I can usually do a solid 4-hour block of real work. Then, after a short break, I can do another 2-hour block of real work. Then my brain is just toasted for a

I can usually do a solid 4-hour block of real work. Then, after a short break, I can do another 2-hour block of real work. Then my brain is just toasted for any serious stuff until after a good sleep. For an 8-hour workday, that means I'm spending 2 hours on fluff tasks and clock-watching. The current job I'm in doesn't even use up my entire 6 daily hours of real-work capacity, but they still need my butt in my seat for 8 hours for contract billing purposes. A 10-hour workday, 4 days per week, would be a 20% cut in my real work capacity, unless that extra 4 hours in the day were filled with mindless menial labor or some other form of brain-on-autopilot work. The model is broken. The company divides my revenue generated by the number of hours my butt was in my seat to get some value-generated-per-hour metric. But it's not constant over time. In a work block, my productivity ramps up until I'm in "the zone", plateaus, and then rapidly tapers off at the mental fatigue limit. So my productivity in a day looks like this: | .::::::. . | 100% | :::::::::. .::. | 80% |.:::::::::: :::: | 60% |:::::::::::: .::::. . | 40% |:::::::::::: :::::: ::. .. .. . . | 20% +---------------------------------------+ 0% 0h 1h 2h 3h 4h 5h 6h 7h 8h 9h 10h11h12h