If we are talking about getting into the "zone" where we "create" - I think people would be really, really shocked at how little productive work one can do in a

If we are talking about getting into the "zone" where we "create" - I think people would be really, really shocked at how little productive work one can do in a day. I think 4 hours is a huge-over estimation. If you could find someone who did that over a long term, they would be a rock star. I'd be ecstatic to average one "creative productive" hour a day, averaged over a year. 99% of my actual "new" productivity comes in these tiny little sprints of brilliance, the rest is just coasting, waiting for inspiration. I'd guess I get about 2 1/2 - 3 productive hours in a good week. The rest is just doing things like research, diagnostics, administrative work, email, meetings, post-mortem reports, etc... Thankfully, I have a job (network engineering), where a lot of the work also involves auto-pilot tasks, like configuring network equipment, doing simple triage/diagnostics, delivering/ordering equipment, helping people, teaching people, etc... From the outside it appears to be "productive" - but in reality it's the sort of thing you can do in entirely reactive manner without having to engage any ueber-higher order brain functions - I could probably do it for 10 hours a day without having to exercise those brain functions.