My ideal would be a mix. One sprint of code. One sprint of building houses.

Buy a house. I love doing yard work on the weekends after 50+ hours of tech startup bombardment all week.

I have a 30-hour-a week coding gig that is pretty easy stuff (enterprise integrations for WordPress plus a little Rails and a lot of "fix this CSS"). I spend the rest of the week playing music. It's a lot of moving boxes and equipment around and performing isn't super rigorous, but it's on your feet for 4 hours, and can be somewhat physical. I got a blister from a jazz gig on upright last night becasue I am out of practice.

I've had physical labor jobs (refinishing airliners, sanding gym floors, bussing tables), and playing music is about as physical of an occupation as I'd like.

IMO, 40 hours a week for a single thing is a bad job. I get plenty of work done in 30, I have a lower pay and live in the sticks, but I like it a lot.

> Maybe if I could just have 3-4 days per year?

Look for a company that offers VTO (volunteer time off). I worked for one that would organize a group volunteer event once per quarter and gave us a maximum of 8 individual days to volunteer per year. There's a ton of fun, physical volunteering opportunities. I've done habitat builds a few times and there are a bunch of parks in the Bay Area that are always willing to put volunteers to work on trail restoration, habitat restoration and other strenuous outdoor activities. One year I even combined all my VTO with a few days of PTO and volunteered in a national park for a couple weeks.

You might something like Habitat for Humanity.

We call those "reminders."

Do you know somebody with a garden? Or maybe there is a community garden nearby?

I second this. I find nothing more grounding after a caffeinated day of coding than pulling a beet out of the ground. Good food gardens (esp. permaculture ones) are fascinatingly complex systems that appeal to the engineering mindset, but involve neither 1) reading nor 2) looking at a screen.