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I simply can't put in more than ~20 hours of productive work per week anyway. Yes, I used to sit at my desk in the office, but I was basically doing nothing and just wasting time. Either I'm just lazy (highly likely), or there is a cap for the number of productive hours you can spend doing creative work.

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For me it depends a lot on what kind of work it is. Architecture/design/troubleshooting or other mentally taxing work I agree fully, maybe 4h after lunch per day. I can easily put in 40h+ of productive work when implementing straightforward solutions though (coding, documentation, testing etc).

I would agree. I can easily put hours into straight programming when there is clear designs and goals. Actually designing the program though can just get exhausting.

I won't discount personality differences but I've certainly seen it enough in others that I figure there is some sort of mental limit.

A lot of discussion on automation is on removing the tedious, basic stuff so we can focus on the more difficult mental tasks. I do wonder though if perhaps we won't get as big a benefit as we think just due our nature.

Dirac worked four hours in the morning and then had fun the rest of the day. He would have agreed with you and it paid off for him ;)

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