>>2703I think he means that a person can spend too much time thinking about productivity, rather than actually getting anything done.
As a student I was told that it was expected that I would do 2-3 hours of homework every night. I ended up recording my time spent doing homework and it ended up being something like 45 minutes. 90 minutes was a good night.
When I went to uni I was told it was expected that I would spend about 40 hours per week on studies. I was also working full-time, so I had limited time to study. Most days I would go to the city, sit at a cafe and spend 1-2 hours noting down a lecture or working on an assignment. I probably only averaged around 10 hours a week, and passed with good grades.
This year I have been unemployed, so I thought I'd scale up my studies to account for the fact that I'm working less. Nope. I fuck around and maybe do 2 hours of study if a duedate is coming up.
So yeah either I'm some kind of super genius, or people heavily overrate the amount of time required to do work.
When I'm working on my own projects I find that I can make pretty solid progress in 3-4 hours. It's enough time to get in 2-3 solid work sessions, where you sit down, work through a problem, and implement a solution. If I pushed myself harder I could maybe fit in one more work session of 90 minutes or so. After that it would just be mentally exhausting. However dumb shit like reading through emails or sitting in front of a word document, I could do that all day.
Maybe there are people out there who can actually put in a solid 8-12 hours of work in a day, but these people have different minds from the rest of us. I have a wealthy relative who went from nothing to owning his own factory. He's got a shitty personality, has a couple of basic hobbies, and seems to spend the rest of his time walking around the house doing small pointless tasks. To me it almost seems as though he feels uncomfortable sitting still, and is doing shit because sitting around is difficult for him. He even got a terminal illness but just keeps on going. He doesn't even spend his money on anything or have a family. I'd ask him why he works so hard but he has such an insufferable personality there never seems to be a good time to ask. I feel like a lot of "successful" people have this strange personality, where somehow they are unable to feel comfortable being idle.
I've also met a few successful people who have nice personalities, but I think all of them have some kind of energy that drives them to keep doing shit that normal people don't have. Us normal people should focus on setting a handful of goals for the day, and knocking them down. Repeat for a week and you can get a surprising amount of shit done. It's when you get complacent and stop setting goals for yourself that you start wasting time. That's why all this modern software development shit like scrum and daily meetings exists. It forces people to say what they're going to do today, because that's really a big part of getting anything done.