If it's something I really enjoy doing then going 8+ hours isn't a problem and I'll even feel energized afterwards and catch myself saying stuff like "I know but you need to stop, let's resume tomorrow".
When I'm able to financially afford to spend blocks of time such as working on creating programming related video courses, I've done that type of schedule for 3 months straight multiple times in a row. Basically work like that for 3 months, ship a new course, take a 2 week break and repeat. The only reason I even took those breaks was to reflect on what I learned and figure out how to do things better for the next one.
But when I'm not able to afford doing that and I need to mix in contract work, especially contract work that I feel doesn't help me in the long run because it's doing things I wouldn't necessarily do in my own projects, that shit drains me like nothing else. Just working on stuff like that for 2 hours destroys me for the rest of the day.
That and personally I find that I'm not optimized for juggling many different things at a time. I work best when I can block out large amounts of time and just plow through 1 task instead of chopping up smaller amounts of time to do things in parallel. I think it's because if I don't finish something all I do is compulsively think about it until it's solved, so trying to do that with many concurrent projects leaves me in a constant state of feeling like nothing is ever going to be done which drains me overall.
If it's something I really enjoy doing then going 8+ hours isn't a problem and I'll even feel energized afterwards and catch myself saying stuff like "I know but you need to stop, let's resume tomorrow".
When I'm able to financially afford to spend blocks of time such as working on creating programming related video courses, I've done that type of schedule for 3 months straight multiple times in a row. Basically work like that for 3 months, ship a new course, take a 2 week break and repeat. The only reason I even took those breaks was to reflect on what I learned and figure out how to do things better for the next one.
But when I'm not able to afford doing that and I need to mix in contract work, especially contract work that I feel doesn't help me in the long run because it's doing things I wouldn't necessarily do in my own projects, that shit drains me like nothing else. Just working on stuff like that for 2 hours destroys me for the rest of the day.
That and personally I find that I'm not optimized for juggling many different things at a time. I work best when I can block out large amounts of time and just plow through 1 task instead of chopping up smaller amounts of time to do things in parallel. I think it's because if I don't finish something all I do is compulsively think about it until it's solved, so trying to do that with many concurrent projects leaves me in a constant state of feeling like nothing is ever going to be done which drains me overall.