Comment by pyalot2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyalot2 | Hacker News Reader

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Working 14 hours a day, 7 days the week will not acomplish more than working 8 hours a day, 5 days the week. This is already true of factory production line workers. How much more true do you think this is for mentally exhausting activities like information workers.

This is what's called "dumb working". Dumb because your productivity will drop permanently more than 60% if you do it for prolonged periods of time.

And if you, somehow, can't measure the drop in your productivity and it seems that you're at the same level of productivity no matter if you're rested and relaxed as opposed to stressed out, overworked, sleep-deprived and on the brink of burnout, then you're not doing actual work. You're doing make-believe work, like sitting trough endless meetings and nodding your head.

Somehow a lot of smart people seem to think that bruteforcing your way trough a problem (despite solid statistical data of this not working) is a good thing to do. But let's suppose that even if you could achieve the imaginary boost in productivity (2.5x or whatever) for prolonged periods of time (which you can't), most of the time this will not solve your problem. Performance increases below a factor of 10x are not very juicy targets. No matter how good you are, you will not be able to cram 400 hours in a week, because a week only has 168 hours. The way to solve problems that are that hard that you'd need 10x the amount of time to solve them, is to work much, much smarter, so you can get to grips with the problem.

Working smarter can make it possible to attack a 10x as hard problem, whereas scaling up work hours even if it'd work does not.

Just because you might be less productive after 8 hours does not mean that you cease producing measurable results.

You WILL build more if you are building every waking hour. If you are obsessed enough to do so.

You could work 14 hours a day and do the work that someone else could do in 4 hours. But that is not what this discussion is really about. This discussion is about the fact that if you are crazy, hungry, obsessed, and single minded enough to work 100 hours a week, intelligently, you WILL accomplish far, far more than what anyone else could ever do in a 40 hour work week.

You're making some assumptions that are shown to be incorrect.

1) You're assuming that you can start every workday at maximum productivity regardless of your previous workload. This has been shown to be false. Previous overwork will make you start your day already at depressed productivity.

2) You're asuming that there is no way that somebody who works 2.5x as many hours can acomplish less than in 1x as many hours. This can also shown to be wrong in general because your productivity due to overwork can drop below 40% of what you can achieve when rested. It can also shown to be especially wrong for work where the quality of the work has a future compounding effect (such as programming). If you make bad decisions one day, because you are overworked, even if you achieve more that day than a rested person would, the bad decisions can cost you all the gains and more the next day, weeks or months. I.e. not only will you have achieved less, you factually worked backwards.

"Nine women can't make a baby in one month."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

This phrase is so overused, it has become an excuse to be lazy in many cases.

Look how Cory Doctorow works:

" The “write it now and fix it later” approach sounds perfectly reasonable to me, but then Doctorow pushes it to an extreme. “For instance, I wrote Homeland [2013] while I was touring Germany to publicise Little Brother [2008]. I had a translator, we’d visit lots of schools, and so I’d be speaking English half the time and he’d be speaking German half the time, and I’d write the book while he was speaking German.” "

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9a344ea2-e8af-11e2-aead-00144feabd...

He is 27 women making 4 babies a week. And he manages to make breakfast for them all every morning too ;-)

Well, nine women can make nine babies in nine months, so effectively they are working at a capacity of one baby per month. If you want to twist physicality for your standpoint, I can twist sampling range for the opposing standpoint.

This is not saying I fully agree with EM's case in point here, as much a fanboy of his as I am.

I understand you don't want to be Elon Musk. But, surely, you are not suggesting Elon Musk is a dumb worker, are you?

Not necessairly. I might think that the bulk of Musks activity is sitting in endless meetings and nodding his head, and that he might think that's work, the same kind of work that the actually working people do, and it might lead him to generalize his view on his working hours into other kinds of activity (where the actual work gets done).

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