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Comment by kuchenbecker | Hacker News Reader

Ive worked a 110 hour week, a few 80-100 hour weeks.

But stable state more than 60 burnout is within a month.

That must also be some weird definition of work. Otherwise this doesn’t even leave time for meals, personal hygiene or for communicating with your s.o, let alone any kind of rest.

Not everyone has a s.o. In addition you can work remotely, order everything in, and nothing truly terrible happens skipping a week of hygiene.

I think I frequently have days like that if I add my side projects as work on top of actual work. I wouldn't want to spend that time on actual work as of now though.

I usually don't eat for the first 12 hours and then at some point eat everything I have for the day all at once. Kind of intermittent fasting, but not intentionally or for those reasons.

I.e. if I am excited about a particular side project I would do that.

So really depends on whether the work is exciting enough. If it is, this would be easy. It is rare if you are working for someone else or specifically a large company though.

If it is truly interesting work then you wake up focus completely in it and all of sudden it is end of day. In that case it is a little bit like an addiction where you just always have to build this one thing more, delaying eating, sleep, etc.

For usual work I would maybe only consider it if I was paid 4x the usual hourly rate for it.

My wife covered the slack that week and I'm 100% family after 6pm most nights

Covered the slack? I do not follow.

Edit: oh you must mean household chores, I was thinking about the App. That your wife was so pissed off she decided to cover the monitor your Slack was open on.

What's the point though of working so much you have no time left to live your life? Making money is just a means to be able to live IMO.

There's different styles to it, depending on where you live, how your life is, and it means to "live your life" for you. E.g. you could have certain periods where you work really, really hard, and then you take a longer break, month, 3 months, 6 months, etc. Or you could work really hard to try and get an early state of financial independence. At that point living life becomes very easy, because you know you can just quit to do whatever you want, you are not dependent on anyone else so much less stress. Otherwise job market, your company state, leadership etc will be unnecessary stressors.

I completely agree but I will say that as somebody who intellectually understands that principle, overwork and burnout are still insanely common and arguably even rewarded in some work cultures / tech in general, and I screw this up a lot.

Even people who understand this rule / philosophy end up violating it if they're not careful.

... and with that I think I'm probably going to sign off for the day. It's late.

Cuz for some people work is fun. It's like asking a guy who likes fishing why he fishes so much. "But you've already caught enough for dinner...?"

Agreed. I’ve put in days where I did nothing but work because the project was fun and also due in a week or very soon. Food really doesn’t take that long especially if you order in or pick up close by. Doing this consistently though would surely lead to burnout. Unless, of course, you just consistently love the project you’re working on. Even then, you need a break.

You worked 16 hours a day for 7 days? I doubt that - you would be getting only 3-4 hours sleep max?

Don’t really understand the deniers here. I’ve also worked through weeks of literally waking up and building software until time to go to bed, 7 days a week. It is definitely possible, but it destroys you mentally. It was never the expectation that it would be the norm, so my wife was supportive.

Were you 63 years old when you worked like that, like Phil?

No, but I'm not talking about Phil. People here are claiming no one can work that much. You can, but it's not healthy or sustainable.

Millions of old guys work like that. The old dude who owns your local bodega probably works like that.

For him work constitutes for the most part just being at the bodega. I worked from home for about 5 years. I was at home nearly all the time, and did concentrated work 8-9 hours a day. Can I claim I actually worked 16 hours a day just because I was at home and there were deep learning training runs running in my garage? Of course not. When I say "work" I specifically mean _doing_ something, not just being there.

I got about 5-6 hours of sleep, and meals were 10 minutes. Basically most waking hours for a week.

1 week of that is not that big a deal as long as it's not expected.

My father works partly 18h a day for several weeks only with breaks for fast eating and 3h sleeping. It's not like that he enjoys it much. But as a self-employed you have to work that much if you want to keep your customers (delivery date is in the quote, so you have to deliver). He has done that for the last 40 years haha since I know him never had been different.

I'm the same, I like to work.

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