Ask HN: How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?

How strict is your employer about butt-in-seat schedule?

If you have full flexibility, I’d suggest aiming to hit 40 hours on a weekly basis rather than 8 on a daily basis. That gives you the flexibility to work, say, 10 hours one day because you’re really on a roll, and to stop at 6 hours the next afternoon when you’re tired and distracted without feeling guilty.

Don’t go over 40 hours on a regular basis. That’s a recipe for burnout. A week of crunch time every 3 months is one thing. But regular 50-hour weeks aren’t sustainable for most people.

I’d also suggest setting goals in the morning for what you want to accomplish in a day. Put down your work when you reach the goal, unless you’ve got several more hours in the day. In that case, set another goal for the remaining hours. If it becomes clear that you won’t reach your goal within a reasonable number of hours for the day, put your work down whenever you hit a stopping point close to the time you’d planned to wrap up for the day.

More experience should help you make increasingly accurate estimates of what you can accomplish in a day, so you’ll hone this process as time passes. Plus it’s great practice at estimating, which is a difficult and valuable skill.

It’s unusual to hire junior engineers fully remote in part for this reason: more experience in a “typical” work environment give you more context for these sorts of judgement calls.

This is what works for me.

1. Start the day with a plan (15 to 30 min)

2. List things that, absolutely, need to be completed

3. List things that would be great if can be completed (bonus)

4. Have a set time when you are going to finish work. For me, 6pm. So when 3 or 4pm hits and I still have 1 or 2 things from my list #2 above, I get on it right away. That also helps me to stay on track whenever I am in meeting or unexpected phone call etc. Excuse myself or end the call quick so that I can get back on track.

It sounds very simple but it has helped me feel accomplished when I end my day at 6pm. Feeling accomplished for the day is very important for me. I usually hit the gym at 7pm and if I don't feel accomplished, I end up having a sucky gym time. A good gym time, run or outdoor activity, helps to set the tone for the rest of the night. If I am working on a side project, I usually start working again around 10am and stay up until 12 or 1am latest. Rinse repeat until Friday.

So MY short answer to "How do you decide when you've done enough work for the day?" = When you feel "accomplished" for the day :)

If I'm in the flow, I just keep going. My only hard-and-fast rule is that I'll stop if it gets to about 4am, because I find it very difficult to get to sleep if there's sunlight outside. I haven't always been this disciplined and sometimes used to go right through until I dropped from exhaustion, but discovered that was unhealthy.

Having said that, I almost never get started before midday, and often it's only in the early afternoon or sometimes even the evenings after a lot of online procrastination. I have some days when I'm extremely productive, and others where I really just can't get into the zone to do much of anything at all. In the latter case I'll just write the day off and try to make something of it in terms of relaxing. I make no distinction between weekdays and weekends, so I'll just work whenever I'm in a productive mood.

I'm also a remote worker; my client is on the other side of the world, and I bill by the day. So I have a high degree of freedom over which hours I work, and to a certain extent, the amount of days I work each month.

Butts in seats and meeting a quota of 8 hours a day is entirely pointless, and serves neither you nor your employer. The only things that matter are, in order: 1) your health & work/life balance, 2) the value you bring to your employer.

What's going to happen to your life is you're going to learn what other people's natural speeds are, what yours is, and what is needed for your specific job, and you're going to have a much better barometer for that. That's going to happen naturally over the next 2-3 years.

In the meantime, you can:

* Try to incrementally improve. Keep a daily log (wish I had started this my first year), write down your stupid mistakes, false starts, other things. Re-read entries sometimes. Try not to make the same mistake twice and to be doing more complex tasks over time.

* Do the "butt in seat" thing without beating yourself up. A good one is to try to work ~40h a week (even 35), except if you can see an immediate career benefit not to by working the extra hours on a side project or stretch assignment. It doesn't have to be 8 hours every day it can be 12 on one day then 4 the next. Log your hours (remote people should always do this) and note patterns. For example, if you are consistently working less than 40h, try working harder, more than 40h, reconsider your approach or appeal to your manager.

* Ask for feedback. You can set up a meeting with someone (for example lead, manager or just someone more senior you work with) and ask "what do you think I should do to be more useful to the project?". Alternately you can wait until a more social occasion or a lull when working 1:1 with someone and just ask "so how do you think the project is going?" If they think you have a time management issue, they'll tell you, if not, you're good. Side note, you may hear stuff like work on your soft skills, have better work life balance. It doesn't strictly mean "work less" but it means your coworkers think you're too focused on individual achievement.

