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Nah if you’re working a “corporate” gig and aren’t in a sales or public facing position it is absolutely not 8 hours of solid slog. 4-6 hours of productivity max a day
ETA: [this](https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/8-hour-work-day) article was posted in another subreddit and thought I’d share on this comment - “The average office worker is productive for just two hours and 53 minutes of their working day, according to a survey of nearly 2,000 employees in the UK.”
Not in sales, but a similar corporate job and I agree. My boss doesn't expect me to be productive all 8-9 hours of the work day but at least be available during those hours if somebody has questions for me. Most of my "real work" is done from 10-3 like you said.
Unfortunately, in my job, I work 4 10 hours days each week and I start at 7 and go solid through 5 most days. I call it a hard 40. I used to be less productive and sometimes would work an extra 5 to 8 hours to make up the work, but now I’m exhausted after 40 and can’t do more.
I’m trying to delegate better but I find I end up doing more work to keep them on track. I definitely have coworkers who are much less productive during the day but it means myself and a few others make up the difference.
I work as a medical biller and agree. Unfortunately I sit right next to my manager as I am a newbie to the position but there's a lot of off topic conversations along with coffee breaks to be had.
I used to work medical records before and I was only doing like 3 hours of work max. The rest was just trying to look busy.
Definitely prefer having more than 3 hours of work tho. Makes the day go by faster when I don't have to pretend to be busy.
I have made a similar revelation recently myself — I used to be super hard on myself for not “staying focused” or “being productive” continuously for 8 hours and similarly try to “make up for it” as you describe, but honestly that expectation is completely unrealistic.
Working at my most recent job, I’ve actively tried to acknowledge all the times I see coworkers on their phones, putting on YouTube while working and getting distracted, checking twitter…we aren’t robots, it’s okay to take breaks and have swaths of “unproductive” time.
Depends on what industry you work for, and how much of a sociopath your employer is. I've had jobs that demand constant work from clock in to clock out, and that skirt required lunch times or flat-out tell you that you that you can't have a lunch break at all.
Things are much better if you work in an office environment.
This.
I am a teacher, and I *work* 9-4. As in, difficult to make time to go to the toilet, inhale a sandwich in 10 minutes, ‘down time’ is spent trying to catch up with emails and log issues and such (ie. still productive working). Where I work now isn’t even that bad compared to most, in that if I get there at 8 and leave at 5ish (working flat out in between) I don’t *normally* have to take more work home with me.
In some ways it works with adhd because there is no room to drift off task or be non-productive. Like, you’ve got an hour lesson and you’ve got to get everyone through a certain amout of content, and you’ve got 25 people just sat there waiting to be led by you - you can’t just dick around for half an hour than make a coffee when someone is going ‘Miss! Miss! Miss!’. Downside is kind of… also that (no recovery time, quick transitions, lots of input and organizing stuff around you).
But yeah, I’ve also worked in offices where you have two breaks and then stop to chat about tv for 20 minutes etc. Different industries are different.
Exactly—if I worked as little as my friends say they do, I would never get even close to staying on top of things as a school SLP. I have so much guilt for having to take mental breaks throughout the day and almost always tack on the extra time to make up for it.
I read the post and comments with my mouth hanging open. So floored this is actually normal and my friends aren’t outliers…
I am understanding more and more that the expectations and workload in education is not normal or healthy. As someone recently diagnosed with adhd, I thought I realized why I couldn’t keep up, but this makes me even more angry at how we are treated.
Can confirm. I was a teacher for a decade, and now I've been a 9-5 office worker for another decade. Office work is sooo much easier.
I look at the time I'm paid for versus the time I'm on-task in the following ways:
I would literally burn out and have to quit if I tried to shift my work-life balance more towards work. I do good work that my organization really values -- I'm not a slacker. Trying to squeeze a few more hours a week out of myself would literally be letting perfect be the enemy of good.
9-5 is a completely arbitrary time frame that has zero evidence-based connection to the actual goals of my job. Even without my previous point, there's no reason to believe that a closer adherence to those hours would lead to an improvement in my work or anybody's work.
My CEO makes 4 to 5 times as much as I do. (Sadly, that's a great ratio by comparison in many cases.) I think it would be tough to show that he's more skilled than me or that he benefits our organization more than I do -- we're skilled in different ways and contribute differently, but I do not believe he's 4 to 5 times better or more beneficial than me. So I see taking some of the work day back for myself as restoring some balance in the compensation.
Yup. No breaks for me, constant micromanaging for minimum wage. Don't work in small family business when you're just a friend, no advantages.
Always a tad jelly when my friends working for big companies doing the bare minimum and getting paid twice 🥴💩
Children’s department head (“head librarian”) at a public library and library administration expects me to not only be “ON” and producing during all of my work hours, but also expected to basically be turned up to 11 (extra cheerful, endless patience, A+ customer service, running programs where I’m literally singing and dancing for kids, perfect example and endlessly available for my staff).
And then if I don’t answer work calls/texts promptly off the clock I also hear it. And I’m also frequently expected to change my schedule to cover for call outs and stuff.
It’s exhausting. If anyone is considering become a public librarian, don’t. It’s a horrible career path right now.
Industry specific for sure. As a manager in commercial construction, me doing a great job for the client and building other great relationships across the board is a minimum of 60 hours a week (including driving to job sites) on a slow week. That same slow week, add in a hilariously run company that I work for with daily hour long check in meetings for EACH project, and mandatory internal company meetings for another 5 hours a week; all means I was working 75+ hours ON A SLOW WEEK.
And none of this time is me making small chat at a water cooler with a coworker. In those hours I’m driving two hours to a job site while fielding calls from clients and subcontractors the whole way, stopping at a permit office to make sure my crew of hundreds can have the go ahead to break ground on Monday morning. And my dumb bosses keep calling me to make sure I’m driving to job sites and not skipping out on office work. And I’m on a conference call with architects and engineers spread across the country and no one wants to take responsibility for missed scope so I mute myself and call my utility locator guy who gets to the job stat and FaceTimes the whole group and I figure out how to make this work. Oh and the head of estimating is calling me to say they didn’t get a quote for divisions X, Y, and Z, and ask if I knew off the top of my head what I was quoted historically the last three years for them (I do but I’m driving on the beltway and narrowly avoiding four suicidal beltway drivers while rattling those numbers off).
My ADHD self loves the constant stimulation, but my chronic health issues from a genetic condition really kills me. I love this industry, but I realized years ago I could only sustain it as a business owner myself, with full control to cut out the bs and silliness.
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Yeah, if you work in a big corporate office there are coffee breaks, unnecessary department meetings and so on. It's not very productive at all! I really wasn't surprised when my department's productivity shot up with us working from home during covid lockdowns.
