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My wife and I just started slowing down to ramp into retirement, so we're both working 4-day weeks.

We had the idea to stagger the days, alternating between Fridays and Mondays off. That works out so that weekends alternate between 2 days and 4 days. And a 4-day weekend is enough that you can really do something - an actual trip or something. Having that every other week is really nice.

When I'm not on site I work 4x10 hour days, usually 0900-1900, with 1h25 break.

When I'm out and about I'll work as long as I need to, 12 hours is a typical day, but any hours I do over 35 per week get paid time-and-a-half. If I'm out on an event and say staying in a hotel in rural Norfolk, I'd far rather work from 10 or 11 to 2300 than do 1500-2300, it's not like I'm going to make use of the extra 4 hours in the morning.

A 6 hour day sounds awful, I barely get into top gear until about 5 hours into the day on a typical desk day.

What are you doing for the first 5 hours? I typically find that if I'm actually working and not in too many meetings I'm basically checked out after 5 straight hours if I haven't wandered off already.

Generally firefighting, dealing with emails and various minor requests that all take less than half an hour but involve a lot of task switching.

I do a lot of this too. The worst is when the company I work for tries to prevent this from happening. I seem to -need- that time to "gear up" as you say. I also find it very rewarding to help my colleagues with these types of quick issues, as it often prevents issues from ballooning, encourages collaboration and builds trust.

When they force me into "developer timeout" and effectively isolate me, I just sit there struggling for the first half of the day anyway.

Change job dude, you are going to have a burn out

My job is easy, crisis-proof and generally fun, not to mention 6-7-hour workdays which many can only dream about (not a common thing to find at my location). I just hate getting up in mornings, having fixed time schedule and spending many days in a row working this way. But that's the standard almost everybody has to deal with. So I don't feel like changing the job. Perhaps I'm going to return to flexible-schedule gigs someday, that felt better except too insecure. I just hope the society is going to move to 4-day workweek. It's been so long since it last decreased the workweek length.

In fact I only share details about my sub-optimal perceived well-being because people tend to come up with useful suggestions of relevant supplements and practices. E.g. from my own experience I can say homemade kombucha can boost after-work evening well-being significantly (feels like some batches boost serotonin or something like that).

I know you're not to supposed to listen to advice on the Internet, but perhaps improving/changing your sleeping habits if you want to stay in your job?

If Saturday is the one day you are getting good sleep, then there is some improvement to be done. Perhaps reading a book before bed, and trying to go to bed early, can create a new sleep routing for your sleep hygiene? Worth a try! Hope you feel less tired!

> I know you're not to supposed to listen to advice on the Internet

Perhaps that's the conventional wisdom yet advices on the Internet are exactly what I hunt for by writing this kind of comments here :-) For a reasonably rationally minded person this is a great input of things to explore. Many such advices already changed my life for good.

Another thing to look into is whether you have snoring / sleep apnea. Most people who do, it seems, are not aware of it. 2 easy, objective tests:

1) Ask your sleeping partner, if you have one, if you snore.

2) Record yourself sleeping. I used an app called SnoreLab which does audio analysis to give you a numerical rating and pulls clips of likely snoring moments so you don't have to scrub through the entire night's recording. The app also gives a pretty exhaustive list of recommendations for fixing snoring.

Many people have snoring / apnea and don't know it / are in denial. Poor sleep quality / being tired is a symptom. Fixing this can add quality years to your life, so worth looking into.

I often snore when I sleep on my back. So I always sleep on my belly and don't snore. This developed before I even finished high school. I have never been (and am not) even slightly overweight.

Sleep apnea often develops during puberty when the voice box changes, which lines up with the high-school timeframe. Being overweight can certainly make it worse, but apparently an above-average number of firefighters have sleep apnea, and they're not exactly an overweight group.

Not saying you have sleep apnea or that sleeping on your side/belly isn't enough to deal with it, simply some information.

(It's certainly possible that the reason an above-average number of fire-fighters have sleep apnea is that 1) they're more likely to have people hear them snoring, and 2) the people screened out of the military for sleep apnea often respond by becoming firefighters.)

Weight is often a cause but is not necessary to produce apnea. The human breathing apparatus is just weird.

I'm glad you have a way to prevent snoring. But I wonder if sleeping on your belly isn't also bad for your sleep. Everything I've read recommends side sleeping for back-snorers. I've seen some sources say belly sleeping is bad for you as well.

In any case, good luck on your health journey

Move to the Netherlands. Our workweeks are 28hr on average (that includes part time work, but I think that’s still like 50% of all people).

Ok. Thank you. I'm studying Dutch already (seriously).

Dude, change job. You can absolutely find a software job where they let you work later in the day.

I used to have a software job but am not sure I want to return to that. I prefer communicating to people. Writing code gets me severe ADHD attacks :-]