Ask HN: How many hours per day do you work?
There are a lot of comments about interruptions, and a couple about interesting work. I&#x27;ll add two more dimensions: Agency and Rewards.<p>I&#x27;ve worked intense 10-12hour workdays in the past for long periods of time (waves of 3mo), but they all had at least three of four things in common: Agency, Interesting, Interruption, Reward.<p>Agency is important to me -- am I bought into what I&#x27;m doing and understand the importance+urgency and get to direct the work -- or is someone up the chain jamming some feature down to check a box for their own personal reasons w&#x2F;o good reason. This encompasses Respect -- where everyone understands the rationale and why some urgent deadline is present and people are not told to go on unknown journeys &quot;just because&quot; or &quot;you dont understand&quot;<p>Another is Reward. When working at a hedge fund, sometimes, things were not interesting but there was a clear reward I was psychologically aligned with the reward. Same when I was Founder&#x2F;CTO -- there was a clear reward (not always monetary.)<p>I think when you hear 2hrs&#x2F;3hrs&#x2F;etc per day, often it is the fault of the organization for:<p>- Not having good business cases<p>- Thinking Engineers don&#x27;t care about reasons for doing things<p>- Not providing distraction free blocks<p>- Not sufficiently sharing rewards with the company