This is something I generally recommend to juniors, which goes against a lot of advice I’m seeing here - spend more time learning if your work is all good for the day. Early on, it is important to ramp up to get to senior as quickly as possible. If you don’t, you risk having trouble if you get laid off for whatever reason and need to ramp at a new job with a new codebase. I generally recommend doing around just under your max focus abilities - enough to push you hard, but not to the point where your mental health suffers.

Once you get to senior, your job prospects will reflect how quickly you got there - the quicker, the better opportunities you get, which has a cascading effect on your entire career.

I have seen junior devs fall into the trap of taking the job for granted, and run into trouble searching for new jobs - you don’t want to be that person.

Most employers who are mature enough to support remote work are also mature enough to understand that you are paid for the value you deliver, not the hours you spend starting at a screen. I made my decisions accordingly when working remotely. I would spend the bulk of normal working hours on work... but if I had to think out a problem, I'd go for a walk or clean the house while thinking. I'd also lay out some goals for the days that felt reasonable, and if I got them done by lunch, I might relax in the afternoon... but if I was still working on them at dinner, I'd keep working til they were done. I also worked harder on the days when I was in the zone, and didn't waste my time forcing it on others days. Over time it all balances - even though no single day matched expectations from an office job, I delivered results.

A lot of good answers but I'll throw mine into the mix. Assuming I know what the ultimate goal is for what I'm currently working on, the day-to-day becomes working towards what I call momentum tasks for the next morning. The start of the day is when I'm at the highest risk of being derailed, so super easy tasks are paramount. So before I wrap up for the day, I'm making sure I'm stopping at a point where I know - and perhaps am excited - to continue the following day. I never stop at an impasse, personally. That means I can sometimes put extra work in, but generally I come up with momentum tasks quite intuitively. I'll write my todo list before going for a 5k run after work [typically ~5pm to reset my brain for relaxing a bit, and often get ideas for how to overcome larger challenges that comes with the concreteness of thinking about momentum tasks. I find self-set constraints really helpful in my productivity. I am generally a pretty boring person, though, so it suits my personality. Just my 2 cents.

When the end of the day approaches, start finishing up whatever you were working on, and mentally prepare for what you'll be doing the next day. Then forget everything until tomorrow morning.

There's a huge amount of variability between developers, so don't think that the "workaholics" doing 50+ hour weeks are necessarily being more productive than you; unless you actually compare, they could really be struggling and just trying their hardest to keep up with everyone else. In the past, I've solved problems in minutes that someone else on the team had spent many long-houred weeks and eventually given up on.

Try to know how many hours of "deep work" you can do before losing steam. Usually it's ~4 hours, once you get past that point, do some tickets that are not too demanding, and preparation for the next day. That should be around 6 hours of work and that's more than enough, almost no dev does 8 hours of solid work a day, a part of it ends up being browsing the internet and reading articles.

I'm remote and have been prone to workaholism in the past. Here are my techniques:

- I do track my progress on key long term objectives. If I'm getting behind I need to know, and burn the candle at both ends until I catch up. This should be rare.

- I try to set a daily goal or two of stuff to get done to make sure I stay focused on something productive and don't get distracted with yak-shaving or non-work.

- I stop hourly-ish and assess what I've achieved in the last hour. Sometimes I'm just not getting anything done and I'm better off calling it a day to get some real rest and diversion.

Best thing in my opinion is to have something external that limits your schedule.

For me and few it of my coworkers it definitely were our children. I know I want to be at home by 18:00, so that I can have dinner with my family. One colleague was starting at 7:00 and and finished by 15:00, because he was pisking up his kid from preschool at 15:30 most days :)

I am not suggesting for you to get a kid :P but knowing that every day I want to end by $HOUR because I have a $THING does wonders :-)

This of course depends on the flexibility of your working hour window. I see a lot of fairly complicated answers but for me, having a simple punch clock app so that I know exactly how long I have worked for the day, every day, works.

Some scenarios with my approach:

1) No flexibility, chair sitting required from 9 to 5.

With paid overtime, I would be there for 8 hours and never 10 minutes longer, unless the project was ending in two days and was not finished or the production was burning down.

Without paid overtime, I would be there for 8 hours and consider staying a little longer if production is burning down.

2) Flexible (meaning it does not matter if you work from 8 to 4 while skipping lunch, 10 to 6 or you don't show up at all - this is my situation now).

