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The Most Productive Days and Times In 2017 (rescuetime.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the on-the-clock dept.

In a blog post, personal analytics service RescueTime revealed exactly what days and times we were most productive in 2017, by studying the anonymized data of how people spent their time on their computers and phones over the past 12 months. From the report: Simply put, our data shows that people were the most productive on November 14th. In fact, that entire week ranked as the most productive of the year. Which makes sense. With American Thanksgiving the next week and the mad holiday rush shortly after, mid-November is a great time for people to cram in a few extra work hours and get caught up before gorging on Turkey dinner. On the other side of the spectrum, we didn't get a good start to the year. January 6th -- the first Friday of the year -- was the least productive day of 2017.

One of the biggest mistakes so many of us make when planning out our days is to assume we have 8+ hours to do productive work. This couldn't be further from the truth. What we found is that, on average, we only spend 5 hours a day working on a digital device. And with an average productivity pulse of 53% for the year, that means we only have 12.5 hours a week to do productive work. Our data showed that we do our most productive work between 10 and noon and then again from 2-5pm each day. However, breaking it down to the hour, we do our most productive work on Wednesdays at 3pm. RescueTime has a separate blog post detailing how they calculate their productivity scores.

16 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. Only 5 hours!? by lucasnate1 · · Score: 1

    we only spend 5 hours a day working on a digital device

    I don't think anyone who only spends that amount of time in front of a digital device.

    --
    Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
    1. Re:Only 5 hours!? by Patent+Lover · · Score: 1

      It said working. It doesn't include watching cat videos, playing solitaire, or attending virtual meetings.

    2. Re:Only 5 hours!? by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      I suppose it would also not include, spreadsheets, cad/cam machines, animation, coding et al. Lots of people spend twelve hours a day in front of computers, lots as in large numbers, not lots as in large percentages but when you start with 7 billion, even a tiny percentage is millions.

      However there measure is not a measure of productivity but a measure of technological based time wasting, definitely not one of producing some thing other than perhaps large measures of social angst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... So the most productive week for, hmm, disrupting actual productivity?

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  2. I call BS by cruff · · Score: 1

    One size fits all is almost never appropriate. I know I'm most productive at the start of the morning before people start interrupting me for questions, and usually through a good part of the afternoon before 4 PM.

    1. Re:I call BS by Kjella · · Score: 2

      One size fits all is almost never appropriate. I know I'm most productive at the start of the morning before people start interrupting me for questions, and usually through a good part of the afternoon before 4 PM.

      You realize that "people start interrupting" because that's when they're working, right? I understand your perspective, except I'm the polar opposite who usually gets things done in the late afternoon but I'm under no illusion that's when most work is done company-wide. I get work done because it's quiet. And to be honest I think you are the exception, most people seem to take a long time to "boot" to get into work again. That goes for Mondays, mornings and just coming back from lunch. Or they're procrastinating a bit and then towards the end it's like "I should get this done before lunch" or "I should get this done today" and finally get to it.

      Not really surprised they found the most productive time was in the middle of the week either. In the beginning of the week work is winding up and towards the end of the week it's winding down, the meat is obviously somewhere in the middle. The question is what's really the point, you want everything to be like Wednesday afternoon? It's like saying you want your whole steak to be like the juicy center, it's just not happening because the outer layer has to fry in the pan. You won't make Monday morning or Friday afternoon equally productive and I think everyone knows it. In fact you often introduce extra overhead by making it the recap point, like what did we get done last week and what are we doing this week.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    2. Re:I call BS by David_Hart · · Score: 1

      One size fits all is almost never appropriate. I know I'm most productive at the start of the morning before people start interrupting me for questions, and usually through a good part of the afternoon before 4 PM.

      Not me. I work for an international company with the main office being in EMEA and with our team being global. Which means that the majority of my mornings (afternoons in Europe) are taken up by early morning meetings, usually from 8:00am to noon. Tuesday's and Thursdays are completely taken up by meetings.

      I am the most productive on Wednesdays as it's one of the only full days that I have no meetings scheduled. Friday comes in second place. So, for me, it's pretty close.

