3 hours out of 11.

I get paid a salary for working a 38 hr week plus 'any extra hours as reasonably required w/o additional remuneration' or something which I assume is fairly standard. I do prob 50 hrs a week.

Man, if I didn't LOVE my job, there's no way I'd do that. Admittedly the job market in Australia's a hell of a lot better than elsewhere, but that's cruel.

I had one job where I would come in at 8:00, finish my work for the day @ 08:15-08:30, and then just browse the internet the rest of the day because there was nothing else for me to do. This wasn't once in a awhile either, more like three or four months in a row during our slow period. Ironically enough, this job paid more than any other job I ever had!

My current job allows no slack time at all. I even work through my lunch most days.

So what about you?

Haha. I was going to start a new thread until I found this one. Ignore "so what about you".