Can you afford to not work at the peak of your intellect? I tried the whole busting ass thing in my early years as a freelancer. I bombed, my output went down

Can you afford to not work at the peak of your intellect? I tried the whole busting ass thing in my early years as a freelancer. I bombed, my output went down with no correlation to working hours whatsoever, I developed obvious markers for anxiety and it took years to get away from that. Maybe if your job consists of answer dumb emails every day, but there's indeed a very limited number of productive, concentrated work you can get done during the day. Most of the people who claim to work excessive amounts of overtime waste a humongous amount of time on meetings, confirmations, transportation and phone calls. If anything, they might have a mission and purpose that helps them stay up. But to pretend that you can crank out code like a machine all day every day is the biggest greatest farce of our profession.