Back in the golden age of working from home, when internet service wasn't sufficient for for the barrage of pointless meetings, I was working no more than two hours per day. My coworkers and employers, who all worked in the office at the time, used to joke that I must be an entire team of people.
I still only get time for no more than two hours of actual work each day, but now that so many think they should expand to consume all the capabilities of the modern network by having endless meetings for no good reason, I'm much more exhausted when it comes to getting anything done during these two hours and productivity suffers as a result.
It is devastating how much less productive I've become spending more time working. I want to get things done.
It is also very difficult to define "work" and the various definitions contradict each other. I've met programmers who start coding as soon as they hear about a requirement and then spend weeks untangling the web of spaghetti code they have previously written down.
I tend to sit down and think before I write even a single line of code. In the office, I used to stare at my screen with headphones on to "look like I was working". Now that I work from home, I usually spend that time walking around the house, doing mindless chores, and sometimes lying down on my bed in the dark.
I would say that the time spent lying in my bed is my most productive time. Someone else might say I steal billable hours.
I feel the same about stealing billable hours. My creative time happens always in the background, when I doing chores or watching tv series. And then I come to the office and stare at my screen to "look like I was working". I can't help it and sometime my creative time spans 2-3hrs, something I cannot do during staring hours. I feel guilty. But your answer put my mind at ease, thank you.
I still only get time for no more than two hours of actual work each day, but now that so many think they should expand to consume all the capabilities of the modern network by having endless meetings for no good reason, I'm much more exhausted when it comes to getting anything done during these two hours and productivity suffers as a result.
It is devastating how much less productive I've become spending more time working. I want to get things done.