In my experience, it's counterproductive to code more than 4-5 hours per day. At a certain point you start introducing bugs/inadvertent complexity whose negatives outweigh any feature contributions you're making. There's lots of research which bears this out. E.g., https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/why-working-more-than-4...
Code and test for 4 hours, document what is not, maybe work on easing on-boarding on your projects or even other's. And read. Developing software is about a lot more things than the code. If you are making things for other departments of your company, don't hesitate to go check how your "clients" use your software and what the pain points are. Check what is done in other technologies so you can get new ideas.
If you think software programmer is sitting at your desk churning code don't complain you are not paid enough and have shitty health. Also if you're paid less than other people at your company and they don't do anything more than you it is time to ask for a raise while looking at other jobs.
The other option is to show up at your job for 40 hours/week but only put in 15-20. Especially in software, where one engineer can be 10x more productive than another, one can easily get away with this.
(I’m not advocating this, just pointing out that it is a strategy I’ve seen employed)
Code and test for 4 hours, document what is not, maybe work on easing on-boarding on your projects or even other's. And read. Developing software is about a lot more things than the code. If you are making things for other departments of your company, don't hesitate to go check how your "clients" use your software and what the pain points are. Check what is done in other technologies so you can get new ideas.
If you think software programmer is sitting at your desk churning code don't complain you are not paid enough and have shitty health. Also if you're paid less than other people at your company and they don't do anything more than you it is time to ask for a raise while looking at other jobs.