I will still track my time down to a minute. The overtime rules stay (unless I am really having fun with something and know I will get paid 150% of hourly for it). As for daily hours - usually I will work longer hours whenever required (within reason), at least at the beginning of the month.

Since my hours are flexible and I know exactly how long I have worked so far, I can easily stay there for 9-10 hours one week and leave after 6-7 hours the next, depending on the workload / situation.

I have noticed that some people, unless they are contractors with billable hours, look down on tracking your time or "punch clocks" as if it is beneath them. For me personally, it brings me the peace of mind. I don't have to ever debate myself whether I am working too much or too little since I have the exact numbers.

This is really dependent on your employer's attitude. What worked for me, though, when working independently, is:

- Start the day by making a list of tasks you can do that day. You don't need to finish them all, but there should be no moment that you don't know quite what you could pick up. - Then work using the Pomodoro technique: alternate 25 minutes of work with a 5-minute break, and every fourth break is 15 minutes. In those 25-minute sessions, do not e.g. check Hacker News, and in the 5-minute sessions, do not work. - My day was done when I finished 12 "Pomodoro's", i.e. did six hours of productive work.

I was way more productive than I was when I had to go to the office, yet had more spare time. I guess that helps: if you can compare it to going into office, you feel less guilty for fewer hours butt-in-seat if you're getting more done.

Of course, things like meetings can complicate this.

> This might work if we had actual sprints. Our reality is an endless stream bugs and features for us to work on before we launch our product, and we just grab tickets as they come.

> Hopefully this improves after launch.

It won't. It will improve after you or more likely someone more senior stands up and does something about it. Which requires buy-in. Which is much harder to get in a highly remote team IMO.

Or it will change when you find another job that already matches your criteria.

we as human are expected to stay 8hrs in the office because that's what our culture says: 40hrs a week is a normal work week. But if you analyse what we do in the office: barely ANYTHING.

My advice to you: As a Junior, you should expect good mentorship and support from your more senior peers and your manager. So lean on this. Make sure that the expectations between you and your manager are clear. Ask your manager the productivity he expects you to have. What tasks are expected to be done either daily, weekly or in the sprint. Try to see also what other engineers of your level are accomplishing. Once this is a little more clear to you, then forget about hours, butt in seat, etc. Do those tasks and find the sweet spot. If the expectations take you 1hrs/day, take a little more work, because performing better than expectations will make you feel good and motivate you (and probably be good for your career). If it takes over, say, 4-6hrs/day, the expectations might be a little too much, or you might need to growth a bit more and learn how to be more productive.

You're a junior SE and working remote? Yikes. I'd want others around that can help me out. So simply fixing bugs and adding features is a junior dev kind of task. Prioritization, understanding the business need - that's how you differentiate yourself at this point. It's not about hours worked but about identifying what is and what isn't as important.

What you are looking for here is primarily a feedback mechanism issue. This is something that is a hard problem, since good, useful feedback is never quite as simple as just asking someone. Employees are looking for it. Managers are looking for it. Executives are looking for it.

With respect to work time and workload there's always an element of presentism - if "enough" surfaced activity happens over the course of each week and the work is not obviously deficient, then most managers won't ask questions. And you already know that much, since you had many years of school to get that idea in your head. And when it's on-site, it's simple to get to that level - if you're in the office, you're at work, even if it isn't time-on-task.

But there is always going to be a level beyond that, of taking on tasks that are a good combination of "builds up a career" and "builds up the company" - stuff where you can act more independently, and likewise fail independently. You can easily fall into work that does neither or only one of those things, or convince yourself into workaholic behavior and sacrifice everything else. Nobody can offer a clear bright line of "this is the best possible course of action". But there is a "better" out there somewhere!

So if you can measure yourself by whether you did something of both career and company and other life things each day, then you already have a more balanced self-measurement than "quantities of issues" or "lines of code" or "hours in seat".

The night before I make the list of the three MUST-DO items, always three. Once those are done, I can bail whenever and feel good about my work product.

I have a similar expecting from my employees.

These items are the detail, the standing orders still remain (answer phones, do meetings, email, etc)

How I handle juniors and beginners:

It is ok to stay longer

It is ok to stay longer especially as a beginner. You are in a learning phase. But still need to do your stuff.

It is also ok to screw up or ask questions.

Never ever go every week over 50 hours. I have a junior right now which works longer because he sees us working long hours. I will tell him soon to suck it up and go home on time.

I'm not sure what "butt-in-seat" means, unless you're working interactively in real time with a team, or doing customer support. Otherwise, what matters is billable time. That is, time when you're actively on-task, and not on HN or whatever. A reasonable practice is tracking 10-15 minute intervals.

