This is a bit of a sensitive question, but I am curious to know how much other EAs actually work. I think this can easily fall into setting unrealistic expectations in the community. However, I have the suspicion that many people in the community have overly high impressions of how many sustainably productive hours other people make. Also, I'm currently working quite flexible hours and I'm wondering how to count a collection of "actually work" hours as a full work day (I'm currently leaning towards 4-5 productive hours/day). The question I'm specifically interested in is as follows:
If you only track the hours you spend actually doing work*, how many hours do you make on an average work day that is sustainable?
* So this excludes: small breaks, long breaks, distractions, etc.
Additional questions I'm interested in:
2) How many of these hours are deep work?
3) How much total break time do you need? Or in other words: what is your average 'efficiency'? (note: higher than ~75% efficiency seems unattainable sustainably for most people?)
More info is also in this excellent blog post by Lynette Bye.
[At best a semi-answer to your question. Sorry.]
If I reflect on my last 5 years or so, one thing I find really striking is how much both the quality and quantity of my work has depended on external circumstances.
In particular, I have experienced all of the following:
During the times when I was procrastinating a lot, generally had low motivation for "work", and was depressed, it was often quite bad for me to confront the fact that other people were (or at least seemed) productive and happy (whether or not they worked long hours).
But I think one of the worst lessons I could have learned is that other people are just intrinsically more hard-working or capable, and that I should leave the job of improving the world with these 'great people'. I also think it would have been bad to approach this as a 'productivity problem' to be solved with 'productivity hacks' or other local fixes.
(This is not to deny that interpersonal differences in productivity or capability exist as well. I'm kind of on the record about this ...)
If I could give my past self some advice, it would be this: Don't compare yourself to others. Treat your depression. Lean into what you're good at. And if your environment isn't good for you, change it. I wasn't great at actually doing these things, but I'm very glad about the extent to which I was.