At my old job, as a development DBA, I had minimal self-directed time. I was in a dev support role so I had a list of tickets to work on and could choose from those. Unless we were in crisis mode which was most of the time so I had a set prioritization of tickets.

A month into my new job, as a production DBA, almost all my time is self directed. There was an existing DBA that had backups set up and rolling smoothly and I worked with him at my last job before he left so he knows I don't need a lot of babysitting.