The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I Work So Much

Imagine you are stuck in a room with 10 screaming people. You could expend a bunch of effort and get one of the people to stop screaming, but this hardly seems worth the effort. There will still be 9 people screaming, and now you will be too exhausted to work on your own projects. Instead you devote a little effort to learning how to deal with the screaming while you get your work done.

THIS IS A MISTAKE.

It is a mistake because getting that person to stop screaming is a permanent improvement upon your situation. Getting the first person to stop screaming has very little utility, but the next one is easier AND makes an even bigger difference. The next one even more so, etc. By the time you get down to only 2 or 3 screaming people you are amazed at all the new things you can hear. You can almost hear yourself think!

When you work on things that give yourself more capability you are making permanent stackable improvements. By the time I had fixed the loudest screaming voices of nutrition, sleep, exercise, and constructively reacting to stress, I couldn't even recognize the person I used to be.

On the contrary, I find that in most jobs I do, there is decreasing marginal utility of my work, since I have a finite amount of energy and the quality of my work goes down as I cross the 40-hour mark. People seem to have individual differences in where this cut-off point is, but I have yet to meet someone who claims it is not there. So for me, given that I value all my work, the concept of increasing marginal utility of work is strange. It would perhaps be different in another field than plain vanilla software development consulting, would be interesting to have a discussion around this.

I don't think he makes a very good case here. The twentieth hour of work could mean the difference between doing his job and failing at it. The sixtieth could make him more prestigious.

There is a good case to be made for increasing marginal work utility, but it's much easier to make in terms of basic numbers in an ordinary market economy: working more hours often leads to a higher average hourly rate. For instance, if you are a consultant, and you spend extra time writing books, you may become a recognized expert and be able to demand much higher rates.

That makes it sound like overwork is logical. But this calculation targets only money, and money has a decreasing marginal utility. And many other aspects of life also have a decreasing marginal utility, which is why people lead varied lives.

So, this problem has more to do with tunnel vision about your goals than with a fundamental curse of life. Keep at least a few goals in mind most of the time, and that will prevent you from falling into this trap.

My list would be something like (not necessarily in this order): health, family, friends, financial security, achievement, helping others, and making improvements for future generations. Usually I'm falling behind in a couple of these areas at any given time, and that helps me see what I need to do to change.

The fact that this isn't so points to a couple of possibilities.

1. Only the professor gets much utility out of his research--the organization which employs him would prefer him to spend his time on managing phd students and teaching.

2. Universities are organized to optimize for organizational utility and not for each professor's maximal utility.

Incidentally, this story reminds me of many developers who are promoted to be managers and then are removed from what they loved about their profession in the first place. Similar to the author, such managers often have side projects at home to keep coding.

Unfortunately, the professor doesn't have the option of 'dropping out' of management like the developer-turned-manager does.

* step down from administrator/teaching role and become full time researcher with all implications (lower salary, less prestige)

* give others full supports to do "your research", give them credit, your ideas and so on.

Sitting on too many chairs is just bad.

Here is a paper which cites a lot of the literature (note: primary topic of the article is flamewar inducing):

http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.ph...

Using the above example, you make an interesting observation: if your queue processor processes only two items, it has an efficiency of (1+4)/(8+2) = 0.5 utilities per hour. If you process three items, it shoots up to (1+4+15)/(8+2+5) = 1.33 utilities per hour.

Remarkable! It would seem that the more items on the queue you process, the more efficient this queue processor becomes. Perhaps you have just discovered the Law of Increasing Marginal Queue Processing Utility.

Or perhaps the queue is being processed in the wrong order.

The situation is similar to an artist who cannot (yet) make money off her "artistic" work. Instead she has to do commercial work to support her "artistic" ambitions.

Utility seems to have several dimensions. It's easy to say that the first 40 hours of commercial work have low utility, but without those first hours, you would not able to survive to do the rest of the work that you are more interested in.

