How many hours per day are you working?

I'm getting over being sick so I'me only working occasionally and only for a few hours but I used to work 5 billable hours a day (anything after that was gravy). I probably spent 7-8 hours a day at my office.

I keep a log. If I was working and you called me, I would stop the meter, talk to you and start the meter again when I started working. If you were another client I would record my hours working for them. I have a log for every client. I did not stop the clock for bathroom breaks.

I would love to hear your answer because I do this too, and the numbers may seem shockingly low. Posting under a throwaway just in case some manager sees this and judges me.

I have been scrupulously tracking focused time for years, since I was in college. I "stop the clock" when I sit back to daydream for a few minutes, check the news, or use the bathroom. I also generally don't include meetings unless they're small meetings where I need to be fully engaged.

The result is that for me about 150 minutes of real work feels like an ordinary productive day at my not overly demanding dev job. 180 minutes is doable on a daily basis but I have to be pretty disciplined. If I set my goal to 240 minutes work begins to consume my life and I often stay late to make it up. Days when I have done more than 5 hours of work by this definition are really rare, I either get so stuck on a problem that I am consumed by it (super rare) or have some really impending deadline that blots out everything else (rare). I know if I put in 240m I'm doing a really solid day's work every day.

In college while taking 18 credits of graduate courses I could get by on 4h studying/homework per day, but had to bump it to 5h near the end of the term.

Software developer here. I work about 6 hours concentrated on stuff before i notice a drop in cognitive abilities. That's not counting the short breaks for toilet, getting coffee etc... Then it's roundabout 5-5:20 hours. These breaks normally don't get me off the topic very much as i can continue thinking about what to do next or crunching on a solution.

But after that time I start to mix things up and make mistakes. So I really wish 6 hours were the actual work time... but in reality I have to work 8 hours a day.

I tracked my productive time down to the minute for 4 years when I was working for a consulting company. I could do 4-6 hours of actual programming work in a 9 hour time span. Any more than that, and I was exhausted.

I'm a solo dev now. I don't keep track of my time religiously but RescueTime reports I'm coding 3-4 hours a day plus 1-2 hours of email.

I would say between 6 and 7 hours per day working at the office, but as I'm connecting once at home and doing more online research that could lead to action, it could be up to 8 hours a day.

6 hours of actual heads-in-the-code software dev work. It does vary, sometimes I get nearly 8 hrs, but meetings/etc drop it to the average of 6.

We have a real meeting problem in my workplace, I'm at work the standard 7.5hrs but usually 5.5-6 of that is calls

3-5h a day, if lucky. Being busy or looking busy doesn't count as working.