My research is in fluid dynamics, though my day job does not involve research. How much time someone in academia can devote to research depends a lot on their

My research is in fluid dynamics, though my day job does not involve research. How much time someone in academia can devote to research depends a lot on their position. Your average professor seems to only dedicate around one day per week to research in my experience (certainly far less than 1/2 to 3/4 of the time), and mostly acts as a manager and a grant writer. (Some people seem to consider grant writing to be research time, but that doesn't make sense to me.) That's on top of the fact that professors tend to work a lot more than 40 hours per week. Around 60 hours per week seems about right in my experience. There are more research-oriented roles (like postdocs) after getting a PhD, but they tend to be rarer. And I think this is true in academia broadly: I recall when speaking to Scott Aaronson before that he said since finishing his last postdoc, he's never done anywhere near as much research as a fraction of his time. (He did also say that being a parent takes more time than the non-research duties of a professor.) In my experience, industry (and government) tends to have less hours of work per week. There certainly are research-focused jobs in industry and government (for example, scientists at NASA). But I've heard that in many industry positions, what you said is accurate: Any research one does is after the full-time work is done. To be honest, that might leave you more research time than a professor gets.