I am an indie iPhone developer, and I've been working for 3 hours everyday for almost 2 years now. It may not work for everybody, but I started this habit in early 2014, and I have continued to do it since have I found that this is the most productive way to work for me.
You can code only 4 hours per day. Here’s why.
Most of us have felt it: after a few solid hours of coding, your brain starts shutting down.
Less stress, more productivity: why working fewer hours is better for you and your employer
There’s always too much work to be done on software projects, too many features to implement, too many bugs to fix. Some days you’re just not going through the backlog fast enough, you’re not producing enough code, and it’s taking too long to fix a seemingly-impossible bug. And to make things worse you’re wasting time in pointless meetings instead of getting work done. Once it gets bad enough you can find yourself always scrambling, working overtime just to keep up. Pretty soon it’s just expected, and you need to be available to answer emails at all hours even when there are no emergencies. You’re tired and burnt out and there’s still just as much work as before. The real solution is not working even harder or even longer, but rather the complete opposite: working fewer hours.
Is full-time work bad for our brains?
If you’re over 40, working more than 25 hours a week could be affecting your intelligence, new research suggests
Doing nothing at work
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I have a high-pressure project going on, I spend 20% of my workday away from the computer.
2026 State of the Workplace
Get the latest insights from state of the workplace report spanning more than 443 million hours of work activity across 1,111 organizations and 163,638 employees over three years.
How I got to 200 productive hours a month
A tested approach to improve your focus and productivity
The lost art of concentration: being distracted in a digital world
We check our phones every 12 minutes, often just after waking up. Always-on behaviour is harmful to long-term mental health, and we need to learn to the hit the pause button
Let’s hear it for the four-hour working day
Are you working your brain too hard? Take it easy – like Charles Darwin, Alice Munro or Thomas Jefferson
Why working fewer hours would make us more productive
A shorter working week could improve our mental and physical health and even mitigate climate change, research shows
Live asynchronously.
Last year I turned off all my notifications. I stopped booking meetings. I started living asynchronously. Now instead of being interrupted throughout the day — or rushing from one meeting to the next — I sit down and get work done. I work a lot. I co...
What Isn’t There an App For? (Published 2015)
A writer spent three weeks trying to improve his life through apps.
It's getting harder to focus every day
I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else. I don’t know how and when this happened. During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing open source. And actually got stuff done. Doing all of those at the same time requires paying attention to what I wanted to do and ignore the noise.
When we say work can wait, we mean it. Really.
We recently had a problem with our interns. Now, in terms of problems, it was a good one to have. I noticed some of them working on their days off or very late/early hours. That’s not how we roll h…
How to balance full-time work with creative projects – The Creative Independent
A guide to finding the right day job, protecting your time, and building creative habits by Jeffrey Silverstein. Illustrated by Sunny Eckerle.
Work less, get more: New Zealand firm's four-day week an 'unmitigated success'
Reduced hours for same pay increased successful work-life balance management, cutting stress levels and boosting commitment
Making 20% Time Work | begriffs.com
Following Google’s lead many companies have instituted “20% time” for their employees. This is one day per week in which employees can work on projects of their own choosing. The practice keeps developers motivated and sharp, produces tools to solve company problems, and in the best case creates open source which builds prestige and helps recruitment.