Then limit that to a rolling average of 40 hours per week, or whatever you like, and can negotiate with your employer.

I've mostly worked as a consultant, so there's been no limit, other than however close to 24 hours per day that I can handle. And sometimes, with rush jobs from multiple clients, I've just about maxed. But in that case, I've discounted work time, especially for clients who weren't pushing as hard.

Start the day with a plan.

I use the Franklin covey method of listing out tasks ranked by importance first. Most important have “A”s next to them, then “B”s and so on. Then rank the list by order, 1,2,3,etc.

List should look like this:

1A - most important fire drill task I need to get done today

2A - def have to do this too

3B - let’s do this after that

4B - blah blah blah

...

This will focus your efforts on being effective rather than efficient.

Then I intentionally detach myself from accomplishing everything on the list. There will be days when you can’t even get through task 1A so you really have to be able to cut yourself off and sleep on it. If you get too emotionally attached to completing the list you’ll experience dissatisfaction. Instead, choose to value other aspects of your life like the fact that you have flexibility, family time, good health, etc.

I generally try to get as much work done (in life) as I can. Some projects I can work for 12 hours a day on, others I'm tapped out at 6, so I just maximize output. If output is below the debugging cost of that code or something, I stop. Could be 2pm or 10pm.

I own a small start-up and struggle with work life balance. I'm a night owl and generally not terribly productive in the morning, but once I hit my stride in the afternoon/evening, my productivity continues to increase and I often find myself plugging away at 3-5am. I have found that it's in my best interest for throughput to continue when I'm "in the zone", but it does create some friction with the spouse.

I'm very interested in how to define the "enough work for the day" question. Or we could just listen to Dan Reeder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNWhiXxdbWk

I always stop at 5pm. I take some kids for a walk to decompress. Around 9pm, after kids go to bed, then I’ll do another hour if I’m working on something fun.

I love coding, and I would be coding if no one was paying me, but there’s more to life than just that.

If your team are not able to have at least a short term roadmap for planning your work, then think about assigning points to tickets yourself. Let's say, you think you should be able to do 5 points a day. If you knock out 5 one pointers or one 5 pointer, that's your goal achieved, so you can clock out early if you want to (or carry on if you're in the zone). If you find 5 doesn't fit well (you're working too much or too little for your hours) change the numbering until it's closer.

Keep track of your progress and you should be able to get more of a feel for your own productivity (as well as getting better at estimating tasks).

I get paid for 40h so I do 40 hours.

At the beginning of my career I was probably less active but now I work better/fuller.

This article remindes me how I wanna be.

http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity...

So if I can't anymore for the day I take a break and continue later. Not sure when I had a time when it was just no longer possible but than I would just go home.

Also I don't read Reddit or hn when I work. Helps a lot to keep focus. And I try to work on something else for the company in break time like when a build is running.

To me, it's more about making sure that you accomplish while pushing your learning curve up. This is easier when you work for an employer, but hard when you work for yourself as you always want to push more in less time. Another thing in a virtual work model is to make sure that you are engaged with your other coworkers throughout a regular basis especially if there are some others that are not working remotely. I think it's more about making sure that the team has a good feeling of the virtual model. I wouldn't be too worried about keep tracking of the exact clock in/out.

I spend the first 70% of the work day on hard problems and things I absolutely have to get done. For me this 70% ends at 4pm.

At 4, I step out for a coffee, stroll around the block and grab a cookie. Then I come back to my table and reply to annoying emails and tackle the easy stuff till about 6-6:30.

I never start working on a tough problem after lunch, because if things go wrong, I end up working long hours and can't get it out of my head even when I go back home.

By the way, I'm really impressed that many people commenting here can work 6-10 hours at a stretch. I need to stretch every 45 minutes to 1 hour lol.

In this past job which was the first one that didn't track time at all, I still wrote down my hours every day and still tried to balance it to +/- 0 at the end of the week, if not possible then end of the month. After a while (months?) I did what everyone else seemed to do. Just eyeball if it's either roughly 40 hours per week or if the last days/week was very stressful tread a little more careful, or if nothing seemed to work and I was distracted make a mental note to catch up next week.

That said, I enjoyed most of my time there very much and often would be doing exploratory stuff that I might have done on my own time anyway, so sometimes I took some extra time to evaluate one more possibility and used some spare time. Other times I just did some private stuff only veeery distantly related to actual work stuff and chalked it up as "learning".

