> when you are working as a contractor or freelancer for someone else's project maybe 3h/day is not acceptable. When you've got externally imposed deadlines 3h/day may not be sufficient.

There's an easy solution to that problem: don't take on those projects. If they don't fit into your schedule don't do them.

You could say that but it seems like you will be turning down a lot of work. If you are only working 3 to 4 hours a day it is not that hard to double yours hours for a week or two to meet a client's deadline. It will keep your clients happy and if you charge by the hour it a nice bonus on your invoice.

I think the assumption of the author is that the 3 hours he does work are best-case productive hours. If you work 40+ hours a week, you still have to account for all those staring-at-your screen hours, that are not contributing towards meeting the deadline.

Somewhat related: I found it is a lot easier (and natural) to estimate projects in terms of 'ideal' hours. And then just assume there are only 20 to 25 of those a week. That quite closely matches the 21 hours of the original post.

This is somewhat different but, back when I did consulting work that often involved writing in some form, we tended to think in terms of the work that we could do in a "production day" of about 4 hours. The thinking was that, on a given day, we'd spend about half on project-based work and about half on the phone with clients and others, doing miscellaneous research and "research," internal discussions, and various administrivia. Sometimes we'd buckle down more to get something done and other times we were at conferences and the like--but we found this a good rule-of-thumb.

> When you've got externally imposed deadlines 3h/day may not be sufficient.

Lots of deadlines companies and thus their employees face are externally imposed (often from their customer(s)).

they are also often bullshit deadlines that users dont care about but gets a few brownie points for management.

No true Scotsman fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

I don't think "no true Scotchman" means what you think it means...

It's about criticizing something as invalid, BS, problematic etc. -- is not even about saying something X doesn't belong to an idealized category.

It's about shifting the discussion to "X doesn't belong to an idealized category" AFTER you were OK talking generally about it previously.

This means that when one talks morally/ideologically/etc. about what constitutes "a true scotchman" (e.g. not in the plain sense of citizen of Scotchman") it's not a fallacy to ascribe certain attributes to the notion (because "true" here essentially means "ideal", "most representative" etc, instead of merely "actually existing").

True, they're still deadlines. But, since they are BS, that might be fixed somehow, no?

What evidence do you have the the negotiating partner doesn't have good reasons for insisting on the deadlines despite they look BS to you?