When it was just one job, I worked 3 or 4 days a week. Now I work 6 or 7 days a week (we have an MVP release soon). Both jobs are remote.

I sometimes even do extra freelancing provided it's related to bitcoin, but having small children at home makes it extra challenging.

One of the jobs I strictly asked for no meetings (everything async. They've tried to set meetings up, but my friend, who is the director, benefits from me doing the hard work so he covers for me). We're a team of about 8 devs and 8 rent seekers with about $20 million in funding. I'm the best developer in their team, so they kind of let me work on my terms.

The other job I only have two meetings (2x30 minutes per week) for sync ups. I use the excuse (which is kind of true) that I have to put my kids to bed, but since the beginning I told them this is as much as I can commit. Our founder has $100 million in cash from selling his previous bootstrapped business and we're only two programmers. They are in absolute awe that I came up with the MVP a few weeks in advance.

For both jobs, I'm actually praised very often for delivering so well. Almost no bug reports on both ends.

Once I was promoted to engineering manager, but I hated having so many meetings and not doing any deep work.

I do go for very long walks (I walked 20km today) while my children nap or play, where I figure out how I'm going to do difficult work. Cal Newport coined this "walking meditation" (I don't think meditation is the right term).

Basically can train yourself to do hard stuff (for example, try to do difficult math or CS / coding challenges) only using your brain, then try to go home and see if your solution works. It took some time to train, but I can hold and design somewhat complex data structures or database designs on my brain like this.

Not trying to brag, as actually I am not that smart compared to my peers (I flunked calculus and algebra in college). I've simply put the effort and now I see those who were smarter/better than me thinking so slowly that it pains me work with them. They're also highly distracted, which believe it or not takes a huge toll on your productivity.

Cal Newport -- Deep Work changed my life.

I think some jobs simply have less workload, the hard part is to get in and find them. For example, getting into the top Japanese universities (Tokyo Uni, Waseda) is extremely hard, but once you're inside it's extremely easy. Same happens with other Asian countries. I did once work for a guy who was self-funding a Bitcoin-related project and it was very hard work. I worked my @ss off for two months to release an MVP and ended up making only a few thousand bucks (non-KYC sats though ;) )

But I would say most jobs allow this provided you can skip the shallow work. I have friends working for MS, Meta, Google, Youtube, small startups, everywhere. They don't follow the 80/20 rule, they still waste a lot of time in useless tasks. When I get tagged on a bug that doesn't move the needle, I leave it for later™️.