I think it's highly dependent on who you are, what you demand of yourself and your situation, and where you end up working. In corporate, I had one position where I worked crazy hours for the first 5 days of the month, calculating publisher's commissions/payouts based on 200 different contracts and deals. There were literally times I worked all night on the fourth and went home on the 5th whenever I got the checks out. Another place, I worked pretty heavy hours for the first 10 days of the month closing out the books for the previous month. In public, I would work much heavier hours until April and then it was a breeze the rest of the year.
For all these positions, there was balance of time off. For instance when I worked all night on the 4th, I generally didn't come back to work until the 7th. When I closed the books the first 10 days of the month, I would take off a few days right before the end of the month. A huge caveat to this though is that you have to have supervisors who 1) understand how cyclical accounting is and 2) trust that you are actually working and not goofing off. If you find yourself in an environment where you're working crazy hours and you don't have a supervisor that understands that the cyclical nature of accounting isn't spreadable over the period, you're probably not going to be happy there.
BTW, I worked with another guy who was very well respected, and had a reputation for being very knowledgeable and focused. He worked until 6 every day and he went home, no matter what. You can do that if you don't spend 30 minutes talking at the coffee machine and another 30 checking your email or facebook or whatever. He gave at least 8-9 hours of solid, focused work every day and then went home, and his supervisors respected it.
AUD - 88
FAR - 90
REG - 85
BEC - 88
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