Most of the time its not extreme enough to take a full day off. It just means you run at 50%, or 30% capacity. But you can't really speak up about not having that capacity, and if you take the day off it comes out of your vacation. At the end of the week though, the work is done because you buckle down.
This is why open offices and daily standups and constant micromanagement are terrifying to me - everyone is VERY happy with my work output and I'm considered an A player, but if you watched me on an hour by hour basis you'd have a much different opinion of me.
The last bit is funny since it's basically the same thing for people with impostor syndrome (which seems pretty common in the industry) but those people may or may not subjectively feel like they're trying their best regardless. A trick I think helps in either case is to compare with others -- are you obviously at the bottom of the pack by your own standards (which are probably too high)? If no, stop stressing. (For some reason this doesn't develop into an ego thing for me, or a devaluation of other coworkers whose work I think is less stellar than my own even though I'm not putting in 100%... But if that happened that would be a whole new problem.) At one job seeing a 95th percentile commit count per month that was less than 12 (with an average of about 4-5) made me worry a lot less about not committing anything for over a week. The job before that I was used to committing something every day or sometimes every other day.
At my previous job at a startup on a team of 3 developers, I accounted for 75% of the commits over a 6 month period. Many of these were big multi-week projects (one- and two-way integration with EMRs, or scraping the ones that didn't have an API).
I was the first one they "indefinitely furloughed" when their investor tightened the belt.
When a previous company had a major layoff because of our only client tightening his belt, who got let go? Primarily the people who were paid more than the others, including veteran developers who were simultaneously developing and acting as project managers leading the teams. Only a handful of developers remained.
> everyone is VERY happy with my work output and I'm considered an A player, but if you watched me on an hour by hour basis you'd have a much different opinion of me
Same here, actually.
I've had days where I knocked out "estimated 4 hour" tickets in 20 minutes. I also have days where I can't focus for the first and last 4 hours worth a damn.
This is why open offices and daily standups and constant micromanagement are terrifying to me - everyone is VERY happy with my work output and I'm considered an A player, but if you watched me on an hour by hour basis you'd have a much different opinion of me.