How many hours during the work day do you actually do productive work?
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How many hours during the work day do you actually do productive work?
If you could permanently eliminate one workplace meeting from your calendar, which type would it be and why? I’d probably choose status meetings where everyone simply reads updates that could have been sent in an email. Curious what everyone else would remove.
I'm a junior engineer, but I inherited a project mid-construction because the designer left. I wasn't around for the early phases, but now I’m running the site meetings. I'm stressed about the technical gap and being asked questions I don't know the answers to. I don't want to appear clueless in front of the clients, even though I am. Is it okay to say that I don't know, but I will get back to them? Or does that look unprofessional?
If you were given one extra hour each workday that had to be spent on professional development, how would you use it? I’d probably split it between learning new tools and studying how other industries solve similar problems. How would you invest that time?
What was the biggest mistake you made early in your career that ended up teaching you a valuable lesson? One of mine was assuming everyone interpreted requirements the same way I did. Learning to ask clarifying questions saved me from a lot of rework. What’s yours?
Do you think the best engineering decisions are usually the simplest ones? The longer I’ve worked on complex systems, the more I appreciate solutions that are easy to explain.
In an 8-hour day (gee I wish I was only here for 8 hours), about six "work hours" are actual work. There's a 30-minute lunch break and two 15-minute "stretch breaks." I would guess there's about an hour of downtime wedged in the other seven hours. Of course, I usually come in at least 30 minutes early to prep my desk and go over my to-do list and stay 30-60 minutes late to wrap up what I was working on when the whistle blew and clean up the work area to be ready for the next day.
On a day packed with meetings I would say about two hours and on a day without meetings as much I would say about five hours. When I used to work mainly solo on things I used to say the full 8 but now with a team it’s usually no more than five hours because something or someone is always calling me.
I feel this so much. The amount of meeting at certain times of the year are overwhelming. So many meetings could be an email or email response…
1 hour
I start early to get a few productive hours of work before meetings begin
12hrs
Different “work cultures” expect absolutely different approach on employee’s productiveness. Chinese working cultures (as i know from my ex Chinese housemate) does require people ro be 101% engaged into workload of “9/9/6” which means from 9am to 9pm monday-saturday. russian corporative culture is even worse. You have to secure or work on a system 24/7 - so if anything is not “in favour” or your Boss than you have to fix it or solve core problem straight away. I came to UK 4 years ago as a political refugee having 13 years of russian cultural experience. Here, in UK, if you text your line manager on a weekend he will be angry as so as he would want to fire you.
I'd say 6 hours (including productive meetings). I usually multitask on worthless Teams calls too.
8 out of 9.5 doing "productive" work. However, productivity slows as the day goes on. I'd say only 3 hours of 100% productive capacity and declines to 20% the last hour. Studies show that is the norm for office work environments. And I try to be the norm.
I had this same question before. Based on my survey people worked 60-70% of the day. I think that's probably lower now since meetings have become more prevalent and can be a big drain for a lot of people.
Please Elevator supervisor job required
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