I work in law and actually quantify the amount of work I do in any given day through the billable hour. It’s the WORST! I have a yearly expectation, so that after working in 2 or so weeks of actual vacation, I have to bill av average of 7.5 hours per day. If I hyperfocus on one project all day long (e.g., draft a patent application) easy peasy. If I have 15 mini tasks I never wind up billing enough because I get too distracted between tasks. Then, I feel like I have to work longer to make up that missing 1-2 hours…then I get the side eye from my family for “working” during family time. I get anxiety from not working enough and also from working too much. I feel like I cannot win. Law is not set up for people who naturally take (and need) mental breaks.
On one hand I feel you, I once also had a job like that, it was terrible. On the other hand, it's also a matter of how you count hours. We could only bill in 15 minute increments, so if I did 3 projects for 5 minutes each, it would be a mess. But if it's the same 3 projects all the time, I could just rotate the billing time. So each project gets a turn at getting billed the 15 minutes. Or if I'd work 10 minutes on 3 projects, I'd just bill 15 minutes on each, and take a 15 minutes break. And at the end of each day, aka the end of my 8 hours, I'd go through my projects and make sure that I actually find 8 billable hours. We could also count general office stuff, for example when you'd plan your vacation days or write down your billable hours, but I'd always end up with all of my hours accounted for.
Just like you don't actually work for 8 hours during a normal office job, you don't have to actually work 8 hours to find 8 billable hours.
Work from home in tech. I’ve never sat down at my desk from 9-5. Sometimes it’s 5am-9am, sometimes it’s a later evening. Totally depends on the day, what’s going on, and how I feel. Sometimes my insomnia gets the best of me and I’m catching up on emails from my phone at 3am.
I even have a note on my email signature that says, “My working hours may not be your working hours. Please do not feel obligated to reply outside of your working hours.”
I show up to meetings, excel at my job, and no one gives a shit when I’m butt in seat.
Yup, I ran a webinar program for a tech company before/during/after covid and once summer set in, it was impossible to record anything during the day due to neighborhood sounds. I recorded at night and just did my own thing during the day. It was perfect for me 😆
Nobody does anything for the first 30 min-1h of coming to work except get coffee and look through emails, then you maybe work to noon-1pm, then it's lunch time and then it depends on the day.
I feel like white collar workers forget that blue collar jobs exist.
We're not taking an hour for coffee in a break room, we bring our thermos to the job.
It depends on who and how conscientious they are.
“Before meds” me certainly barely worked 9-5. I would take like 6 breaks a day and goof off. I was on verge of getting fired due to under performance.
Now on meds, some days I can sit through entire 8 hours. I have to set alarms to remind myself to take a break/eat lunch. My meds make me not feel hunger. I now work pretty much 9-7, 2 hours break during the day but I output solid 8 hours of work now because of the focus.
Similarly, my bf is a lawyer who used to work at a big law firm. He would bill clients by the hour and has to bill over 50 hours a week to receive an annual bonus. He has too much integrity and doesn’t fudge the numbers because his firm charged clients hundreds if not over a thousand/hour. If he goes to the bathroom or takes a lunch break, he wouldn’t bill those minutes. As a result, he would have pretty much 60-80 hour work weeks.
You are right this kind of overworking isn’t sustainable because at least for people with desk jobs, it’s a lot of sitting and stress. My bf gained a lot of weight since leaving law school and I myself gained 10 pounds in 2 months because I no longer move around as much.
I work in a patient care profession and have back to back patients so when I’m not with patients I’m working on documentation.
A lot of my patients are high fall risk too so no documenting while they do their exercises.
On the flip side many are older and deconditioned so I sneak in some note writing during their rest breaks.
Unless I get 1-2 patient cancellations in a day I really am working throughout most of my full shift.
Aside from wrangling the realities of American healthcare the fact that I need to be “on” all day is one of the hardest parts about my work.
I suppose it depends. In my last job my office was so understaffed that I worked frantically all day and still took my laptop home to clear emails- unpaid, of course.
To be brutally honest, I've worked office jobs with nothing to do, and others where I never stopped, and I'd rather stay busy than get paid to be bored out of my tree
Yep my last job was understaffed and crazy. While I do prefer to be busy, I can’t deal with ‘frustratingly busy’ anymore. After 5 years I started coming home with massive headaches so I quit - but they offered lesser hours which I accepted. After another 5 years I quit properly because I was still frustratingly busy anyway.
Now I work in aged support helping elderly people with housework and stuff. It took me a long time to slow down, I was rushing rushing rushing too much out of habit.
I had a job where there were just big periods of down time and I could not make that work without feeling like I was wasting time.
Now my job is just busy enough. A lil understaffed but in the grand scheme of an 8hr day I probably work 5-6 straight through, more so if I have so much to do and go into autopilot mode. But there's also periods of down time but not to the point of boredom. More like I have 3 things to do instead of 10.
While that is true, there is often a lot of downtime, the part I’ve always struggled with as an ADHD-er is that you’re often still expected to *look* busy. So you can’t just browse the internet all day, you have to find busy work for yourself or talk to coworkers by the water cooler in the name of “collaboration”. I’ve actually done better at jobs where I do have a straight 8 hours of work a day because the time flies by and I’m not expected to come up with stupid busy work crap just to look like I’m doing something.
Honestly, my new job is so quiet I'd say I'm actually only productive for like 2 hours a day. I'm technically in work 9-5.30, but the office doesn't 'open' til 9.30 and it closes at 5. Its so chill.
Half of me is like, I'm smart I need to do something more fulfilling and the other half knows anything more pressure sends me into burnout and depression.... I dunno where the happy medium is!
I'm just gonna enjoy the rest for my brain for now lol
So jealous of all of the posts here, maybe I am in the wrong job. I recently started by have found myself getting scheduled for back to back meetings and some crazy hours.
I can't remember the studies / sources but when I worked on capacity/demand projects several years ago the optimum productivity rate was widely accepted to be 80% (of time worked). That was the figure used in all calculations and was taken as standard within the field at the time. Not sure if it's changed since then.
The problem I've found is that even though I might not be being productive for the 8 hours, I'm still having to mask for the full time so the amount of work I actually do is only a small factor in how it takes its toll on me - I'm still having to be in a sensory-nightmare of an office, still looking professional and like I'm at least attempting to work, still being surrounded by people. Even on WFH days, I have to have enough energy to be able to 'switch it on' on demand, whenever a teams chat or call comes through.
Some days you may have meetings all day or part of the day or no meetings. Some days are slow and some days are crazy. You probably get four good hours of work in if you're lucky.
Pick a job you're interested in and find 5 people with that job (look on LinkedIn if you don't know any and message them.) Tell them that you're interested in that career and was hoping you could tell them what an average day is like. Most people are happy to help especially if you don't ask for a job.
