In my experience, there is no such thing as "getting through your tasks", as you are expected to pick up more tasks from a never ending bucket of tasks [1]. Of course this varies from place to place, but is in general true. Your peers and managers are more likely to notice you leaving early, or "not working" on the Friday, than they are to notice you working your butt off on the previous 4 days, to be honest.
[1] Edit: this is because of the nature of knowledge work, and the difficulty in estimating duration of work, difficulty, and quality. If you finish early, the powers that be are more likely to attribute it to bad powers of augury as opposed to extra hard work. This might sound overly negative, but I have seen this consistently throughout a few decades of experience (yet, I still work hard... go figure).
Same, I've never worked anywhere (other companies, or my own after the first couple of years) where you could really be "done". There was always more to do if you finished the critical path tasks.
One of the most important changes for me, going from normal employment to self-employed, was no longer being paid by the hour. I don't know what it is about it but when I'm on the clock, all I can think about is the clock. I love being rewarded financially for being more efficient than expected and finishing early, and I love having the liberty to take a bit longer (and accept that it's not going to earn me more money) to get the job done right to my own satisfaction.
I work remote for a company that is very intentional in not asking for any specific hours or amount of time worked—business value delivered is the only thing we care about. Yet, I still find myself feeling the need to warm a chair (in my home office!) for 40ish hours per week. Part of it is still external pressure (my wife would have a hard time understanding if I was working less than "full-time"), but I also have to fight this internal conflict of defining "work" as "butt in seat" vs. "delivering business value". This despite the fact that I've worked salaried positions for the majority of my career.
Interesting. Where I work, we have a well defined scope for a sprint. That will get divided into tasks and then are assigned to team members. So I usually know what is my pipeline for next 2 weeks and it is fairly finite. Unless of course I am working on a more exploratory project where scope is not well defined. Of course people falling sick, or getting stuck in their task and needing help, and few other attributes can change that to some extent, but not a lot. So in summary, even though there is an endless supply for tasks that can be done, for the sprint, it is fairly finite.
Also I dont spend less time at work, I just use post lunch hour, and 30-60 mins throughout the day to do learning.
Where I work it's generally assumed that when you run out of stuff from the sprint you start working on the backlog or looking at stuff on the list of things we know we'll have to deal with in the future.
In my experience, there is no such thing as "getting through your tasks", as you are expected to pick up more tasks from a never ending bucket of tasks [1]. Of course this varies from place to place, but is in general true. Your peers and managers are more likely to notice you leaving early, or "not working" on the Friday, than they are to notice you working your butt off on the previous 4 days, to be honest.
[1] Edit: this is because of the nature of knowledge work, and the difficulty in estimating duration of work, difficulty, and quality. If you finish early, the powers that be are more likely to attribute it to bad powers of augury as opposed to extra hard work. This might sound overly negative, but I have seen this consistently throughout a few decades of experience (yet, I still work hard... go figure).