      The results may not exactly fit everyone, it's very rare that averages do. What it does do is give a sense of just how much time is sucked away by various office and corporate activities, distractions, etc. that takes away productive time. From that perspective, it's an interesting study and one that might help people think about ways to reduce or eliminate time sucking activities.

      For example, we all have meetings that we don't need to attend or where we are added "just in case". Eliminating some, stacking others on a single day, or giving specific times that you will join the meeting (i.e. for a 30 minute period, rather than the full 1 to 2 hours) might help free up time to get more done.

    3. Re:I call BS by networkBoy · · Score: 1

      This is a double edged sword.
      If management would take it at face value and say "okay, this is when people are productive, so lets make that time easier for them" it'd be okay.

      We all know management instead will say: "Shit! they're only 'working' 12.5 hours a week but we're paying 40?" ignoring that a lot of the not work time is meetings/overhead and the games/social media time is often a case of "This problem is thorny, I'm going to take a break and come back to it." and while on said break our brain is actually still background processing the task.

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
  3. Most Boring Article of 2018 - and it's only Jan. 4 by sound+vision · · Score: 1

    I won't eat the clickbait, but you can tell from the summary that they started with a narrow, non-representative sample of office workers, and the methodology probably just gets worse from there.

  4. Thinking is working so basic metric fail. by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 1

    Before I retired (early), I *often* outproduced my co-workers because I took more time to think and much less time to "do".

    Spending time learning is also productivity. I would often know a way of doing things which took 1% (or less) as long as co-workers.

    So you really need to watch the questions you are asking and the assumptions you are making about what is work, what is productivity, and so on.

    Sometimes, the best thing you can do for your productivity is to take a break and go for a walk.

    You just have to stay balanced about it.

    --
    She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
  5. WAYYY too many task switches by mnemotronic · · Score: 1

    I'm not on RescueTime; I'm on, like, Boulder Golden Durban Goat Poison Oh Jesus Chem Kush got-any-crackers time. I can't imagine trying to flip my neurons to a new thread 300 times a week, much less 300 times a day. Isn't there some research that says that it takes people 20+ minutes to get fully engaged after an interrupt or task switch?

    --
    The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
    1. Re:WAYYY too many task switches by networkBoy · · Score: 1

      This.
      For quite a while I have been tasked with customer support for *one* customer and primary QA at my current gig.

      "But it's only one customer!" -management
      "Yeah and when they interrupt the super complex test case I was running I have to very nearly start over." -me

      6 months later I have an offer at a new company on the way, where I can focus on what I'm genuinely good at.

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
  6. Long hours != productivity by hackertourist · · Score: 1

    After 8 hours of work, productivity drops precipitously. Accrue too much overtime, and you'll be so tired your productivity is negative: you'll just be introducing errors you'll have to fix later.

    1. Re:Long hours != productivity by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 1

      Eh, with version control, you won't go negative in productivity. Your breadcrumbs will help the next day. Now, it's probably not worth the loss of free time and mental strain*, but at least you won't move backwards.

      * Or it can be. I have no idea what your compensation structure looks like.

      --
      Your ad here. Ask me how!
  7. These slaves are lazy... by greencfg · · Score: 1

    ...this is what this kind of "studies" actually say. And they measure people in a way 100% consistent with this view: the only metric is how many hours the slaves actually sweat at the workplace. Because slaves are little more than animals, they don't think, they do not talk among themseves while working, they do not eat much, all they do is handle the tools in a more or less productive way. I say, there is a solution for this problem: use a a longer whip!

    1. Re:These slaves are lazy... by networkBoy · · Score: 1

      and the smart slaves use out of band devices for comms, social media, etc. all while remaining logged in at their proscribed station.

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
  8. Re: Surely AMD processors improve productivity... by tehcyder · · Score: 1

    Fake news maybe?

    Here is my personal experience from a recent laptop purchase - I bought a laptip with A12 processor and 16GB RAM running Windows 10 on a 1TB HDD. First two days it was on, it was so slow I couldn't bear it. I sent it back and exchanged for i7 , rest of specs same, and that one was faster.

    It was no benchmark but the experience was significantly better on i7 for home office type work.

    You really can't dispute solid evidence-based testimony like that.

    --
    To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it