So yeah, probably not a really helpful answer. But if you're having fun and are learning a lot a few more hours won't hurt. If a fun evening of spare time does not include programming (which I guess is true for at least 50% of programmers) then don't put in extra time. I think I've mostly done "I have a guilty conscience if I leave a lot sooner" but I also try really hard to not slack off during my 8 hours and count them as working hours. And yes, if you have that "Today I achieved more in 6 hours than the whole last week" then absolutely stop working, it's probably true.

>> I'm a relatively junior software engineer, a little over a year out from university, with a cushy remote job working for big-co. And I never know how much work to do on a given day.

Protip: Optimize for consistent performance. It's better to close 3 tickets every day, than close 30 tickets on Monday and one or two every other day, even though the latter scenario adds up to more tickets.

(Obviously, replace "tickets" with your own measure of productivity.)

Using TDD (Test Driven Development) I tend to stop working when fatigue sets in and I'm tempted to skip unit tests for the sake of immediate gratification.

> I want to do enough work to feel good about myself, without burning out.

Two things about this:

- I think you should be careful of linking your work ethic to your self worth

- It would probably help if you had a more clearly defined goal.

Common healthy goals are:

- I want to be Tech Lead in X years

- I want to retire early at X

- I want to learn about technology X and work primarily with it, here or elsewhere

- I believe in what my company is doing and I want it to succeed

From that standpoint, you can start to tie your behavior to whether or not it helps you achieve your goals.

> I have very little supervision from management, my coworkers seem to respect and like me, and I am generally productive.

I think you should also examine this. Don't let others set your priorities for you. If your manager or company want you to work more than you're comfortable doing, find another job. If your coworkers don't respect you based upon how much or little you work, find another job. If you find yourself not being productive for reasons like "this is boring", "I don't believe in this", etc., find another job. Dealing with situations like that -- while not always avoidable -- is a short road to burnout.

Feeling good about oneself is obviously very personal. From your post it seems that you're mostly satisfied with your flow. So your motivation is a key for the adjustments that you're seek.

If your motivation is about advancing in your career (getting noticed), then it's somewhat specific to your workplace.

What's it there that gets one promoted? Overwork? Yes-man? Report athletics? Plain year count?

Either way, being junior you need some feedback from your supervisor, both to show your progress and to gauge the expectations. There's probably a yearly review system in place, if not yet. So setting one own goals is a good way to prepare for a future review.

In a kind of 'conveyor' style of workflow where you just draw tasks from the stack it may be harder to see the larger project scope. But it's still there.

Your department/team may have commitments, e.g. to reduce the bug backlog, to deliver features for integration. Basically, it's business goals, larger than just a personal churn.

Once you understand how to contribute to the team value, you can decide about how much is your fair contribution.

When the clock hits 4pm, I have a daily standup meeting. About half the time, this meeting occurs, and I go home afterwards immediately. If it doesn't happen, a quorum of people had something better to do. If I don't have anything actually urgent or interesting, I tend to bail with the others. Otherwise, I work away until maybe 5:15, then I go home.

I'm basically paid to be on-hand 9-5, so that's what I do. I don't check email outside work hours as a rule. If there's something technically interesting, or is important to do but cannot be done within the constraints of a business workday (basically, anything that involves deep thought, concentration, and sustained effort), I may choose to do it when that's convenient for me. And I know things; I remember, and I've been around long enough to know the whys and wherefores and sequences of events that led up to the present state of things.

Pedantic guy asks "what is your definition of 'work'"?

The short answer for me is, I've done enough 'work' when my efficiency curve drops more than 15-20%.

After that though I relax my scanning the latest news, HN and other consistent sources of interesting and useful new information. Is this work? Actually I (as in the guy in my brain who uses it when I'm not) often comes up with work arounds for the local maximum I've often hit in my "real work". Things like a better way to structure some code, a better way to approach a system problem, all kinds of useful things pop up from time to time. Really it's a way of getting out of the rut.

I've come to view this as essential work though it seems like just goofing off.

Well the Brits have a saying for it. "Bed, bath and bus." That's often where inspiration strikes when you least expected.

I'm always objective focused with my team...

1. we breakdown issues/bugs into 2 - 4 hour increments where we write test(s) to replicate. Then share with team. Hopefully there can be a fix in that time, else create a new issue.

2. we breakdown new tasks into 2 - 4 hour increments with a new function(ality) + necessary tests

Then we spend ~1 hour a day doing code reviews. Some days I can get through multiple issues, some days it's just 1. In either case, we can assume 5 - 8 tasks / issues a week are completed. How everyone does it is up to them; so that's how you decide how much work you need to do.

