[BitwiseFool]

In the 9-5's defense, a good chunk of my "downtime" at work is due to waiting on other people and/or not having something I can make progress on.

I would love less than a 40 hour work week where the effort is more concentrated, but after a certain point you just can't expect full productivity in a shorter space of time.

[packetlost]

This. If I'm chest deep in code (or other deep technical stuff) I can get about 6 hours of real work a day before my productivity nosedives. But that's maybe a once a week occurrence. The rest of the week is shorter bursts of productivity sprinkled between coordinating with teammates, other teams, etc.. I don't think actually shortening my work week would allow me to meaningfully be as productive with what I currently do. That being said, I WFH some of the time and I took like 30-40 min to vacuum my apartment and it had basically zero effect on my productivity.

[vkk8]

I guess the answer to these problems depends a lot on the job. I don't know why we would expect all sorts of different jobs to nicely fit into the same 9-to-5 5-days-a-week model anyway? For sure there are jobs where that works just fine (manual labour, etc.), but also jobs that would benefit for less working hours and more rest time (many cognitively heavy jobs) or jobs where the best model would be 24/7 readiness to work, but only small number of hours doing the actual work.