Hey Wolfmountain3. I am not a programmer but I am (was until I quit ha!) a system administrator and have been in the industry for 8 years.

I can tell you that if you are getting a workload that is too much for you to handle, you need to TELL someone. I don't know if you use Agile+Scrums or any other sort of organizing tools in your team, but those meetings are opportunities to say "Hey you know I've been working on xyz for a while, does anyone have a second to help me jiggle my brain a little bit?"

I appreciated it so much when other admins would step back and do that rather than just try to plow through on problems and turn them into perpetual fixes that never complete.

You also need to make sure you are taking care of yourself. A lot of times people get into programming, computing, engineering, because they have FUN solving problems. So it can easily consume you to know there is something unfinished/that there is a deadline approaching.

The truth is, there will always be something unfinished and there will always be a deadline approaching. Not that you shouldn't strive to finish before the deadline or finish that last bit of code. But make sure you are taking time AWAY from the problem (incidentally this helps SOLVE problems by freeing up your brain for a bit in my experience).

Mostly my days consisted of finding any problems that needed triaging, assigning an order to those problems

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Around 2 hours, including talking to those involved, reproducing results and updating bug

Then fixing those problems if they were deemed immediate enough, OR putting them in the queue for the next sprint

Around 3 hours depending on width and breadth (sometimes this would take an entire day)

Then going through various user stories and finding out what I'd be working on to finish a project

Around 1 hour

The rest of the day would be spent working on projects and researching anything I needed for further information.

Around 2 hours

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In addition to this I was scheduled to be on call for outages and emergencies. Sometimes this would mean weeks without a night of uninterrupted sleep (which created a strain on relationships). But this doesn't really apply to programmers as they mostly can deal with their issues by smartly creating a development/testing/production environment so that production doesn't have to be their problem (although in some places it can be!)