If you are feeling stressed staying productive 8 hours a day, try comparing your productivity with others in the team. If yours is higher you deserve a better

If you are feeling stressed staying productive 8 hours a day, try comparing your productivity with others in the team. If yours is higher you deserve a better pay. 1. Everybody doesn't have similar productivity. There could be a Nx(or 10x) programmer who would finish off his work in say 2 hours. And there would be a 1x programmer who would finish the same task in a 8 hours. Both programmers are good - but the 10x programmer will get tired, burnout and eventually become less than 1x if made to work 8 hours every day. For employers and management - this is pretty hard to figure out (or understand) 2. "Wouldn't you accept a proportional salary reduction?" - Yes, only if everybody in the team exhibited similar levels of productivity. Unfortunately that is rarely true. I have faced this scenario as a freelancer when I worked 32 hours a week. Some team members have worked much much slower than me, wasted my time in meetings outside my work time, asked for help on simple things that were well documented and still got paid higher than me. I almost doubled my rates for that client. 3. One needs few hours to get-in-the-zone and task-switching costs are higher with lesser hours per day. At least that is true for me. Once I am in the flow, the outputs are much faster. I would work one 80-100 hour workweek and finish the work. If I were to do the same work in 40 hour workweek, I might finish it in 3-4 weeks. And if 20 hour week - that same work would finish in 7-8 weeks. That is simply because of the switching costs. Obviously, I cannot do 100 hour week consistently