This post is on point. In my graduate lab, there were people that I thought were working 14-15 hour days regularly. Then I started paying attention and realized that they spent about 1/3 of that time being productive and the rest of the time they were just faking it. If I had to add a piece of advice, I would say don't use others' schedules as a measure of how hard you work. Do your best when you're at your best and the results will come....and sometimes they might be results that you actually want!

With the way science currently works, I think how valuable a post-doc is for the person doing the post-doc depends on what you want to do with your PhD. If the goal is to have a high profile academic research career, it's a chance to grind out more publications and network with more established scientists without having all the other responsibilities of a job (committee meetings, faculty meetings, teaching, etc.). Frankly, even in that case, I think the model of a post-doc should be changed completely. As graduate students, we spend years at the bench becoming good experimentalists and as post-docs, more years at the bench becoming slightly better experimentalists. Then when you become a P.I., you rarely use those skills and have to develop people management skills, multitasking skills, etc.--things nobody taught you how to do, but knew you would have to do them. Essentially, you start over but in on-the-job training, which you could have done right out of graduate school. How about having a post-doc period where you become P.I. in training (a junior P.I. in an established lab, for example) and learn how to run a lab instead of doing more of what you already know how to do in a different setting?

Furthermore, if you want to go a more non-traditional route, I think the post-doc should be avoided completely. You should use those years developing those skills you'll need for your non-traditional scientific career instead of becoming slightly better at something you're not going to do.

I'm in the system!