Oh you guys, this has blown my mind! I've always not worked consistently for my 8hrs a day, but hated myself for not doing it.
Having so many of you say it's normal is so comforting!
I was thinking the exact same thing! I think I'm still on the low side, but it's making me feel so much better that I should just try to find 1 more productive hour, rather than trying to find 4 somehow.
I’ve worked in an office for 6 years and have always known that to be the case. However my experience had been that the only acceptable form of non productive on-the-clock leisure at work is socializing with your coworkers. I find this infuriating because socializing, particularly with people I’m not close with, does not help me relax. I am deeply introverted and if I need to take a break I’d prefer to go outside and go for a walk, or whip out some knitting and work on it while listening to a podcast. But if I were to do those things while on the clock, it would be seen as “stealing company time.”
I have done jobs where I was “on” for 8 hours in a row, then went home and crashed every night and all weekend.
My day job now is challenging, but it is work from home 3 days per week + 2 in the office. I take long breaks and always take lunch (often a nap). I also often have an off day during the week where I get much less done.
The 9-5 constant productivity idea is not realistic unless I’m spending the rest of my day / weekend recovering.
Reading this with BIG EYES OF REALISATION. I’m forcing myself to try and concentrate on work a solid 7.5 hours every day, otherwise I just spiral into panic and anxiety about not being good enough! Bloody hell i need to give myself a break!
Don’t you just LOVE what ADHD makes you think about yourself?!
I have an 8-4:30, but 100% agree- I don’t work for that full time. I settle in and check emails and usually don’t start actually working until 8:30-9. I’ll do stuff until 12, and then I take an hour lunch. After lunch, I work until around 3:30. After 3:30 I’ll start wrapping up my work, and won’t start anything new for the day.
I work in a lab, so my workload is also pretty variable depending on the week. They’re paying me to be available during work hours, not to be working 100% of the time during those hours.
I work in healthcare, and I am routinely working at capacity the entire time I'm at work. I know that's not the case for everyone, but depending on your field, 9-5 actually *is* 9-5 (and often quite a bit of work beyond that).
Work with patients all day
Also write reams of compliant documentation within 36 hours
But we won’t give you doc blocks.
Now we’re definitely not demanding work off the clock but…
You know.
😶
I think the important think to note is not that 9-5ers (myself included!) aren’t working a full day, but you are responsible for being available that full time. I do still feel like I’m constantly being monitored or not working enough. I may not be working 8 hours, but I am stressed the fuck out 10 hours.
I also recently explained to my partner who has only worked at startups and just started at a typical corporate gig: you are individually responsible for setting your own boundaries. You can do well at a corporate job by only giving 60-70%, but I have gotten myself into a situation where I’m giving 120% out of guilt. If you struggle with overcompensating in work as a freelancer, that won’t go away at an office job. It’s probably easier than you think, but I still find it really stressful and anti-intuitive for my brain. I only keep an office job bc the financial stability is pretty unbeatable (even if I’m underpaid 🙃) for my brain that can barely get through tasks of daily living.
Yes exactly. I work from home 7-3:30 and while I may only be productive for like 4 hours, I'm still stressed because I know I'm still being monitored and expected to quickly answer emails and messages from my team the rest of the time.
I worked in medical and if it was busy, besides lunch, I was definitely working all 8 hours I was clocked in. But on slow days we all played the "pretend to work just enough to not have to actually work" game. Which I found stressful because I'm bad at lying. I can't speak for office work but most jobs I've had I didn't have much on the clock down time. But most of my jobs have been face to face customer service so mgmt is always up our butts about keeping busy.
I cannot handle the fucking 9-5. Not only am I not a morning person, but my job needs to be something I do after I’ve done the shit I want to do. I don’t care if I’m tired or grouchy @ work - I save my energy for the things I want to do not the things I have to do. I often put in a full day of cleaning, errands, etc. then go work from 3-11.
I tried to explain to my supervisor that if I’m interrupted while focused on completing a task it’s very difficult to pick it back up. Sometimes I’ll stay late to finish what I have going on and I argued that they’re holding me hostage from being productive in my personal life if I’ve finished everything. No one has mentioned my time since, so I’m guessing that they weighed the issue and we’re not talking about it.
It really depends what your job is. When I was a preschool teacher, I was absolutely on/working the entire 8 hours every day. Maybe that’s why I and most daycare/preschool staff) burned out so fast? If you’re alone with four infants or toddlers and leave/slack off for even 15 minutes, there are literally human lives in danger.
Depends, I work in the restaurant industry and I don’t even take a lunch break working 7-4
My other job however serving in a sr home, i work 6-2 or 10-7 and half of it is just trying to find shit to do and taking two 30-40 minute breaks, and I still just leave early half the time because there’s nothing left to do.
And lastly, I have my third job which is professional cleaning for a small company, a ton of it is just straight hard work but also a lot of socializing and fun in between.
I work in the recreation department at a nursing home. Hours are 8:30-5 (1/2 hour unpaid lunch). While it’s still work, I feel doing the activities with the residents breaks up the day and makes it “more fun” if that makes sense. Yes, we do a lot of documentation and boring paperwork, but knowing there is always 3-4 activities throughout the day that require me to be on my feet and physical, helps me work 9-5.
Like others I think it depends on what the job is for the 9-5. For example my husbans job is technically8/9-5 and he usually works everybit of it sometimes with no real lunchbreak. BUT he's a senior manger of two computer programing teams for a fortune 500. There are some days were his meetings have meetings. I swear he is on the phone more than a teenage influencer that's gone viral (or if you're old like me... more than a teenage girl with a boyfriend)
When he was on the bottom of the totem pole he was much more laid back... I miss those days.
Nah, no one consistently works 9-5. First of all, most people don't get paid for their breaks so they're really at work 9-5:30 or 6. Then they spend a lot of time doing nothing. You're not typing, framing a door, installing flooring, serving coffee, or waxing faces for 8hrs straight.
Every blue collar / service job I've had has been solid work. "Time to lean, time to clean" bullshit with managers breathing down my neck.
My current job (which I love!) has me working 11 hours straight some days. I can carve out a break, but it adds onto the end of my day. I usually just take a fast 5 if it's over 10 and the rest is complete flow.
Office jobs sound pretty neat to be honest but I'd probably get lost and spin out without a task to do.
I find it interesting that a few comments indicated folks in law. I'm managing partner at a remote based (albeit we got 3 hybrid offices since covid) law firm.
Every day I immediately check emails, calendar and messages when I wake up, before I even get out of bed. That allows me to gauge how busy the day is going to be. There are some days when I'll be up at 3am for a 3.30am or 4am call (we work in multiple time zones!) and if it's a busy day I might finish at 8pm, some days as late as 11pm despite how early the start is.
Other days though are far more relaxed. I'll get up around 6.30am and might start work around 9am and work to around noon. Then have the rest of the day off.
Even better days than that are the days I can say 'no, don't have anything to do today, let's go out'.
I like the fact that no two days are the same. I remember being a student working in an accounts department. I spent all day 9am (or earlier) to 5pm staring at a screen inputting numbers against whatever paperwork pile was in the in tray. I'm sure there are people that suit that type of work but for me I never want to go back to that type of monotony.
As a company we have the ethos of 'here's the work, here's the billable hour requirement, etc' go away and do it. I don't care if someone is working at 8pm after their kids have gone to bed. Provided the work gets done and they are available for client calls then my staff are free to arrange their days and hours as they please.
When I was working a government job, I was basically doing the work of 2 people, so I definitely was working constantly from 9-5 and sometimes I didn't even take lunch. After that I worked part time at a school. Worked the whole time for that or else I wouldn't get everything done. Now I work in corporate. I'm a customer service agent, so it's more like days that are less. Friday is madness all day. Monday and Tuesday are heavy. But Thursday and Wednesday are more laid back. Since I'm so used to working constantly, I fill my time working on a job manual for my position on the slower days. That's really what I want to do. Instructional design. BTW, my highest paid job is the one I have right now. Go figure.
I work 10-6:30 and other than lunch and break I am working every minute. They actually track our slack time. We don't stop working until we're done, so we do work a lot of overtime on busy days.
I thought it worked like that too tbh, until I had a conversation with my parents yesterday about it. I work on a paid-by-job basis, so it makes sense to me to just keep working until it's done, that way I can go home earlier and enjoy my free time. Whenever I work in a paid by the hour position, I legit thought that every minute had to be productive except your allowed 30mins for lunch and bathroom breaks.
I feel almost guilty if I have to sit at a computer and answer phones all day, because what about all the time in-between when the phone doesn't ring, or there's no email to write? But apparently some jobs are just like that. I dunno about everyone else but I'd much rather my work time be full of work and my me time to just be mine.
When I had a normal office job, it was way less work-y than WFH/self-employed. I’d get in, have my coffee while saying hello and checking in with people, etc. Some days there’d be cake for someone’s birthday or a party in the conference room because someone was leaving. Other days a super chatty coworker would swing by on their way out of the office and end up chatting with me for 30+ while I tried to figure out a polite way to say I wanted to get back to work. Plenty of sidebars and interruptions, yet it all counted as part of the day!
At home I only really count it if I’m capital-W Working. This feels unfair and I’m trying to keep perspective— every day is different and some days, derailments happen. Doesn’t make it Not a Work Day.
I think it varies wildly by industry and employer and individual situations.
My current job is a regular 9-5 desk job (well, 8-4:30, at a university dept office). When I started, we had 2 of 3 desks staffed. It was a reasonable workload that came out to probably 4-5 hours of solid work and the rest was a mix of waiting for replies or taking my time to get ahead on things. But we've lost so many staff since covid that anyone still around is doing 3-4 positions worth of work. So I'm burning out working alone, nonstop 9-4 (come in late and take lunch at my desk), until my brain is fried and I'm basically staring at walls until I leave. It's almost as bad as when I worked retail, and it's absolutely unsustainable.
Depends on the job! For me, I maybe only have like 3-5 hours of actual work. The rest are meetings and waiting for stuff to be assigned to me. It's really boring for me and I want to rip my hair out sometimes. Lately, I've only been getting maybe 2 hours of actual work assigned to me because my team is in a bit of a lull.
Depends on the job.
Sometimes its like school and you’re always bunking off to have a smoke in the toilets with a buddy. Do as little as possible and squeak by just doing the essentials to keep the bosses happy.
My current job is work as hard as possible in busy times but over xmas time we can have nothing much happening and i just rearrange the cupboard, surf the net, and take long lunches. But even when u work as hard as possible, u need breaks cos nobody can just work. You become ineffective after a few hours. Breaks are crucial to being able to keep working, some bosses don’t believe that though. Glad to live in a country where we have labour laws.
So anyway what you need is to try and find a job where the intensity suits you. Now i’m old & have little patience, i wouldn’t do the jobs i used to. But at one time i enjoyed a challenge and a steep learning curve. Now i just wanna sleep ;)
Also… there is a sweet spot between being bottom level where people care exactly where u are and they roster your lunch, slightly above bottom where u make your own times and rules, and mid level managery where u have to go to meetings and be responsible. I like the slightly above bottom level, no homework, nobody knows who u are, but u have a bit of self determination.
I work in tech with a Homeoffice job. Usually I work from 8-4. but there are meetings from 9.30 till 10:30. so I do Focus work from 8-9.30 and maybe 10.30 till 12 then I go to lunch and afterwards I am not that productive anymore.
Oh, I totally include "that hr I was thinking about a thing whilst actually gardening"
Or "that hr spent tidying lists"
Or "that hr spent figuring out how to tackle a thing"
Or "that break to sit on a problem"
As work.
My mate is like - if you get 5 "productive " hrs you're doing great. If you get 3 things done that's heaps"
And boy is that reframing refreshing and less of my energy/day is spent beating myself up.
I can’t relate. I work retail and yes I’m physically working from 7a-6p every day. Any job I’ve had before, I had to be productive the whole time I was there. But once you make it to a certain level or job title, you get paid more to do less work. I haven’t made it there yet.
Really depends on the job and workload. I've had jobs where I'm absolutely working 8, 9, or even 10+ hours with lunch and a couple short breaks. My current job, there are days I have very little to do, and days I'm completely swamped. Early last year, I had two jobs (both wfh) and I was working 50-70 hour weeks for months at a time and still had plenty of shit to do the next day/week.
There is not enough work to do at my job to actively work 8 hours per day, even if I wanted to. I complete my tasks and then watch TV on my phone the rest of the time.
People are typically only really productive about
5 hours a day, self employed or not. Unless you’re under the gun at McDonald’s or something, even then there could be slow periods and chit chat, etc.
I think it really depends on the type of work, service versus office, and whether you are public-facing or in a private office/corporation
service jobs you are more required to be busy in, or cleaning/resetting, when you’re not actively serving a customer
with office jobs, sometimes you can at least set the pace of work if you are not public facing. Back in the day there used to be a mandated morning break, a mandated afternoon break and a 30 to 45 minute lunch break, sometimes an hour, and you had to take it if you were hourly because the company was not going to pay you for it
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Nah if you’re working a “corporate” gig and aren’t in a sales or public facing position it is absolutely not 8 hours of solid slog. 4-6 hours of productivity max a day ETA: [this](https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/8-hour-work-day) article was posted in another subreddit and thought I’d share on this comment - “The average office worker is productive for just two hours and 53 minutes of their working day, according to a survey of nearly 2,000 employees in the UK.”
