I've always heard people say if you can get in 3 hours of good development work a day, that's pretty much the max and you should feel good about the day. So if

I've always heard people say if you can get in 3 hours of good development work a day, that's pretty much the max and you should feel good about the day. So if I get that done, I feel accomplished. I do consulting work and can live that lifestyle, you just plan for it in the contract. I've found even when working on startup stuff I want to get done, if it's not just monotonous busy work style coding and requires thinking and planning, meanwhile the system is getting bigger and more complex, then yeah, you can only get done a good 2-3 hours of hard thinking work, then you are just braindead, and any more work just means fixing that shit work the next day, meaning you lose productivity. Maybe some people can push past this, maybe some people just think they can and don't recognize, but at least for some of us, that's just it. I ask my friends about this who work for a living and they agree and say you get 2-3 hours of good work in, the rest is fucking around, meetings, facebook, whatever. I'm not going to comment on non-dev work because I don't do it, and most of it probably doesn't apply to this, unless you are doing intense thinking. Most of the people reading this are probably devs or have hard thinking jobs.