Operations associate at the Forethought Foundation. Former ED of EA Norway.
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I'm grateful you've asked this question, as I've been really curious about this myself and have considered asking the same question. I know I should be careful when comparing myself with others, but I only have experience from one organisation where I have also been in charge of deciding number of hours we should work and how to track it. It feels nice to know that what I've been doing isn't totally off.
Here's what we do at our ~3 year old organisation with 3-4 employees: We use Toggl for tracking hours we actually work and a separate spreadsheet to track number of hours we're at work. We estimate that 6 hours on Toggl is about 7.5 hours at work. The extra 1.5 hours are breaks, usually consisting of many 5 min breaks and one 30 min break (we don't count lunch).
I usually track 6-7 hours of actual work in a regular day ( I work 5 days a week). Some weeks I track 4-5 hours most days, and then 8-10 hours some days. I try to regulate my hours so that each week is more or less the same. In weeks where I work a lot over 6 hours per day, I schedule a day off in the coming week.
I don't have that much time for deep work. Maybe 1-4 hours per week. In my current role, not that much of my work requires deep work, though I should probably be doing 3-5 hours of this per week.
Thanks for sharing, this is great! I found it particularly useful to read how many hours you spend on each activity and the objectives and key results you've planned for 2020.
I was a bit surprised that you've used a quarter (250/932 hours) of your time on personally learning directly related to EA. How much do you think the hours you spent on learning have contributed to the positive outcomes of EA Toronto? You wrote "Finally, without independent learning, another wild guess seems to say that the other two thirds of EATO's strategy updates and insights would not exist". Does this mean that you partly focused on learning about strategy and evaluation?
Also super cool that you directed around 42,000 CAD to MF!!
Thanks for your feedback! We have ended up going for a 4-7 day camp for people with 1-2 years of experience. I've noted down your ideas for a future iteration of the camp.
And thanks for your offer! You've been very helpful so far, and it would be great to discuss more at a later time.
Thanks for explaining! I wasn't familiar with the term, but I feel like I know understand better what it entails and the different ways it could look like.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment! We've noted down all your points, and found especially the one about signalling fit and thoughts on the role of national/local groups very interesting and valuable.
Thank you for your comments! You've particularly made us think about the length of camp for the first group. We're now leaning towards something between 5-10 days. Your comment about potential risks is also greatly appreciated, and we will think carefully about how much we will make public moving forward.
Thank you so much for your comment! I really appreciate that you've taken the time to be so thorough. I also appreciate how structured your comment is, and it makes it easy to follow. You bring up a lot of new points that we haven't thought about before, and have made us think more about how we can better cooperate with MBA/ business graduates and HR managers. I also found your list of certificates particularly useful. I was wondering, could you explain more about what you call 'partnership streams'?
A few days ago we published another post on this topic where we outline our plans for an operations camp this summer as a project to help reduce the operations talent gap in EA. It would be great if you get the chance to read over it and see if you have any input.
This is very cool! Exciting results. We'll definitely look into doing something similar in Norway. Thanks for writing this up and sharing.
Just to check, does this link work for you? http://hexaco.org/hexaco-online
(Edit) Ah, sorry. So you don't get the results from the website?
Really love this, and definitely think you're on to something - thanks for posting! I'd also add that if there are certain things that you don't enjoy or find aversive, you should consider looking for co-organisers who find the those things fun and rewarding. Like with startups, you should generally be two instead of one. And for a lot of people, it's also more fun to do things together than alone.