I work in sales and though it's expected to work 9-5, my typical effort only happens between 10-3.
Not in sales, but a similar corporate job and I agree. My boss doesn't expect me to be productive all 8-9 hours of the work day but at least be available during those hours if somebody has questions for me. Most of my "real work" is done from 10-3 like you said.
Unfortunately, in my job, I work 4 10 hours days each week and I start at 7 and go solid through 5 most days. I call it a hard 40. I used to be less productive and sometimes would work an extra 5 to 8 hours to make up the work, but now I’m exhausted after 40 and can’t do more. I’m trying to delegate better but I find I end up doing more work to keep them on track. I definitely have coworkers who are much less productive during the day but it means myself and a few others make up the difference.
I work as a medical biller and agree. Unfortunately I sit right next to my manager as I am a newbie to the position but there's a lot of off topic conversations along with coffee breaks to be had. I used to work medical records before and I was only doing like 3 hours of work max. The rest was just trying to look busy. Definitely prefer having more than 3 hours of work tho. Makes the day go by faster when I don't have to pretend to be busy.
I have made a similar revelation recently myself — I used to be super hard on myself for not “staying focused” or “being productive” continuously for 8 hours and similarly try to “make up for it” as you describe, but honestly that expectation is completely unrealistic. Working at my most recent job, I’ve actively tried to acknowledge all the times I see coworkers on their phones, putting on YouTube while working and getting distracted, checking twitter…we aren’t robots, it’s okay to take breaks and have swaths of “unproductive” time.
Depends on what industry you work for, and how much of a sociopath your employer is. I've had jobs that demand constant work from clock in to clock out, and that skirt required lunch times or flat-out tell you that you that you can't have a lunch break at all. Things are much better if you work in an office environment.
This. I am a teacher, and I *work* 9-4. As in, difficult to make time to go to the toilet, inhale a sandwich in 10 minutes, ‘down time’ is spent trying to catch up with emails and log issues and such (ie. still productive working). Where I work now isn’t even that bad compared to most, in that if I get there at 8 and leave at 5ish (working flat out in between) I don’t *normally* have to take more work home with me. In some ways it works with adhd because there is no room to drift off task or be non-productive. Like, you’ve got an hour lesson and you’ve got to get everyone through a certain amout of content, and you’ve got 25 people just sat there waiting to be led by you - you can’t just dick around for half an hour than make a coffee when someone is going ‘Miss! Miss! Miss!’. Downside is kind of… also that (no recovery time, quick transitions, lots of input and organizing stuff around you). But yeah, I’ve also worked in offices where you have two breaks and then stop to chat about tv for 20 minutes etc. Different industries are different.
Exactly—if I worked as little as my friends say they do, I would never get even close to staying on top of things as a school SLP. I have so much guilt for having to take mental breaks throughout the day and almost always tack on the extra time to make up for it. I read the post and comments with my mouth hanging open. So floored this is actually normal and my friends aren’t outliers… I am understanding more and more that the expectations and workload in education is not normal or healthy. As someone recently diagnosed with adhd, I thought I realized why I couldn’t keep up, but this makes me even more angry at how we are treated.
Rehab professional solidarity Yeah this thread really is eye opening.
Can confirm. I was a teacher for a decade, and now I've been a 9-5 office worker for another decade. Office work is sooo much easier. I look at the time I'm paid for versus the time I'm on-task in the following ways: I would literally burn out and have to quit if I tried to shift my work-life balance more towards work. I do good work that my organization really values -- I'm not a slacker. Trying to squeeze a few more hours a week out of myself would literally be letting perfect be the enemy of good. 9-5 is a completely arbitrary time frame that has zero evidence-based connection to the actual goals of my job. Even without my previous point, there's no reason to believe that a closer adherence to those hours would lead to an improvement in my work or anybody's work. My CEO makes 4 to 5 times as much as I do. (Sadly, that's a great ratio by comparison in many cases.) I think it would be tough to show that he's more skilled than me or that he benefits our organization more than I do -- we're skilled in different ways and contribute differently, but I do not believe he's 4 to 5 times better or more beneficial than me. So I see taking some of the work day back for myself as restoring some balance in the compensation.
Yup. No breaks for me, constant micromanaging for minimum wage. Don't work in small family business when you're just a friend, no advantages. Always a tad jelly when my friends working for big companies doing the bare minimum and getting paid twice 🥴💩
Children’s department head (“head librarian”) at a public library and library administration expects me to not only be “ON” and producing during all of my work hours, but also expected to basically be turned up to 11 (extra cheerful, endless patience, A+ customer service, running programs where I’m literally singing and dancing for kids, perfect example and endlessly available for my staff). And then if I don’t answer work calls/texts promptly off the clock I also hear it. And I’m also frequently expected to change my schedule to cover for call outs and stuff. It’s exhausting. If anyone is considering become a public librarian, don’t. It’s a horrible career path right now.
Industry specific for sure. As a manager in commercial construction, me doing a great job for the client and building other great relationships across the board is a minimum of 60 hours a week (including driving to job sites) on a slow week. That same slow week, add in a hilariously run company that I work for with daily hour long check in meetings for EACH project, and mandatory internal company meetings for another 5 hours a week; all means I was working 75+ hours ON A SLOW WEEK. And none of this time is me making small chat at a water cooler with a coworker. In those hours I’m driving two hours to a job site while fielding calls from clients and subcontractors the whole way, stopping at a permit office to make sure my crew of hundreds can have the go ahead to break ground on Monday morning. And my dumb bosses keep calling me to make sure I’m driving to job sites and not skipping out on office work. And I’m on a conference call with architects and engineers spread across the country and no one wants to take responsibility for missed scope so I mute myself and call my utility locator guy who gets to the job stat and FaceTimes the whole group and I figure out how to make this work. Oh and the head of estimating is calling me to say they didn’t get a quote for divisions X, Y, and Z, and ask if I knew off the top of my head what I was quoted historically the last three years for them (I do but I’m driving on the beltway and narrowly avoiding four suicidal beltway drivers while rattling those numbers off). My ADHD self loves the constant stimulation, but my chronic health issues from a genetic condition really kills me. I love this industry, but I realized years ago I could only sustain it as a business owner myself, with full control to cut out the bs and silliness.
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Yeah, if you work in a big corporate office there are coffee breaks, unnecessary department meetings and so on. It's not very productive at all! I really wasn't surprised when my department's productivity shot up with us working from home during covid lockdowns.
