My work week for you.
3.5 days which is 29 hours of office time, which with some double booking here and there equals 40 hours of scheduled patient time a week give or take a few hours. I work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 8-5 (lunch from 1-2) and Friday from 8 to 1 (Ocassionally I'll see a patient Friday afternoon if I need a couple of hours to get someone in for a big case and I don't want to be disturbed by my hygenists). My weekends are from Friday 1PM until Tuesday at 8AM. Roughly 20 Monday afternoons a year I teach at UCONN Dental school, and roughly 8 Wednesdays and 1 or 2 Fridays a year I take off for Continuing Education courses. Throw in 3 to 4 full weeks of vacation a year and a few assorted holidays that we close the office, and there's my schedule.
When I'm in the office, I work hard, and frankly at the end of a day I'm often mentally "fried" from having been on the go all day, which sometimes makes coming home an being "daddy" for a few hours before my kids goto bed a bit challenging, although very rewarding. After a year or 2 in the same practice as you get to know your patients, and patients get to know(and trust/respect you), you can quite easily turn out some big time production numbers. But, at first you will see a bit of occassional skepticism as a young dentist when you propose that big crown and bridge/implant case to a patient, but what often happens in your first year or so of working in a practice is the "seeds" you plant for a big cases(often the esthetic elective cases), will start being done in years 2,3,4 etc, and thats when you'll see the big production numbers.
Where you practice also makes a difference, in general, a rural location = less competition = more patients = higher production numbers even with lower fees. Bigger areas = more competition = more marketing needed = less initial production, although often more "big" cases be done.
Either way, after a few years of practice, very few dentists tend to work more than 35-40 hours, because you start to realize often that when you make a very good living working less with more free time/family time is better than making a very, very good living working more with less free time/family time. The shifting point in decreasing your hours worked/week is often in conjunction with kids arriving in one's family, sounds like a pathetic Hallmark card or something, but just about anyone with kid(s) will know what I'm saying.
