Creativity thrives when constrained. I have been struggling with organising my time as well, and I found that fewer hours every day means I only focus on what'

Creativity thrives when constrained. I have been struggling with organising my time as well, and I found that fewer hours every day means I only focus on what's important, and I can achieve a state of flow, with a good routine, every day. I do 4 hours of 95% effort, no distraction deep work, and then I need to recharge the batteries. It all depends if you're doing creative programming work, or menial one. I'm building a business, and the software underneath it. It's not too dissimilar to sculpting or painting: bursts of intense work, with tons of space necessary to digest, plan the next step or just daydream and think out of the box around hard problems. Some people thrive in a brute force approach to creativity (work until the problem is solved), for others intuition is the driving force (think until the problem is solved) The issue is that as a society and the corporate machine is tuned for the brute force approach. We celebrate the 100 hours/wk Musks and Carmacks, and forget that their physiology, and more importantly, environment is much different than most of us. How many hours do you think Musk spends thinking about paying rent, cost of living, standups with a boring boss, endless Zoom calls that cut into his focus? How many hours does John Carmack spend, bored to tears, plugging yet another Slack library into their CRUD app for a boss than makes 500x his salary? How many hours of "brainstorming", daydreaming and reading up on exciting tech do they count as work? How many hours of daydreaming and "digesting" can you do sat in an open space cubicle? (Sorry, started talking about creative force, and went on a societal critique.)