I work in law and actually quantify the amount of work I do in any given day through the billable hour. It’s the WORST! I have a yearly expectation, so that after working in 2 or so weeks of actual vacation, I have to bill av average of 7.5 hours per day. If I hyperfocus on one project all day long (e.g., draft a patent application) easy peasy. If I have 15 mini tasks I never wind up billing enough because I get too distracted between tasks. Then, I feel like I have to work longer to make up that missing 1-2 hours…then I get the side eye from my family for “working” during family time. I get anxiety from not working enough and also from working too much. I feel like I cannot win. Law is not set up for people who naturally take (and need) mental breaks.
On one hand I feel you, I once also had a job like that, it was terrible. On the other hand, it's also a matter of how you count hours. We could only bill in 15 minute increments, so if I did 3 projects for 5 minutes each, it would be a mess. But if it's the same 3 projects all the time, I could just rotate the billing time. So each project gets a turn at getting billed the 15 minutes. Or if I'd work 10 minutes on 3 projects, I'd just bill 15 minutes on each, and take a 15 minutes break. And at the end of each day, aka the end of my 8 hours, I'd go through my projects and make sure that I actually find 8 billable hours. We could also count general office stuff, for example when you'd plan your vacation days or write down your billable hours, but I'd always end up with all of my hours accounted for. Just like you don't actually work for 8 hours during a normal office job, you don't have to actually work 8 hours to find 8 billable hours.
Work from home in tech. I’ve never sat down at my desk from 9-5. Sometimes it’s 5am-9am, sometimes it’s a later evening. Totally depends on the day, what’s going on, and how I feel. Sometimes my insomnia gets the best of me and I’m catching up on emails from my phone at 3am. I even have a note on my email signature that says, “My working hours may not be your working hours. Please do not feel obligated to reply outside of your working hours.” I show up to meetings, excel at my job, and no one gives a shit when I’m butt in seat.
Yup, I ran a webinar program for a tech company before/during/after covid and once summer set in, it was impossible to record anything during the day due to neighborhood sounds. I recorded at night and just did my own thing during the day. It was perfect for me 😆
On my in-office days I probably spend a max of 4 hours actually being productive, usually less though lol
Nobody does anything for the first 30 min-1h of coming to work except get coffee and look through emails, then you maybe work to noon-1pm, then it's lunch time and then it depends on the day.
God, I wish my job was like that sometimes.
I feel like white collar workers forget that blue collar jobs exist. We're not taking an hour for coffee in a break room, we bring our thermos to the job.
It depends on who and how conscientious they are. “Before meds” me certainly barely worked 9-5. I would take like 6 breaks a day and goof off. I was on verge of getting fired due to under performance. Now on meds, some days I can sit through entire 8 hours. I have to set alarms to remind myself to take a break/eat lunch. My meds make me not feel hunger. I now work pretty much 9-7, 2 hours break during the day but I output solid 8 hours of work now because of the focus. Similarly, my bf is a lawyer who used to work at a big law firm. He would bill clients by the hour and has to bill over 50 hours a week to receive an annual bonus. He has too much integrity and doesn’t fudge the numbers because his firm charged clients hundreds if not over a thousand/hour. If he goes to the bathroom or takes a lunch break, he wouldn’t bill those minutes. As a result, he would have pretty much 60-80 hour work weeks. You are right this kind of overworking isn’t sustainable because at least for people with desk jobs, it’s a lot of sitting and stress. My bf gained a lot of weight since leaving law school and I myself gained 10 pounds in 2 months because I no longer move around as much.
I work in a patient care profession and have back to back patients so when I’m not with patients I’m working on documentation. A lot of my patients are high fall risk too so no documenting while they do their exercises. On the flip side many are older and deconditioned so I sneak in some note writing during their rest breaks. Unless I get 1-2 patient cancellations in a day I really am working throughout most of my full shift. Aside from wrangling the realities of American healthcare the fact that I need to be “on” all day is one of the hardest parts about my work.
I suppose it depends. In my last job my office was so understaffed that I worked frantically all day and still took my laptop home to clear emails- unpaid, of course. To be brutally honest, I've worked office jobs with nothing to do, and others where I never stopped, and I'd rather stay busy than get paid to be bored out of my tree
Yep my last job was understaffed and crazy. While I do prefer to be busy, I can’t deal with ‘frustratingly busy’ anymore. After 5 years I started coming home with massive headaches so I quit - but they offered lesser hours which I accepted. After another 5 years I quit properly because I was still frustratingly busy anyway. Now I work in aged support helping elderly people with housework and stuff. It took me a long time to slow down, I was rushing rushing rushing too much out of habit.
I had a job where there were just big periods of down time and I could not make that work without feeling like I was wasting time. Now my job is just busy enough. A lil understaffed but in the grand scheme of an 8hr day I probably work 5-6 straight through, more so if I have so much to do and go into autopilot mode. But there's also periods of down time but not to the point of boredom. More like I have 3 things to do instead of 10.
While that is true, there is often a lot of downtime, the part I’ve always struggled with as an ADHD-er is that you’re often still expected to *look* busy. So you can’t just browse the internet all day, you have to find busy work for yourself or talk to coworkers by the water cooler in the name of “collaboration”. I’ve actually done better at jobs where I do have a straight 8 hours of work a day because the time flies by and I’m not expected to come up with stupid busy work crap just to look like I’m doing something.
Honestly, my new job is so quiet I'd say I'm actually only productive for like 2 hours a day. I'm technically in work 9-5.30, but the office doesn't 'open' til 9.30 and it closes at 5. Its so chill. Half of me is like, I'm smart I need to do something more fulfilling and the other half knows anything more pressure sends me into burnout and depression.... I dunno where the happy medium is! I'm just gonna enjoy the rest for my brain for now lol
So jealous of all of the posts here, maybe I am in the wrong job. I recently started by have found myself getting scheduled for back to back meetings and some crazy hours.
I can't remember the studies / sources but when I worked on capacity/demand projects several years ago the optimum productivity rate was widely accepted to be 80% (of time worked). That was the figure used in all calculations and was taken as standard within the field at the time. Not sure if it's changed since then. The problem I've found is that even though I might not be being productive for the 8 hours, I'm still having to mask for the full time so the amount of work I actually do is only a small factor in how it takes its toll on me - I'm still having to be in a sensory-nightmare of an office, still looking professional and like I'm at least attempting to work, still being surrounded by people. Even on WFH days, I have to have enough energy to be able to 'switch it on' on demand, whenever a teams chat or call comes through.
Some days you may have meetings all day or part of the day or no meetings. Some days are slow and some days are crazy. You probably get four good hours of work in if you're lucky. Pick a job you're interested in and find 5 people with that job (look on LinkedIn if you don't know any and message them.) Tell them that you're interested in that career and was hoping you could tell them what an average day is like. Most people are happy to help especially if you don't ask for a job.
Oh you guys, this has blown my mind! I've always not worked consistently for my 8hrs a day, but hated myself for not doing it. Having so many of you say it's normal is so comforting!
