Or you go full corporate but cut your hours by interleaving things you enjoy, like hobbies or gym time.

What happens if you take a 90 minute bike ride each day without changing your hours at all? Would anyone notice? Would they care?

Work is about dollars per hour. Salary is a trick.

That's kinda the whole point of being salaried though isn't it? (At least for those of us in the US.) You are an exempt employee as defined by US labor law. You aren't required to receive overtime pay, and you are evaluated on your expertise and the results you deliver.

So if you can get in daily rides and still meet the expectations of your employer, awesome, you're doing it right.

You're likely also doing right by your employer, since the daily exercise is giving you lots of health benefits and keeping you performing at a high level mentally.

Tell this to my employer. They require me to log >= 40 hours per week, they have no problem with overtime but get a stick up their ass about undertime. I lie pretty much every week on my timesheet unless I happen to do overtime that week. Most people I talk to in the company do the same.

Do your hours get billed to a contract or client? Then it makes sense. It’s just a shitty contract that does not account for overhead properly

If it doesn’t, then you are just working for assholes

Nope we are not billed to any contract or client.

Public service announcement: receiving a salary != being exempt from overtime, depending on where you live. In, for example, California, exempt status depends on the actual tasks you perform and the percentage of your hours each week you spend doing exempt vs non-exempt tasks. Thus, even a C-level executive can be owed overtime if they aren’t performing truly managerial work at least 50% of the time.