3 ms·

> if you're in a job that involves using your brain, you're not working more than 3-4 hours/day max. There are stream online of people doing mental work for 10

by badpun 8y ago

> if you're in a job that involves using your brain, you're not working more than 3-4 hours/day max. There are stream online of people doing mental work for 10 hours (with 5 min bathroom/snack breaks). I don't know if it's genetics or training, but some people can do it.

alexashka 8y ago
Whatever they do for 10 hours, will be automated in 10 years, by people who work 4 hours or less. My opinion of course :)
- badpun 8y ago
  Isn't John Carmack able to code for 10+ hours straight? Will he be automated too? :) My point - as much as this forum seems to hate this notion (I usually get downvoted when I point it out), there's variance in human aptitude and stamina.
  - fhbdukfrh 8y ago
    Ok, but you can't argue that talking in vague generalities is wrong because of one extreme outlier. Sure there's variance, but what does the distribution look like?
    - badpun 8y ago
      That’s a great question. I wish some psychologist did research on this.
beat 8y ago
When I had the freedom to set my own schedule, I found my max productivity came by doing 2-3 days of 14-16 hours grinding, followed by 1-3 days of break where I didn't "work" at all. This corresponded to just how complex an idea I could fit in my mind at a sufficiently fine-grained level of detail to do real work on it. Cal Newport's "Deep Work" is another approach to this, turning maximum productivity into a daily, scheduled system. I've also been influenced by "Four Disciplines of Execution", specifically the first discipline - pick no more than three Wildly Important Goals, and do not work on anything else. If it's not a Wildly Important Goal (and it's not an actual emergency), it deserves zero attention. I've been lucky at my current gig to be able to speak this language, to talk about the cost of interruption. When you have one job, you can focus 100%. When you have two, you don't get 50/50, but more like 40/40, with the remaining 20 lost to context switching. And the more often you context switch (or "multitask", hahaha), the more focus and momentum you lose. I'm sure a lot of knowledge workers lose north of 50% of their available productivity to the thermal losses of context switching.

by badpun 8y ago

alexashka 8y ago

Whatever they do for 10 hours, will be automated in 10 years, by people who work 4 hours or less. My opinion of course :)

badpun 8y ago
Isn't John Carmack able to code for 10+ hours straight? Will he be automated too? :) My point - as much as this forum seems to hate this notion (I usually get downvoted when I point it out), there's variance in human aptitude and stamina.
- fhbdukfrh 8y ago
  Ok, but you can't argue that talking in vague generalities is wrong because of one extreme outlier. Sure there's variance, but what does the distribution look like?
  - badpun 8y ago
    That’s a great question. I wish some psychologist did research on this.

beat 8y ago

When I had the freedom to set my own schedule, I found my max productivity came by doing 2-3 days of 14-16 hours grinding, followed by 1-3 days of break where I didn't "work" at all. This corresponded to just how complex an idea I could fit in my mind at a sufficiently fine-grained level of detail to do real work on it. Cal Newport's "Deep Work" is another approach to this, turning maximum productivity into a daily, scheduled system. I've also been influenced by "Four Disciplines of Execution", specifically the first discipline - pick no more than three Wildly Important Goals, and do not work on anything else. If it's not a Wildly Important Goal (and it's not an actual emergency), it deserves zero attention. I've been lucky at my current gig to be able to speak this language, to talk about the cost of interruption. When you have one job, you can focus 100%. When you have two, you don't get 50/50, but more like 40/40, with the remaining 20 lost to context switching. And the more often you context switch (or "multitask", hahaha), the more focus and momentum you lose. I'm sure a lot of knowledge workers lose north of 50% of their available productivity to the thermal losses of context switching.