At the end of the day, you have to pay your bills. The work that pays your bills is not automatically lower utility than the work that you do for fun/prestige/skill/art/etc.

If I stop working at 5pm like salaried ppl (or say 8pm like startup ppl), then the next day I'll have to spend another 2--3 hours to get back to the same mental state. I rather continue push on and ship something tonight (with some damaging health effects) than pay the upfront costs again tomorrow.

Second thought: this seems like a business opportunity. Why are there such high-ritual organizations employing these people?

Third thought: Why are university professors allowed to do research at all if this isn't profitable? You'd expect if it makes them money they'd actually help, that's not happening, so it must not, but why have them spend so much time on it anyway? I keep hearing about publish or perish... what on earth is going on?

It seems like he should be able to just do his 40 hour job then do as much personal research as he likes after hours.

Peter principle??

I spent a lot of time investigating this in a number of different organizations. What I found is that most people who think they're overworked and have "no time" are spending a lot of time working on the wrong things. They've volunteered for mediocre projects and created too many recurring commitments for themselves. Recurring commitments make it harder to fire you, but they don't do much for your career, because doing the same job 20 times doesn't deliver much more benefit than doing it once.

If you work at a company where everyone works 9 to 8, you also have to work 9 to 8. The good news is that you can still probably get most of your work done in 2 hours, freeing up 9 to network internally and look for better projects, or read books/papers to study up on the skills your next job will require. If you never volunteer (except for a career-advancing project) and avoid recurring commitments, this means you have a lot of time to "learn on the clock". (Don't be dumb and write side-project code at your day job; you can do your exploration/research at your day job to make the side-project work more efficient at home, but it has to be done on your own time and machinery.) This is how most of the programmers who are reinventing themselves as "data scientists" are doing it.

Doing more grunt work, here meaning work that you don't learn or gain anything from, is a pointless game (for the Clueless). You get tired faster, you're more likely to lose social polish and fail politically. The first people fired or PIP'd in a "low performer initiative" (which is a dishonest layoff) are usually overperformers who worked too hard, got themselves emotionally overinvolved, and lost the political game. It's only in a deep cut (10 to 20%) that the company runs out of politically-failed "pain in the ass" employees and start removing the long-term underperformers who've been hiding for years.

Of course, there is work (growth-oriented work, in particular) where the returns are exponential and, for that kind of work, you shouldn't stop because it's 5:00pm. If one programmer is growing at 4% per year and the other one works three times as hard and grows at 12% per year, the difference over 20 years is that the former will be just 2.2 times more productive, and the latter will be 9.6 times more productive. (In capability, if not salary, I've seen programmers grow at 30 percent per year.) That may not matter for salarymen, but it's a big deal if you ever want to go off and start your own thing. The 4%-growth engineer is barely able to justify a senior-level salary; the 12%-growth engineer is a sought-after "10x" engineer.

So what's the answer? If the work is strategically valuable and growth-oriented, do as much of it as you physically can do well. This doesn't mean neglecting your social life or relationships or fitness, because those are important too. It does mean that you shouldn't stop just because it's 5:00 and you're three episodes behind on the Walking Dead. (I'd say that the average person can handle about 65 hours per week; beyond that, it starts to get unsustainable for most.)

For the scut work that's not going to help your career or teach you anything, that just gets shuffled around because no one wants to do it, do as little as possible. The politically optimal point, when assigned bad work, seems to be the 35th percentile in quality. Below the 25th percentile, you risk the appearance of having intentionally blown off the grunt work (which is different from just not being well-suited to it, because the former will be taken against you and the latter will be tacitly accepted) but above the 50th, you're in danger of doing it too well and getting assigned more of it.

The importance is knowing the difference. You need to do just enough of the "dues paying" work to fit in, and avoid recurring commitments as much as you can get away with, but put as much of your work time as possible into the compounding-interest growth-oriented work, and as little into the dead-end grunt work. In Iron Triangle terms, this is why strategy wins out over dedication.