Tracking Time at Work: How much do I work?
Once you start tracking your time, the first and easiest question to answer is: "So how much do you actually work anyway??".
On average I work around 9.4 hrs/day measured over 40 working days.
This is about in line with what I expected and I can confidently say this measurement is also erring on the side of less work than I actually do.
I didn't track time I spent replying to slack from my phone late in the evenings, or multi-tasking while sitting on the bike getting a workout in. There is a plethora of extra nuggets of time that get given to my company outside of what I was able to realistically track. I would feel comfortable saying I manage to spend an additional 20-30min per day that I just missed in my tracking.
😕 That seems low/high....
Inevitably, you the reader, are probably comparing this number to your own perception of how much you work. And you're probably in one of two camps....
🤨 Camp 1: Why would you work more than 8hrs/day?
I suppose this is a personal decision for all of us. In a perfect world, I would love to only work 8hrs/day, but unfortunately to be successful in my role and to help my company be successful within the constraints they've placed on me, that's just not an option.
At the end of the day, how much you're willing to work for a company usually boils down to:
- Do you enjoy what you do?
- Is the return on investment worth it?
- Do you have better options available to you?
That second statement may sound sort of weird. At first I wrote "are you fairly compensated for your time", and while that's certainly a fair question to ask, I prefer to think of this as a relationship of mutual investment.
I as an employee choose to invest my time and energy into the company objectives. In turn, what is the company willing to invest back into me, what is the return on that investment? It could be benefits, compensation, training, any number of things, even just a sense of personal fulfillment can count. As long as this investment feels balanced for both stakeholders, then things are good.
👨⚖️ Camp 2: Only 9 hrs? Weak sauce.
From what I can tell amongst my peers, this places me around average for my company. There are plenty of folks who I know work less than this, and I know several who invest a lot more hours than me. So at least for my company and role, I seem to be within the status quo.
That being said, I wager, most people when calculating their hours worked don't pause their internal clock when they take a bathroom break, take a phone call, watch that YouTube video their coworker sent over, spend 10min making lunch, etc.. I did pause the clock for anything that was not actual work.
And if you work 60hrs/week.... yeah, I'm sorry, that sucks.
💼 What counted as "work"?
You may not have actually asked this question, and instead made some seemingly safe assumptions about what "work" is, but you might be surprised here.
If the activity I'm doing is required by my company, than I consider myself on the clock 🕐.
Now to be extra clear, this is not how my company would define work. They would define work as anytime I'm doing "productive work".
"Productive" is perhaps an oversimplification as we know not all work is necessarily productive work. Perhaps a better, less succinct, description would be a measure of "the opportunity to be productive".
What's the distinction?
Well, the biggest difference between these two measurements is whether or not you count the commute time 🚗.
Per my companies definition, the work day starts when I arrive at my desk and ends when I leave it. Per my definition, my work day starts when I put on makeup so I can be "socially presentable" for the office, and it ends when I get home at the end of the day.
🏠 Work from home days
On average I work 8.52hrs/day when I am at home. This time is measured from the time I sit down at my desk and start actively working, until I leave my desk at the end of the day.
I notice that this average is lower than my total average of 9.4hrs/day. During the majority of the time that I was measuring I worked from home only 2 days per week, Monday and Friday. My Friday workday tends to be on the short side (for obvious reasons) and it's definitely pulling this average down.
My hypothesis is that if my work from home days were something more like Monday/Tuesday then we'd see this average be much closer to 9.5hrs/day.
🏢 Work from office days
On average, I work 10.33hrs/day when I commute to the office. Of this time, I average 7.85hrs/day of productive work and 2.48hrs/day of unproductive commuting time.
Even despite my best efforts, I seem to fall short of getting a full 8hrs of work in on commute days. The days feel exceptionally long, and I certainly struggle to leap over the mental hurdle of commuting for an hour at the end of a long day, just to get home and realize I still have another 2hrs of work before I've satisfied my companies allotment of time.
💸 Returns on Investment
Its very easy to understand that commuting adds more time to the overall day, no one is debating that. However, I do find having these exact numbers helps frame my perspective around the ROI, or return on investment of my time.
On a day where I must commute, only 75% of my invested time is given towards productive work.
Since I am required to satisfy at least an 8hr workday, that means on average I must invest 10hrs+ of time to my company in order to achieve the minimum hours of productive work. Let me say that even more simply:
- To Commute, I must invest more time, and my company gets less total productive time from me.
- To stay home, I can invest less total time, and my company gets more total productive time from me.
One thing that might stand out is my commute time averages around 2.5hrs. My commute is usually around 50min in the car one way, so where is that extra 50min/day coming from?
To answer that, I need to give more info about what I count as commute time.
🚗What is your commute?
To me, commute time is not just the time where I am physically sitting in my car. Commute time includes every activity I must do that I would not have otherwise done to prepare to leave the house.
For example, taking a shower 🚿 does not count towards my commute time as this is something I would do regardless. But, blow drying my hair, putting on makeup, finding that stupid matching sock, getting my blind dog ready to sit alone in a room all day (yes its as sad as it sounds), all of this counts as commute time.
This is time I would have otherwise spent doing something for my person well-being, or sitting at my desk working.
And in thinking about all of this, I start to realize the hidden ways that a commute places certain groups of people at a disadvantage to others. For me personally, there is a "social tax" (as others at my company have started calling it) that has to be paid in order to be presentable at the office.
If you feel socially obligated to maintain long hair, wear makeup, pluck your eyebrows, and shave your legs, then you are required to invest more time towards commuting than your peers who do not feel this same social obligation.
Regardless of why your commute time is what it is, I think we can all agree on the following:
The person who only needs to invest 1hr in their total commute per day has a significant advantage over the person who must invest 2.5hrs in their commute.
Over the course of three days, the first person would have had 4.5 additional hours available to dedicate towards productive work or personal well-being. For a standard 8hr workday, that's an extra half-day per week.
🪂 Conclusion
In this case, reality seems to match perception. None of this data was particularly surprising to me. In particular, this data concretely defined the impact of a commute on my available time to be productive.
In the introductory post, I said:
This data revealed the first of these levers. In scenarios where time is the limiting factor, cases where someone says "there aren't enough hours in the day", I know where I can potentially find 2.5 more hours per day, at least on those days I would commute.
But this is only the first step. The mere surface of our data onion 🧅. The most obvious information that could be gleaned from tracking your time.
The next task is to peel back the next layer and understand how I spend my "productive" time.
Ready, set, go!