That's why I go to the gym, or clean my apartment, or cook a nice meal for myself (GF lives in another country so currently solo-cooking most nights), and call my GF.

I used to have really bad habits with respect to keeping my apartment clean. Not dirty, but just generally messy (bathrooms were terrible though, I'll admit). And it was because of the time it would take to do it. Acknowledging my true time budget I now keep a nice, though not spotless, apartment because I take 15 minutes each day to straighten something up. Some areas need a Saturday morning to tackle. But the bathroom is cleaned once a week. The floors get cleaned throughout the month in segments.

If you've ever spent time on money management with tools like YNAB or Mint, it's very similar. You realize where your time is going, and what time is left available. You mete it out in reasonable amounts to the tasks that need to be done. When I'd only clean my apartment once a month (at best) it was a major undertaking. It was intimidating and I'd skip months because of that. Amortize the time cost across the month, it's now "easy", and my apartment takes 20 minutes to get ready for company in the worst case of short notice from friends.

Not all work is (or needs to be) "intellectually productive."

I see statements like this on HN a lot, particularly from developers (myself included), but most of them cringe at the thought of having 2-4 hours of administrative work every day.

What sort of work would you class as administrative?

Meta-tasks around projects. Communicating/coordinating with other people. In big-corp land, mandatory training and time spent on time tracking (a bit ironic). Dealing with git screw-ups by people new to it.

> Dealing with git screw-ups by people new to it.

I do this all the time. Of course, the person new to it is usually myself.

I think the problem is when such administrative work interrupts the intellectually productive work.

I think another key component of administrative work is that even if it's time sensitive, it's not urgent.

Software Design is intellectually productive. If you aren't, you are not designing and implementing software.

I actually disagree - maybe 60% of good software dev is really really thinking. A lot of it is automatic, based on learning the crafts good habits, repeating motifs, testing can be repetitive but is important to do as you go. Making sample data, talking to people writing emails - so there is a chunk that is not deep foo.

This correlates with my anecdotal observation that the smartest people can write bad code, and it takes them quite a while to absorb the stuff of writing good code.. a couple years at minumum perhaps. Its not just about raw thinking power - perhaps the important bits are, but not all of it.