I do agree with the general notion that working 8 productive hours everyday does not work long-term. But assuming that you could work three hours completely productively every day, that does not imply that the remaining five hours would be completely worthless. In a normal work week, I am sure you could get more out of the remaining 5x5 = 25 hours than the six hours at the weekend.
Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day.
I think the appeal of "3 hours a day" is that the number is so extremely low compared to the number 8. But I don't think that it will work. Flexible time models also give you a pretty good work-life balance, and they're more realistic. I mean, for one, you won't find an employer who will follow this 3-hour model, so we're only talking about self-employed workers. But even then, it has to be a pure coding or other desk job - if it involved e.g. any meetings at all, how are you going to fit that into your small time budget of three hours only per day?
Yeah, like I said, I don't think that this model is going to work in most situations and for most people.
> Q: I was wondering how work other than coding fits that profile. e.g. work with designer to prepare logo or any kind of promoting – that must be a part of your work as well, right?
> Yes, I have to do everything, including UI&UX design, marketing, supporting and so on, since I’m a solo person. The coding might be around 50% of the work time.
Pretty much. Near-everything aside from "one man project hacking" will have some amount of "office hours" just used to coordinate with co-workers, plan, code review, or frankly just doing stuff like reading the docs or specs.
Even assuming "you can only do 3 productive hours a day" (which is a lie with appeal to authority mixed in. "Look that guy that made shitty web framework did it, it must be good!"), that does apply only to coding, there is more to being developer than just programming
> Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day.
I'd even call that advice outright idiotic. You wasted time to get in the zone only to throw it away
I feel like any recommendation of "do X hours of this" is a delusion. We're not robots, we have better or worse days and more or less engaging tasks. If task is "here are API docs, make a bunch of code and tests for it" I can do it whole day without much slowdown.
The longest lasting and easiest to extend software I’ve cobbled together (and some still running in production after 20yrs) were me designing for 18+hrs straight, share general idea w/team, then furiously writing for 36hrs. Those spurts were always the most productive and setup future work to be easy to add on.
I do agree with the general notion that working 8 productive hours everyday does not work long-term. But assuming that you could work three hours completely productively every day, that does not imply that the remaining five hours would be completely worthless. In a normal work week, I am sure you could get more out of the remaining 5x5 = 25 hours than the six hours at the weekend.
Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day.
I think the appeal of "3 hours a day" is that the number is so extremely low compared to the number 8. But I don't think that it will work. Flexible time models also give you a pretty good work-life balance, and they're more realistic. I mean, for one, you won't find an employer who will follow this 3-hour model, so we're only talking about self-employed workers. But even then, it has to be a pure coding or other desk job - if it involved e.g. any meetings at all, how are you going to fit that into your small time budget of three hours only per day?
Yeah, like I said, I don't think that this model is going to work in most situations and for most people.