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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

I work the longest hours of anyone I know (friends implore me to stop). I'm one of the first cars in the garage, one of the last ones out. Start at 8, home at 8, 15 minute lunch, 2 hours at night with overseas team. A few hours cram-work Sunday night. 3-5 hours of sleep M-F (5.5 hours is a rare luxury). These numbers are accurate and consistent every week for last 12 months.

It's still not 80 hours a week.

So I get a bit miffed when people cry "Wah, we all work 80-hour weeks!" No, I don't think so.

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It's easier if you don't have days off.

You typically don't have a concept of weekend/not-weekend when you're working 80+ hours.

I've done periods of what I call "sleep/work", where I wake up with my laptop next to my head, immediately start working, and work all day: definitely not leaving my house and usually only even leaving the room to grab deliveries or use the restroom. I'd work until I literally couldn't stay awake, with the laptop next to my head and ready for when I wake up to continue. So literally for entire days I'll have done nothing but sleep and work, with even eating being done while working.

You can certainly do it, but it's an (unproductive) expression of mental illness that will additionally worsen every facet of your existence in short order. Elon's definitely mentally ill too: either for doing it regularly or being enough of a sociopath to claim that others should do it on his behalf.

Sure, I believe that, but my real point is: for how long did you sustain that sleep/work mode? Did you go a year working 80+ hours, every single week?

Because what I see is people do one ultra-crunch week, and then shout "OMG I work 80-hour weeks!" as if it was the normal occurrence, when the reality is they're working ~50hrs on average.

6 or so weeks of working every waking hour before settling into an average of 12 hours a day for the last 7 months.

Again, people do it but it's not useful. Once you back yourself into a corner, all you can think about is moving one foot in front of the other no matter how inefficent the path you're taking is.

From there the only thing that will stop you is some outside factor, because you no longer have the clarity or discipline it takes to stop.

If you're lucky some great windfall from all the inefficient work you're doing will be that outside factor, but most likely the outside factor will be your health failing, or interpersonal relationships failing, or everything failing anyways because you aren't even at 50% effectiveness to make up for the 2x time you're putting in.

Maybe you should stop focusing on winning the hours worked competition and focus on finding a new job.

> Start at 8.

Nice of you to finally join us there, buddy. Thought you weren't coming in today.

Ha!!

Why?

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