Unfortunately, estimating can be poor for these tasks, but that's why we time box it and require a team notification for any issues (plus tests). It works relatively well, and everyone checks for open PRs or code reviews between each task -- so blockers don't occur.

I recommend trying something like that.

I thint tgere are two strategies that work.

1.) Keep log of worked hours. When you want to stay longer, whether because need or because it goes well, stay longer. Note additional hours. Take those hours back (work less) within next two days or so. That way you will not overwork your self and will still take advantage of continuous time chunks.

If you are organized person, you can also note how much was "focused effective" and how much "staring into it butt in seet". I did that in past and it was eye opening.

2.) Work every day exactly same schedule and live very regular life. This his frustrating and hard for most people. Anyway, after a while you will codition yourself to be focused at exactly those times even if you are working on something big.

Large disadvantage of 2 I'd that you will become overall less flexible person that way.

Once I get 5 billable hours in the rest is just gravey. I’m a consultant though so I get paid by the hour.

Humans work in cycles.

So, you already had the right hunch.

You don't really have a good direction on a random day and can't really get into the zone? Fix some small bugs for 2h and then call it quits, go to the gym, drink beer with your friends.

You got that one feature that you know exactly how you build it and you're on fire for it? Knock yourself out in a coding session of 2 x 20h and take 3 days off afterwards. Much bette than forcing yourself to quit at 6pm even though you're burning to do it.

Productivity means taking advantage of the human cycle, which is comprised of your mood, hormones, the characteristic of your problem and many more factors that you can't really control.

Read Deep Work and find a schedule that works best for you. If it doesn’t work for your employer find a company that it will. You’ll be happier and more productive.

I have clients for whom I averaged 5-6 hours a day. They saw me come and go and were happy to pay me 40 hours. I have other clients who act like they cannot survive without me there 8+ hours a day. For them I get there at 7am and work till 5. Many days I leave still feeling like I didn’t get to accomplish everything I’d hoped.

There’s quite a bit of variety in expectations out there. You have to cross this river by feeling the stones.

Switching context has a cost. Resuming work has a cost.

If it is already end of day, it may be reasonable to start your next task tomorrow rather than spending time next morning trying to resume your work.

I try to end my work day right in the middle of "Flow"; especially when I know _exactly_ what my next move will be.

This has two functions:

1. Gives me something to jump-start my next day with; I'll be eager to finish my work, instead of dallying on Slack/email/GitHub.

2. Keeps me from overworking. It's easy to think you're "being productive" by pushing lots of code late at night, but at least for me, this is when my lowest quality work happens as my brain has started winding down. Save it for later!

You need to plan. Merely having sprints will not make your days shorter!

Think what's your 1 day, 3day, 5 day, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and 5 year goals for yourself, team, product and company. What unknowns may influence decisions or are strategies? What assumptions need to be confirmed? How often are we checking ourselves on our progress? When do we get to change our mind?Do these things and how much should you with in a day becomes very clear.

As a remote developer, setting a schedule for yourself is really important -- at least when you are getting started. Once you have an established work pattern that you are happy with you can experiment to see how things work.

I recommend doing what you are doing until you feel like, "OK. I'm in a rhythm and things are going well." Perhaps you are already at that point.

Next, when you have one of those days where you are feeling good and want to continue, work an extra hour. Then play with how you are going to use that hour the next day. Will you start late, or leave early or have a long lunch, or whatever? Tell your coworkers that you're going to do it. "I worked late today, so I'm going to X tomorrow". This keeps them informed so that they don't panic if they are looking for your help the next day.

Evaluate the progress. Did it feel good to you? For example, starting late does not work for me. I'm a morning person and taking an hour or two off in the morning means that I will get started on my side projects... and never stop. Then I end up working my "day job" until midnight --- no good!

Also, evaluate the reaction on your team. Were they OK with your behaviour? Every team is different. It's important to try to work with the team and not just stubbornly go your own way. I've worked with people who have the attitude, "It's my right to do whatever I want. I'll come in at 2pm and leave at 4pm and make up the time when it suits me". I hate working with people like that because programming is a team sport and I have to accommodate your weird schedule.

I work time shifted by 9 hours from the rest of my team. I know it impacts them and I do whatever I can to help them -- including working late nights sometimes (even though I'm a morning person). But you do what you can. Some of my colleagues can't get up early in the morning, so I'm happy to accommodate them, just like they are happy to accommodate my choice to live on the other side of the world. There is a give and take there, and as long as you are aware of it (and not always taking), then I think it's fine.

