Well the discussions here are not exactly from a random sampling of individuals. Many people in HN are programmers, meaning that their productivity does not sca

Well the discussions here are not exactly from a random sampling of individuals. Many people in HN are programmers, meaning that their productivity does not scale linearly with time. That is, you may get a considerable amount of work done in 4 hours, and the proceeding 4 hours may yield hardly any progress at all. Any knowledge worker can relate. But in a lot of industries, there is a lower bound of hours that need to be worked. I used to work in the medical device industry, and hospitals, and also have some real estate company experience. I can assure you in my experience, a 40-hour workweek was by no means unreasonable in these industries. If you're working in Semiconductors or Finance or Law or most industries out there, you really do need to be physically present and working 6-8 hour days.