But there is always some expected body of work. If you don't pull your weight, despite working 9 to 5, you might get fired.
I'm one of those "half days" people, and it's not about doing less. It's about realization, that you are productive for less than 8h daily and that difference + commute time is simply wasted. Even if you plug some optimistic numbers, like 6h of productive work vs 8h office + 1h commute, its 30% of time spend on "work" just lost. Daily.
If your employer knew you were only working half-days, do you think they would be unjustified in adding to your workload? Does this work situation require keeping it secret from your employer how much you are working?
How do they determine what is the "expected body of work"? What keeps them from making it too high to actually get done in 8 hours? If it's not knowing that it would take you more than 8 hours to complete, if you expect how much time you actually take is private information and can be less than 8 hours and it's none of their business.
Yes, it is secret, same as it is secret that you spent 8h in the office, but did "only" 6h of productive work. It is an open secret [0].
Well, a lot of it is very subtle, and I guess vary from place to place, person to person. Point is, your "body of work" can be the same, but time spend is certainly higher with office work, simply because you _HAVE_ to spend this time, regardless of the amount of work you do.
Working in an office, I never considered it a secret that I was not productive 100% of the time. I didn't have to lie to my boss about checking some amount of social media, or taking a long coffee break, or checking HackerNews when my brain needed a break (which I consider part of my job to some extent), or chatting with co-workers about how our weekends were. None of this was a secret, open or not, it was all entirely revealed.
Maybe I had unusually tolerant bosses or different than yours. But those very same bosses, who certainly did not expect productivity 100%, if they knew I was only working 4-hour days routinely and spending the other 4 hours on personal matters, would think, hm, it sounds like you don't have enough work to do.
It doesn't seem the same to me, cause if I'm only working 4-hour days, and riding my bike the remainer of the 4 hours -- I'm probably not 100% productive those 4 hours I'm working either!
I mean, I don't begrudge anyone what they do to survive. But it makes me deeply uncomfortable to mislead my bosses like that (like, I have to make sure to keep my personal life entirely secret to make sure I don't slip up and let them know I didn't work at all on Tuesday but went on a hike instead), and I also would feel weird about pushing back when they give me too much work. If they give me so much work that I can't do it in my ordinary work week, I push back -- we can only get so much done in a week. But I'm going to push back because they're assigning so much work that it eats into my daily 4-hour bike ride?
I'm one of those "half days" people, and it's not about doing less. It's about realization, that you are productive for less than 8h daily and that difference + commute time is simply wasted. Even if you plug some optimistic numbers, like 6h of productive work vs 8h office + 1h commute, its 30% of time spend on "work" just lost. Daily.