Deciding whether or not to work late is always a judgement call. My advice is to consider 2 things.

1: Is it truly and emergency? The server is on fire and you are losing customers. Somebody needs to work on it. You should stay if at all possible. Even staying around to provide moral support for your colleagues can make a big difference. Sometimes there is nothing you can do, but if you hang around and read slack (or however you communicate) and make occasional comments, it can really help the team. Nothing is more lonely than sitting in front of a melting down server, not having a clue what to do and everybody has buggered off for beer.

Sometimes people say it's an emergency and it really isn't. In those cases, consider the cost of saying no. There will be a cost if someone asks (or hints strongly) for you to stay and you say no. It sucks. It's not what it should be. But it's very common. If you can afford to pay the price, then feel free to draw the boundary. If you can not, then do what you have to -- and then try to get yourself into a situation where you can afford to say no the next time.

2: If you just feel like working, then go for it. Keep in mind that this comes after you have established a "normal" working day for yourself and when you know how to take back the time later. But stopping yourself from having fun (even if it's making other people money) is just silly.

Always keep in mind your own health, though. When I was younger, I seemed to be able to work a lot of hours and still stay very energised. As I've gotten older, I can not longer do that. I have to pay attention to my energy level, because a 12 hour stint can wreck me for the next 2 days. That's no good for anyone.

Finally, I occasionally work a short day when I'm really not on the ball. Again, I confer with my colleagues before I make any decisions. People know I'm usually around between 9am and noon their time. Sometimes I need that time off and around 9am I say, "I'm not getting anything done today, so I'm thinking about packing it in for the day. Is there anything that somebody needs me to do before I go?" Sometimes there are lots of things, and I stay and do what I can -- which is good because that often makes me productive, when I wasn't before. But if there isn't anything pressing, I'll rest and be able to do a very productive day the next day. That kind of thing really depends on the team and the amount of trust everybody has in everybody else. It won't fly on some teams, but I work with a good team.

This is the question of the next few decades. How much do we keep the "x amount of hours a each day" thing built into our culture.

Try the pomodoro technique. https://lifehacker.com/productivity-101-a-primer-to-the-pomo... https://open.buffer.com/work-less/

I'm a business owner and I start my day early (5ish). I am usually done around 1 for a few hours then do another hour before bed. As I've grown older I've learned to recognize when my brain is mush and I've replaced actual work with the appearance of work. Even when things are going great there is a limit to what I am capable of each day.

Have boundaries and respect personal needs. Quit when needs unmet or crossed enough. Be homeless if necessary.

Look up the concept of Flow Theory by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I run a relatively small Creative Agency called Lazy Eight, where we are experimenting with 60 hours a month(measurable execution), its been working well so far but will be interesting to see once we scale a bit more.

I think your approach of 8 hour day is fine.

Add to that anything you feel passionate about-- things you'd learn for 'fun' and you should be fine. (For me, there are tasks that I'd do even if I weren't employed at the time. Those are the 'after hours' items.)

I wrote an app for my old pebble watch to display on the watchface how much I work. Some days are inevitably longer than others but by Friday evening I try to leave once I clocked 45 hours for the week. Any remaining brain power at the end of each day goes into side projects.

I use rescuetime to track my computer usage and aim for a certain number of “productive” hours a day. This way I don’t feel guilty for procrastinating or falling into a hacker news hole, that time is not counted toward the productive time goal.

Read the Joy of Craft. https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Craft-Paradoxical-Approach-Learni...

I know cause I start to get slow at programming and find it hard to solve problems.

Easy. Once I have to do pretrain 30min before training in the gym. Nothing except exceptional routine change (a short trip) or emergencies would get in the middle of that.

When it's 5pm...

But seriously, you should have a metric of quality over quantity. If you work on a team or a highly collaborative environment, the Dynamics and the answer will change.

I have a hard stop at 6 PM, and I made sure everyone else knows that. I do check email one last time at around 10 PM and work on a code review or respond to a comment.

When I reach a milestone..it can be done in less than 8 hours. If the 8 hours limit is reached, then enough work is achieved anyway and go home. No extra hours

Excuse me for the off-topic, but how did you find that job? Junior + remote seems a very difficult combination.

I try to not go over 20k keystrokes a day

These days I just do one big idea. If I finish early I might do other smaller tasks which I don't care about too much. When I was a junior dev I tried to do a lot of things everyday to prove how fast I am. That worked for the short term but looking back there are actually very few things which are genuinely useful. Creating new revenue streams for the company for example.

