[jotm]

That sounds great - but don't you get tired? After 6-8 hours of mental work (incl. learning), my ability to understand things is severely diminished.

I can go on working on simple tasks, physical work or something that I already know, but not on something new or anything that requires extensive of thinking/planning. Using any drugs?

[EC1]

My current day job is a mobile frontend developer. I'm not thinking up intense algorithms, doing crazy math, calculations, or whatnot. The hardest thing I do is performance optimization, and since the apps we develop right now are incredibly simple, it's by and large cookie cutter work.

It's not mentally exhausting because of my perspective on my job: I'm basically a construction worker, but in a virtual domain. So I'm doing construction, minus the intense physical work, with barely any mental workload as well. My day job just takes time. Dragging pixels. Uploading pixels. Shifting pixels. Zooming in on pixels. Deleting pixels. Asking for input on combinations of pixels. It's all pixels.

My day job is rarely mentally intensive, nor is my post-day job. Drafting contracts? Sending emails? Talking on the phone? I can't really remember the last task I had to do that wasn't purely just DOING. I can't remember the last time I had to bust some pen and paper out and seriously think about some sort of methodology.

So no, I don't find it tiring. I find it rewarding, especially since my hobby just so happened to turn into my career. I did UI/design on my spare time just for fun, then someone hired me, now I do it full time, and started my own company.

Yeah I use drugs. I use adderall (only used it twice in the past half year) if the previous night consisted of less than 6 hours of sleep (I always make sure to get 8 hours a night no matter what, doesn't matter how much work I have) and I smoke pot a few times a day, as well as a lot of coffee (2 strong in the morning - decaf throughout the day). It's not too bad right? I think my only "problem" is weed, and even then, I don't think it's a problem. I smoke because it's like relaxing WHILE working. I can smoke a bit, get this nice mild head rush for a few hours, and keep working, all the while enjoying the sun more, enjoying the tunes more, and generally being happier. Kills two birds with one stone.

[biscarch]

I do something very similar (although with an approach that is different) and I find that doing harder intellectual work has to be balanced by doing harder physical work (roughly speaking).

As an example, some of my recent intellectual work (and "distractions") included writing a book on Haskell web development, building out a product, some Android contracts and casually reading new papers. This is balanced in my life by training to compete at a professional athletic level (beach volleyball/high jump training. Roughly: Oly lifting, sprint workouts, plyos, etc) and music (Playing drums, guitar, bass and covering songs on my own).

Both training for athletics and playing music have a mental states that lend themselves to "recovery" from intellectual pursuits.