People don't work as much as they say

When I was building the physical apparatus itself and plumbing it up, I was working 70 hour weeks because it was more or less mindless physical labor.

When I was writing software to operate the experiment or analyze data, I settled into more of a few hours a day of deep work pattern. Part of that might be the nature of science; after I implemented an idea, it might be hours before the experiment fully responded to my changes or the computers finished crunching numbers. And I needed that feedback to inform what I'd do next.

Writing my dissertation was somewhere in the middle. The actual writing required focus, but a lot of it was tracking down references or making figures, which required some thought but not too deep. That's probably the closest I came to a 40 hour week.

Based on other replies, it sounds like other people have experienced similar relationships of the nature of the work to their capacity to do it.

As you get more experienced, you may require less deep thinking to do your job, which boost productivity. However in our current world all fields are changing so rapidly that this is mostly wishful thinking.

The other factor is of course whether you're allowed to be productive. Even a day with "just" 3 or 4 meetings is practically destroyed from a productivity point of view, and this doesn't even account for email and chat. So even if willing to be more productive, you just can't. This particular problem never seems addressed, quite the opposite: "we need to collaborate more".

No, we don't. When you have 5 tasks and each task depends on others and requires a lot of collaboration then it's a crappy task, from a productivity point of view.

Aside from the distractions of professional communication, we should be honest about the additional distractions from personal devices. When I started work, nobody had a smartphone. Just a workstation with restricted internet. So there were few temptations.

Now it's unstoppable. It's right there in your pocket, begging for attention. Add in email, which the average person checks once every 6 minutes, and the conclusion is that we have near-zero concentration time.

It's a sad thing. If we would control distractions and carve out very clean packages of work, knowledge workers could probably switch to 4 hour workdays, 6 as a transition. The rest is fluff anyway. Why not double the work packages then, to meet 8 hours? Because our species simply can't.

But anyway, it won't happen. Let's just keep telling ourselves we work 10-12 hours whilst we piss our life away to a collective illusion.

For me this really depends on whether I'm "into it" or not. When I'm doing what I need to do but my heart isn't in it, I mostly match the "a few hours of real work per day" descriptions, doing my tasks in between some reading and chatting or whatever. Push it too hard, and I start getting into burn out territory.

But when I'm excited and really enjoying myself, watch out, I'm a fucking productivity monster. I can work cheerfully and with high energy basically nonstop, like I have to force myself to eat and sleep. I can do this many months in a row--empirically for the better part of a year before I chill out and go back to baseline. During these times taking a break is just annoying, I really want to be working, my mind is still there more or less no matter what I'm doing.

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One thing that may be interesting to note is that the degree to which I can do this partially depends on the type of work. I've done lots of different types of work in my life. Here's a tiered list in order of how nonstop I can go when I'm into it:

* S Tier -- I go from the moment I wake until I drop from exhaustion, cheerful, high energy the whole time * programming -- one exception that drops this to A tier sometimes is if the work is particularly intellectually demanding, like tricky math / comp sci stuff, like when I'm trying to do some kind of novel game dev or something * physical labor (eg. house construction)

* A Tier -- I can only do something like 10 hours/day of the main event, rubber-on-road work, while the rest of the time is spent thinking about and planning the main event stuff * art -- stopping this one feels more like fatigue, like the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. I have to reset by low effort learning or browsing-with-intent-to-learn other artwork * writing -- this feels different, where after some thousands of words the "spirit isn't with me" anymore, like I know what I would write, but the verve is gone somehow, even though I have plenty of energy for outlining and planning

* B Tier -- I can do this similarly to S tier, wall to wall, high intensity work, but only for about a week to 10 days at a time. * people stuff (eg. group facilitation, mediating conflict, personal coaching)