I have been on this website for about 12 years. Not including time I spend when not logged in; my stats show as follows: 

Total Time Spent Online:11 days, 8 hours and 12 minutes.

THIS ^^^.  It's not hard.  Once an hour on average, I'll skim the various threads to see if anything new was posted, focusing on threads I'm intersted in (maybe 10% on average).  Then I'll open it up, see the post, and then may or may not respond.

Despite the fact that I'm the most prolific poster on CathInfo, I only post an average of 8.2 post per day, many of which are short ones.  I type very quickly (people at work have made comments about how my keyboard sounds like a machine gun, where I can almost keep up with the speed of thought.  AND, I think about these types of issues and questions a lot, so that on a subject I'm familiar with, and likely have posted dozens of times already about, it just flows out of my brain and in through my keyboard.  I'd have to say that the total time I spend on average per day is, oh, 45 minutes, with about 10-15 sessions of skimming threads for 2-3 minutes at a time on average, and then about 8 times per day I'll chose to engage, sometimes taking 30 seconds, sometimes a minute.  I would probably guess that my average post, if you factor in the long ones, takes maybe 4-5 minutes.

It's not all that hard.  Where things are hard is trying to produce polished material.  I have about a dozen "articles" I started on my Substack page, but the need to make them more polished and more well-written, etc. ... well, I've not published a single one of them since I started about 6 months ago, because I don't feel they're finished.  With posts on CI, I rattle them off without any consideration for style, and often for tone, and that gets people sometimes misreading my tone as being "hostile" where it's mostly just matter-of-fact, boom boom boom, without any consideration for style or tone or anything else, just straight from my brain onto the screen.

How do you accomplish this during work hours? Isn't that stealing time or are you salaried/self-employed? 

Mostly retired is me! 

Most software dev positions are salaried. I don't think I've ever seen a software dev job that was "punch the clock", "you're on our time" like working at wal-mart. Software development is a different animal. Even mental breaks are part of the package, to deliver the goods. You're talking about a high-end, creative position. Big Tech takes it to the Nth degree by spending all kinds of money on various toys/equipment/facilities to make the lives of their employees easier, so they can relax, create, and produce.

You're given tasks, responsibilities, and expected to deliver on time. You also are required to work off-hours sometimes (websites can't be taken down when people are awake and would notice). Which is a good thing, because being at a computer with internet access is required for your job -- and that is GOING to take a certain % of your time. They know that.

In short, you don't stand over a guy with a whip and make him type out code constantly for 8 hours. That isn't how software dev works.

Thank you for the clarification- that makes sense.

How do you accomplish this during work hours? Isn't that stealing time or are you salaried/self-employed?

Matthew beat me to it, but just to add a few points ...

Salaried, and in fact I tend to put in closer to 50 hours for my 40-hour-per week job, easy, sometimes as high as 60 ... so spending an average of 45 minutes per day doesn't come close to offsetting the OT I put in.  Being salaried and therefore "exempt", I don't get paid for OT, but the tradeoff is that on some weeks when we're slower, I also get my full pay.  This relationship, however, tends to always heavily favor the employer, as at most companies you're RARELY ever found lacking work to do for at least 40 and then some.

On top of that, it's understood that people are productive for approximately 32 out of a 40-hour week and all "billing" tends to be adjusted that way.

To say nothing of the fact that eveyrone takes breaks.  Company encourages people to get up and walk around for 10 minutes per hour (a new health thing to avoid issues due to being excessivley sedentary).  I assure you that I spend less time online than most people do shooting the breeze around the water cooler about sports, politics, and other issues ... AND surfing the web on other matters, doing online shopping, etc.  Those folks get caught up on conversations where I'd hear them talking about the same thing a good hour later.

Finally, software development requires mental breaks, it just does.  You absolutely cannot focus at 100% attention for 3-4 hours straight, and if you try you actually get LESS productive over time.  That's why a lot of IT people do weird things like shoot monkeys around on rubber bands, etc.  I can't tell you how many times I had gotten stuck on some programming task only to immediately have the solution present itself 30 seconds after I walk to the restroom.  Sometimes just a change of scenery un-sticks the mind when you get into a rut.

The above post (Reply #11) was written by me.  I despise the anonymous forum and especially see no reason for its use for this topic.

I wish folks would use their legal name and have a picture of their government issued identification....

We could attach the jab certificate too.

.

I'm pretty sure no one on this forum has one of those. Not a real one, anyway.