If you're even a little bright (which is the most I, personally, can claim) and capable of actually Getting Shit Done when you are working (so, you do, in fact, know your shit, and have decent sense/taste for where to apply effort), surprisingly few hours a week are needed to maintain or even exceed par, lots of places.
[EDIT] Though I guess my main technique for ensuring fully-actually-working time is effective is that I'm fairly serious about tightening feedback loops. This is basically like doing your mise en place when cooking. Make sure as much working time as possible is actually working, and that you can do a write-build-test cycle as fast as possible, make it easy to hop in and do five minutes of work and truly accomplish something, et c.