Before you respond, ask yourself: Are you and your co-workers truly using your time optimally today? What does that mean? Well: little to no foozball, recreational web browsing, personal phone calls, facebooking, twitter, phone calls, long lunches, late breakfasts, early dinners, personal business, etc.

I find it takes me a lot of self control to limit myself from these things, but when I do, I find myself giving it my all. I also find there's no way to give it my all more than about 6 hours a day, day after day. It's like a professional athlete: recovery is very very important. If you are constantly working without a recovery, you will burn out.

In my 6 hour days, I end up getting about 2 hours of mandatory recovery in there, and even then, it's structured recovery time. I don't hang out with my co-workers or my "boss" - I actually get the hell out of there and talk to sales, marketing, or biz-dev. Otherwise the conversations always degrade into the problem at hand and I lack a fresh perspective.

It's a marathon, not a sprint. But sometimes you have to sprint. If you have a product launch in 5 days and it's pivotal for the company, then you better sprint for at least the next 3 days - pulling longer days. After that, you'll need a proportional recovery. To do otherwise is unsustainable.

That last bit is what has me most concerned about your question - does your manager realize it's a marathon, and not a sprint? He can't just run the engine harder and expect it to perform. Otherwise, good luck in your job search.

Wrong. Teamwork skills learned through sports would be lost. Not all people can be part of a math-club team, or robotics team. How will they learn these skills to become good team-workers later in life? How would they learn to lead a group of people?

Sports in school allows for greater diversity in experiences, even for geeks and nerds. If it is passed up by those geeks and nerds, they will not have the experience they need to be leaders or even efficient workers.