What I am hired to do is very frequently not what I actually end up doing all the time. I'm a software engineer by trade so you could say a lot of this WFH/work less than 40 hours talk is directed at my profession.

In any given day I'm doing some of the following:

1) adding features to the services/infrastructure I own
2) root causing bugs
3) helping unstick other engineers with their problems
4) designing up solutions to longer term problems
5) meetings (often frivolous)
6) random sidebar discussions about various goings on in the company/broader world

At what point do I consider my job "done" in a day? The list of things to do next is nearly infinite, but the list of roadblocks to accomplishing those things is also nearly infinite. The only thing that determines whether or not I pick up a task is whether I can tie it back to some piece of direction from management.

e.g. I want to add a new API to a service I own. As part of this service I need to interact with several other downstream service APIs owned by other teams. I realize one of their APIs doesn't support my use case. I file a ticket with that team, put it on their radar and hope to hear back from them that their's either a work around or the work that I started is now blocked.

This happens daily. You either find work arounds or work stalls out waiting on other teams. At what point am I being greedy by waiting for the other teams? My waiting is a direct result of management's failure to not coordinate initiatives better and thus create inefficiencies in their business. The whole not working 40 hours a week thing isn't a result of laziness on my part but incompetence on the part of management and the board for determining a proper course of action and aligning teams to that course.

Lastly, I'm a human with a finite amount of energy in a given day and these problems are complex and draining and sometimes you just run out of steam. That's not laziness, that's just reality