How Many Hours Per Week Do Actually Spend Working?

How much time do you spend working every week? I don’t mean being in the office, but actually working. You have 37.5 hours every week, but how much is actually spent doing what you’re paid to do? When I say working I mean developing real outputs (e.g. content); this includes illustrations, diagrams, publishing etc – whatever goes into the final deliverable. Christine, my former manager, kept a record of all the tasks she did during the week. Here’s a breakdown of how much time was actually spent writing.

Technical Writing – 15 hours (includes all writing tasks, such as release notes, developing videos, converting material from Word to FrameMaker and screen capture work)
Email – 12 hours (includes correspondence to programmers, team members, sales, customers, mgt)
Project Management – 6 hours (includes status reports, scheduling, document distribution & include feedback etc)
Timesheets – 45 min (including revisions that need to be made so we can bill the customer correctly and allocate resources to the correct ‘bucket’)
Internal Meetings – 6 hours (Mon & Fri office meetings, Tech Publishing Thursday meeting & meetings with HR (assessments) and project coordination meetings with Development)
Customer meetings – 4-10 hours (this includes conference calls, status reports, emergencies, monthly conf calls with global depts, and project handovers. Mostly status updates)
Travel – 6 hours (i.e. to customer sites or downtown to our HQ)

Total – 43-49 hours (50+ if you add in the travel)

Does this surprise you?

Less than 15 hours (30% approx) was spent on documentation. The rest was sucked up with email and meetings. While there are ways to reduce time spent on these, other areas are outside her control.

5 Mandatory Tasks

She has to: