Any bright ideas to apply when you have to run to work early?
I don't believe this, and I don't see how it squares with "the number of hours you can be productive is limited."
If I'm paying an employee $150k, and he says "the number of hours I can be productive is limited," and then I hear he's waking up early before work to put in 3 hours on a personal project... I'm going to assume that means I'm losing somewhere approaching 3 hours of his productivity.
I'd much rather have an employee work on personal things first then come in refreshed vs burning out and never recharging because I'm demanding their peak "productive" hours.
Every employee I've had that has medium or larger scale hobby outside of work (both in and out of domain) has been a better hire than those who don't. They attack problems differently, they're better organized, and have never complained about burnout.
However, teams that have had a string of mandatory meetings in the AM are measurably less productive in my experience. I think there's something to this.
If i had to guess, i'd say people don't perform well for 8 hours a day. A significant portion of people's butt-in-chair is just that, a butt in the chair. For sake of discussion, lets say only 5 hours of real work is done during that 8 hour stint.
So i think the real question is does 2 hours of side-work before the 8 hour butt-in-chair impact the 5 hours of primary-work? Because if 3 hours are wasted in your 8 hour butt-in-chair, they _might_ not matter where the waste/mental-breaks/whatever are allocated.
Ie, if you mentally need a break from the 2 hours of work, during your butt-in-chair time, perhaps that's a net-wash with other time-wasting behaviors already taking place.
All hypothetical of course. I do know that i've seen numerous studies about how efficient we actually are over 8 hours of butt-in-chair. It's not pretty.
Fixed it for you
1. "All other things equal" applies to productivity pool.
A happier person or a more flexible thinker might gain productive hours.
2. With hobbies you (probably) have to do everything by yourself.
At work you can lean on others for decisions, graphic design, frontend/backend and other things that might drain you more (because its not your expertise)
3. As others have said: Hobbies are optional
Which probably affects you eventhough you _might_ still have productivity-reserves
4. Work is SO much more than 100% productivity.
Meetings, social time, administration, clean-up, etc... might be things you can do while not 100% focused.
And as others have said, everyone will be better off if you start valuing outcome, employee happiness, and other things as well.
It comes of as kindoff entitled to presume that all personal productivity it something that you as an employer have "lost".
You can't just demand all of the results.
$150k in the US Midwest is a lot better than $300k in SF or NY.
For me it used to be work 100%, hobbies 0-10%. By frontloading my hobbies and doing them first, it's now work 90%, hobbies 90%. A good net gain. At the same time my happiness has increased by a good 20%, because as you know, no one feels great watching TV for 3 hours.
The reason why this works is, if you work like a semi-normal human even if you are tired you will do the thing. However hobbies, being "optional" you will skip. By flipping things around you still have that push to perform well at work, so it stays relatively the same.
By the way, with kids, frontloading becomes even more important.
Edit: I try to have 5 main todos every day. 1 work, 4 hobbies. It averages out to about 11 hours (work being 8). I use my "hour" of lunch to play guitar, which is another hobby of mine, but it's the only time I can squeeze it in.