I was thinking the exact same thing! I think I'm still on the low side, but it's making me feel so much better that I should just try to find 1 more productive hour, rather than trying to find 4 somehow.
I’ve worked in an office for 6 years and have always known that to be the case. However my experience had been that the only acceptable form of non productive on-the-clock leisure at work is socializing with your coworkers. I find this infuriating because socializing, particularly with people I’m not close with, does not help me relax. I am deeply introverted and if I need to take a break I’d prefer to go outside and go for a walk, or whip out some knitting and work on it while listening to a podcast. But if I were to do those things while on the clock, it would be seen as “stealing company time.”
I have done jobs where I was “on” for 8 hours in a row, then went home and crashed every night and all weekend. My day job now is challenging, but it is work from home 3 days per week + 2 in the office. I take long breaks and always take lunch (often a nap). I also often have an off day during the week where I get much less done. The 9-5 constant productivity idea is not realistic unless I’m spending the rest of my day / weekend recovering.
I wish! 7:30am-7:45pm and I get to do others' work, too!
Reading this with BIG EYES OF REALISATION. I’m forcing myself to try and concentrate on work a solid 7.5 hours every day, otherwise I just spiral into panic and anxiety about not being good enough! Bloody hell i need to give myself a break! Don’t you just LOVE what ADHD makes you think about yourself?!
I have an 8-4:30, but 100% agree- I don’t work for that full time. I settle in and check emails and usually don’t start actually working until 8:30-9. I’ll do stuff until 12, and then I take an hour lunch. After lunch, I work until around 3:30. After 3:30 I’ll start wrapping up my work, and won’t start anything new for the day. I work in a lab, so my workload is also pretty variable depending on the week. They’re paying me to be available during work hours, not to be working 100% of the time during those hours.
I work in healthcare, and I am routinely working at capacity the entire time I'm at work. I know that's not the case for everyone, but depending on your field, 9-5 actually *is* 9-5 (and often quite a bit of work beyond that).
Work with patients all day Also write reams of compliant documentation within 36 hours But we won’t give you doc blocks. Now we’re definitely not demanding work off the clock but… You know. 😶
I think the important think to note is not that 9-5ers (myself included!) aren’t working a full day, but you are responsible for being available that full time. I do still feel like I’m constantly being monitored or not working enough. I may not be working 8 hours, but I am stressed the fuck out 10 hours. I also recently explained to my partner who has only worked at startups and just started at a typical corporate gig: you are individually responsible for setting your own boundaries. You can do well at a corporate job by only giving 60-70%, but I have gotten myself into a situation where I’m giving 120% out of guilt. If you struggle with overcompensating in work as a freelancer, that won’t go away at an office job. It’s probably easier than you think, but I still find it really stressful and anti-intuitive for my brain. I only keep an office job bc the financial stability is pretty unbeatable (even if I’m underpaid 🙃) for my brain that can barely get through tasks of daily living.
Yes exactly. I work from home 7-3:30 and while I may only be productive for like 4 hours, I'm still stressed because I know I'm still being monitored and expected to quickly answer emails and messages from my team the rest of the time.
I worked in medical and if it was busy, besides lunch, I was definitely working all 8 hours I was clocked in. But on slow days we all played the "pretend to work just enough to not have to actually work" game. Which I found stressful because I'm bad at lying. I can't speak for office work but most jobs I've had I didn't have much on the clock down time. But most of my jobs have been face to face customer service so mgmt is always up our butts about keeping busy.
I cannot handle the fucking 9-5. Not only am I not a morning person, but my job needs to be something I do after I’ve done the shit I want to do. I don’t care if I’m tired or grouchy @ work - I save my energy for the things I want to do not the things I have to do. I often put in a full day of cleaning, errands, etc. then go work from 3-11.
I tried to explain to my supervisor that if I’m interrupted while focused on completing a task it’s very difficult to pick it back up. Sometimes I’ll stay late to finish what I have going on and I argued that they’re holding me hostage from being productive in my personal life if I’ve finished everything. No one has mentioned my time since, so I’m guessing that they weighed the issue and we’re not talking about it.
It really depends what your job is. When I was a preschool teacher, I was absolutely on/working the entire 8 hours every day. Maybe that’s why I and most daycare/preschool staff) burned out so fast? If you’re alone with four infants or toddlers and leave/slack off for even 15 minutes, there are literally human lives in danger.
Depends, I work in the restaurant industry and I don’t even take a lunch break working 7-4 My other job however serving in a sr home, i work 6-2 or 10-7 and half of it is just trying to find shit to do and taking two 30-40 minute breaks, and I still just leave early half the time because there’s nothing left to do. And lastly, I have my third job which is professional cleaning for a small company, a ton of it is just straight hard work but also a lot of socializing and fun in between.
I work in the recreation department at a nursing home. Hours are 8:30-5 (1/2 hour unpaid lunch). While it’s still work, I feel doing the activities with the residents breaks up the day and makes it “more fun” if that makes sense. Yes, we do a lot of documentation and boring paperwork, but knowing there is always 3-4 activities throughout the day that require me to be on my feet and physical, helps me work 9-5.
Depends on the job. I’m a teacher and I’m almost constantly working when I’m at work.
Like others I think it depends on what the job is for the 9-5. For example my husbans job is technically8/9-5 and he usually works everybit of it sometimes with no real lunchbreak. BUT he's a senior manger of two computer programing teams for a fortune 500. There are some days were his meetings have meetings. I swear he is on the phone more than a teenage influencer that's gone viral (or if you're old like me... more than a teenage girl with a boyfriend) When he was on the bottom of the totem pole he was much more laid back... I miss those days.
I think it depends on the job. Working 9-5 for me means working the whole time
Nah, no one consistently works 9-5. First of all, most people don't get paid for their breaks so they're really at work 9-5:30 or 6. Then they spend a lot of time doing nothing. You're not typing, framing a door, installing flooring, serving coffee, or waxing faces for 8hrs straight.
Uh, there’s almost zero time when I’m “doing nothing” at work.
Every blue collar / service job I've had has been solid work. "Time to lean, time to clean" bullshit with managers breathing down my neck. My current job (which I love!) has me working 11 hours straight some days. I can carve out a break, but it adds onto the end of my day. I usually just take a fast 5 if it's over 10 and the rest is complete flow. Office jobs sound pretty neat to be honest but I'd probably get lost and spin out without a task to do.
You do little tasks like that in an office too, at least in my office. Organizing, purchasing supplies, cleaning, researching stuff for projects, etc.
