Time can be organized into large blocks
Half of the day is wasted on sleeping, eating, bathroom use and other time consuming tasks that aren't intended to help you succeed. They're just things that need to be done for the sake of being human. The other 12 hours? Well... this is why you need to think like an engineer!
Time is not measured by hours but tasks
If you want to think like an engineer, time is not hour by hour. Time is actually a list of tasks that need to be completed to get to the next point. Don't get me wrong, you can break down a task based on how many hours it will take to complete and use hours as a basis of measurement. But this is conforming to the structure that everyone operates on for communication purposes only.
The everyday dilemma of working from home during COVID-19
The coronavirus really brought this idea to light as we work from home. How many times have you woken up in the morning and thought about how you are going to complete all your tasks in 8 hours? Panic ensues and at the end of the day, no matter how much work you've done, all you can focus on is not having enough time to complete it all. All this leads to is a pile of useless stress. All because you were thinking of the world in terms of time.
Professional engineers are professionals for a reason. We know what we are capable of and we know how long it will take us to do something. If you attack us by asking why it takes so long, we'll fire right back at you and ask you why you don't do it yourself???
There's an old saying that you aren't paying us for the time it takes to complete something, but the time it took us to learn how to complete it. It has a lot of validity and can be applied to almost any skill based task.
Focus on the task at hand.
Engineers will focus on the steps necessary to complete the task. We think of breaking the tasks into smaller pieces so we can manage our own expectations of what is considered a "completed task".
By thinking this way, we can feel more accomplished rather than beat down by the stress of time.
Many of this know this already, but we don't internalize it because we don't have many chance to practice the concept.
Engineers at the end of the day, delivery solutions and if you think a solution can be figured out in a fixed amount of time, all you are doing is setting yourself up for failure. Think of how many projects are led by the thought of "how much time do we need to complete the task?" Most of these projects will often yield stressful workers that will eventually burn out.
Engineers know that you can spend 3 shitty hours on a task and get no where. The task is done when its done. Not just because you worked on it for X amount of hours.
So the next time you are focusing on the hours needed to complete the task. Stop for a minute and trust your own skills. You should know roughly how long it takes to complete something, so don't focus on the time. Rather, focus on how you can break down the tasks to a smaller piece and then just knocking them out. You'll feel much more positive and upbeat about your work and you'll often find that you would have spent less time on the project than when you were focused on time!