When my concentration drifts too far. I can have breaks in concentration but when I really start to think about completely different things I call it a day. That is when doing dev work; for sales/investor/board meetings, it is just when they finish, which is usually when food and/or drink appears on the table and people start talking sports.

Having had my first tate of work in an agile shop there’s a lot of nuggets of wisdom here.

The quality of responses in this thread are why I love HN. So much to chew on here.

When it's 5pm, regardless

Once I'm braindead, have stomach ache, become too distracted, etc.

Start at 8:30, end at 8:45. If you’re end of day meeting load or other demands make you stay late, come in later.

The challenge is to get your stuff done in that time period. IMO, if you’re working more than you are paid to work, you’re a sucker. Direct your passion elsewhere.

How did you get a remote job at BigCo?

Work regular hours. The secret to productivity is routine, discipline, and sleep. That’s non-negotiable. So you’re going to have to set a base day. I like to work hard so in your situation I’d say a minimum day is 8-5 or 9-6. Then I’d build on that.

First thing to do is to make sure you’re working well in those hours. Don’t try to compensate for procrastination by sitting there longer. On the vast majority of days I will literally not do anything other than work when at my machine. Quitting social media massively helps, or at least logging out on your work machine and vowing never to log in. Delete the apps on your phone, or keep your phone in another room or powered down. Have two phones if you really need one to make/receive calls during the day.

You’ll have days when you’ve done less than you want. It’s tempting to work extra hours to compensate, but instead you should say “right, I screwed up by procrastinating today or making a bad call on proceeding down that problematic road to achieve X that soaked up a lot of hours, but tomorrow I’ll have another go and get it right.” Go to bed, try again.

The most important thing to learn is how to decide what to do. This is far more important than the number of hours, or your skill level. A great programmer writing the wrong code has zero productivity. This is the most important advice for getting things done: deciding what to do. Sam Altman said something along these lines recently, he’s bang on.

At this stage you’re junior and won’t be as productive as others. So you’ll want to work some extra hours if you’re ambitious. If you’re keen, I’d recommend working Saturday rather than more hours in the evening. It’s less stressful and you’ll get more done, particularly if no one is contacting you. And a Saturday day can be more relaxed, maybe you want to socialise and you just do half a day, maybe you work on a laptop in bed or in a cafe for a change, you’re the boss that day.

You need to skill up, technically and managerially/organisation-wise. One method is to devote an extra hour a day to learning some tech skills. For example, you have a git problem that costs you an hour. Write on your todo list - learn git - and that evening (or whenever you invest a few extra hours) you study git, make a cheat sheet. That investment begins to accrue. Other things you might consider: mastering IDEs or emacs, build tools, testing, dev methodologies, languages etc. An hour spent googling and reading blogs, stack overflow, watching screencasts, without any pressure to get other work done is remarkably constructive.

So the todo list: you need to learn to organise yourself. This will up your productivity and reduce the need for long hours. Read a few books: Getting Things Done, Rework, The Now Habit. These soft skills are so very, very, crucial.

Finally: take care of yourself. Junior devs tend to have more of a social life, and it’s important to enjoy yourself. But be aware of and invest in all these things: exercise, diet (minimise caffeine, sugary drinks/snacks), relaxation time, and more than anything: sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Cannot emphasise enough. If you’re going out late one day, that’s fine, but try to sandwich it with good nights of sleep either side.

This might sound like a productivity guide rather than answering your question, but essentially I’m answering a related question: how can you spend your time well so that you don’t need to work 12 hours a day, but get enough done and still enjoy your life?

There will times you have to break any routine or hours limit you have. In which case, that’s fine, but as soon as that period is over: have a rest, make a firebreak over a long weekend, then do a reset and get back into that routine.

I know this is not bery popular point of view on HN but:

Burn out? You are in your mid 20ies, if you can’t put in long hours and hard work now you won’t be able to do it later in life trust me.

It really comes down to how industrious and conscientious you are rather then how smart and happy you are.

If you’re a hard worker and know your job well you will make it on any job, even the ones with shitty management. If the managers are unbearable leave - you are lucky to be in the industry where if you’re any good you can land a job in a day. Most people don’t have this luxury, work very long hours in completely shitty jobs (think cleaning toilets) and never burn out and lead happy life.

It’s basically down to your personality and what you value in life, nobody else but you can really tell you what’s best for you.