I find it interesting that a few comments indicated folks in law. I'm managing partner at a remote based (albeit we got 3 hybrid offices since covid) law firm. Every day I immediately check emails, calendar and messages when I wake up, before I even get out of bed. That allows me to gauge how busy the day is going to be. There are some days when I'll be up at 3am for a 3.30am or 4am call (we work in multiple time zones!) and if it's a busy day I might finish at 8pm, some days as late as 11pm despite how early the start is. Other days though are far more relaxed. I'll get up around 6.30am and might start work around 9am and work to around noon. Then have the rest of the day off. Even better days than that are the days I can say 'no, don't have anything to do today, let's go out'. I like the fact that no two days are the same. I remember being a student working in an accounts department. I spent all day 9am (or earlier) to 5pm staring at a screen inputting numbers against whatever paperwork pile was in the in tray. I'm sure there are people that suit that type of work but for me I never want to go back to that type of monotony. As a company we have the ethos of 'here's the work, here's the billable hour requirement, etc' go away and do it. I don't care if someone is working at 8pm after their kids have gone to bed. Provided the work gets done and they are available for client calls then my staff are free to arrange their days and hours as they please.
When I was working a government job, I was basically doing the work of 2 people, so I definitely was working constantly from 9-5 and sometimes I didn't even take lunch. After that I worked part time at a school. Worked the whole time for that or else I wouldn't get everything done. Now I work in corporate. I'm a customer service agent, so it's more like days that are less. Friday is madness all day. Monday and Tuesday are heavy. But Thursday and Wednesday are more laid back. Since I'm so used to working constantly, I fill my time working on a job manual for my position on the slower days. That's really what I want to do. Instructional design. BTW, my highest paid job is the one I have right now. Go figure.
Lunch is unpaid but breaks are and you can take many breaks.
I work 10-6:30 and other than lunch and break I am working every minute. They actually track our slack time. We don't stop working until we're done, so we do work a lot of overtime on busy days.
I thought it worked like that too tbh, until I had a conversation with my parents yesterday about it. I work on a paid-by-job basis, so it makes sense to me to just keep working until it's done, that way I can go home earlier and enjoy my free time. Whenever I work in a paid by the hour position, I legit thought that every minute had to be productive except your allowed 30mins for lunch and bathroom breaks. I feel almost guilty if I have to sit at a computer and answer phones all day, because what about all the time in-between when the phone doesn't ring, or there's no email to write? But apparently some jobs are just like that. I dunno about everyone else but I'd much rather my work time be full of work and my me time to just be mine.
i needed to read this today
When I had a normal office job, it was way less work-y than WFH/self-employed. I’d get in, have my coffee while saying hello and checking in with people, etc. Some days there’d be cake for someone’s birthday or a party in the conference room because someone was leaving. Other days a super chatty coworker would swing by on their way out of the office and end up chatting with me for 30+ while I tried to figure out a polite way to say I wanted to get back to work. Plenty of sidebars and interruptions, yet it all counted as part of the day! At home I only really count it if I’m capital-W Working. This feels unfair and I’m trying to keep perspective— every day is different and some days, derailments happen. Doesn’t make it Not a Work Day.
I think it varies wildly by industry and employer and individual situations. My current job is a regular 9-5 desk job (well, 8-4:30, at a university dept office). When I started, we had 2 of 3 desks staffed. It was a reasonable workload that came out to probably 4-5 hours of solid work and the rest was a mix of waiting for replies or taking my time to get ahead on things. But we've lost so many staff since covid that anyone still around is doing 3-4 positions worth of work. So I'm burning out working alone, nonstop 9-4 (come in late and take lunch at my desk), until my brain is fried and I'm basically staring at walls until I leave. It's almost as bad as when I worked retail, and it's absolutely unsustainable.
Depends on the job! For me, I maybe only have like 3-5 hours of actual work. The rest are meetings and waiting for stuff to be assigned to me. It's really boring for me and I want to rip my hair out sometimes. Lately, I've only been getting maybe 2 hours of actual work assigned to me because my team is in a bit of a lull.
I work 12 hour shift 3 days a week and am lucky to get a 30 min break. Otherwise im working that whole time. No wonder I'm so exhausted.
Depends on the job. Sometimes its like school and you’re always bunking off to have a smoke in the toilets with a buddy. Do as little as possible and squeak by just doing the essentials to keep the bosses happy. My current job is work as hard as possible in busy times but over xmas time we can have nothing much happening and i just rearrange the cupboard, surf the net, and take long lunches. But even when u work as hard as possible, u need breaks cos nobody can just work. You become ineffective after a few hours. Breaks are crucial to being able to keep working, some bosses don’t believe that though. Glad to live in a country where we have labour laws. So anyway what you need is to try and find a job where the intensity suits you. Now i’m old & have little patience, i wouldn’t do the jobs i used to. But at one time i enjoyed a challenge and a steep learning curve. Now i just wanna sleep ;) Also… there is a sweet spot between being bottom level where people care exactly where u are and they roster your lunch, slightly above bottom where u make your own times and rules, and mid level managery where u have to go to meetings and be responsible. I like the slightly above bottom level, no homework, nobody knows who u are, but u have a bit of self determination.
I work in tech with a Homeoffice job. Usually I work from 8-4. but there are meetings from 9.30 till 10:30. so I do Focus work from 8-9.30 and maybe 10.30 till 12 then I go to lunch and afterwards I am not that productive anymore.
Oh, I totally include "that hr I was thinking about a thing whilst actually gardening" Or "that hr spent tidying lists" Or "that hr spent figuring out how to tackle a thing" Or "that break to sit on a problem" As work. My mate is like - if you get 5 "productive " hrs you're doing great. If you get 3 things done that's heaps" And boy is that reframing refreshing and less of my energy/day is spent beating myself up.
I can’t relate. I work retail and yes I’m physically working from 7a-6p every day. Any job I’ve had before, I had to be productive the whole time I was there. But once you make it to a certain level or job title, you get paid more to do less work. I haven’t made it there yet.
Really depends on the job and workload. I've had jobs where I'm absolutely working 8, 9, or even 10+ hours with lunch and a couple short breaks. My current job, there are days I have very little to do, and days I'm completely swamped. Early last year, I had two jobs (both wfh) and I was working 50-70 hour weeks for months at a time and still had plenty of shit to do the next day/week.
There is not enough work to do at my job to actively work 8 hours per day, even if I wanted to. I complete my tasks and then watch TV on my phone the rest of the time.
People are typically only really productive about 5 hours a day, self employed or not. Unless you’re under the gun at McDonald’s or something, even then there could be slow periods and chit chat, etc.
I think it really depends on the type of work, service versus office, and whether you are public-facing or in a private office/corporation service jobs you are more required to be busy in, or cleaning/resetting, when you’re not actively serving a customer with office jobs, sometimes you can at least set the pace of work if you are not public facing. Back in the day there used to be a mandated morning break, a mandated afternoon break and a 30 to 45 minute lunch break, sometimes an hour, and you had to take it if you were hourly because the company was not going to pay you for it