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

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.

Comments

Re:I call BS

[Kjella]

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.