At some point "be active on LinkedIn" turned into "post every day and spend two hours in the comments," and nobody really stopped to check if that was true. It just became the thing people repeated to each other.
I know founders who block an hour every morning for LinkedIn and still feel behind by lunch. Sales leaders who tell their reps to "engage more" without ever saying what that means or how long it should take. Consultants who tried it for a few weeks, felt like they were shouting into a void, and quietly stopped.
Here's the part nobody wants to admit: most of that time isn't doing anything. Scrolling to find a post worth responding to. Reading three paragraphs just to figure out if it's even relevant. Starting a comment, deleting it, starting over because it sounds like a template. None of that is engagement. It's friction, and it eats the clock without moving anything forward.
Where the two hours goes
Break down a typical session and it looks roughly like this. Twenty minutes scrolling for something worth commenting on. Fifteen reading through posts to see if they're relevant. Half an hour, sometimes more, writing something that doesn't sound canned. Then checking back later for replies.
None of that time is wasted on purpose. It's just what manual discovery and manual writing require. You can't skip the searching, you can't skip the drafting, so it adds up. Most of it goes to finding and preparing, not to the actual engaging part.
What 15 minutes looks like instead
People getting real results from LinkedIn, warm leads, inbound DMs, deals that trace back to a comment thread, aren't the ones putting in the most hours. They're the ones showing up daily with something worth saying, to someone worth saying it to.
If the right posts are already sitting in front of you, and a draft is already written in your voice, your job shrinks down to reading it, checking it sounds like you, and hitting post. That's fifteen minutes, not two hours.
That's the whole idea behind Allen. It finds posts from people who match your actual prospects, not just anyone who used the same keyword, and drafts a comment in your voice so you're reviewing instead of staring at a blank box trying to figure out how to open a sentence.
The real question is consistency, not time
Fifteen minutes every weekday beats two hours once a week, on the algorithm's terms and on yours. LinkedIn rewards accounts that show up regularly, and prospects remember a name that keeps appearing in their notifications with something worth reading attached, not once in a while, but consistently.
So the honest answer to "how much time should I spend on LinkedIn" was never really about hours. It's whatever it takes to show up daily without wanting to quit. For most people doing it by hand, that's more time than they've got. With the searching and the blank page already handled, it's about fifteen minutes.
Try Allen free for 7 days and see what your routine looks like once the finding and drafting are already done.