3 ms·

There's a difference between working hard with balance and working hard to the point of excluding everything else in life. > when you spend all your free time

There's a difference between working hard with balance and working hard to the point of excluding everything else in life. > when you spend all your free time working/studying, and constantly turn down invitations to go do stuff with friends, people stop inviting you to things. If we consider a strict 40-hour maximum workweek on one end of the spectrum and what your friend is describing (100-120 hour workweek that leaves zero time for anything else), there's still a huge middle ground. We don't have to choose between working so hard that our entire lives fall apart or not ever doing hard work at all. Many of us do work longer weeks when necessary, balanced with a healthy dose of social activity and things we enjoy. If someone is working so much that they lose all of their friends and even their social skills, something else is going on. Burning yourself out and withdrawing from society isn't what people mean when they say "hard work". Like the author said, balance is important. Your friend's struggle wasn't necessarily with hard work, but with a complete lack of balance.

Scarblac 5y ago
I work a strict 40 hour work week, but I hardly know anybody else who works that much in my social group in the Netherlands. 32 is far more common; I think only about 4 of the 80 people in the company I work for work the full 40. I only work this much because my wife is jobless. So it's strange to see it described as the low end of the scale. I'd pick 24 hours per week.
- mettamage 5y ago
  We Dutchies have one of the best flexible part-time work systems available I think. I think that because when I read HN or read job postings from other countries, or ask US people then I'm noticing that 40 or 40+ hours is much more common. I've noticed that a 4 day work week has outsized mental health benefits compared to 5 days. Especially when your free day is at Wednesday. There's only so much "damage" a consecutive 2 days of work can do. That break on the Wednesday is truly a life saver. With that said, I'm noticing that if you want to upskill and immerse, then 5 days is better, but it comes at a cost, which is: not having a lot of time for much else since a lot of free time is actually spend on recuperation from the work day! That cost isn't there when you work 4 days since recuperation happens much faster. Also, if you have remote possibilities at work, you can basically start doing what Tim Ferriss wrote in the 4 hour work week years ago. It's quite easy to travel and see the world in this mode. I guess even with kids? You have 3 whole days per person to figure stuff out. Well perhaps not anymore, but being able to determine your own work location is always beneficial (even if all you want to do is go to the office). I think with a 3 day work week something even strangers happens. You're now capable of completely living a second live that can truly eclipse your work week (e.g. 4 day "work" weeks in your other life). I haven't experimented with this though. A lot of fun can be had when you and your significant other both work 3/4 days per week :) It won't make you rich, but the upside is that you get to enjoy life now and practice your mind every now and then at work ;-) In that sense, I think Dutch people that truly fine tune this with regards to their needs, location expensens and so on can live a really rich life.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    As an American, Inhave never had a job (whether hourly or salaried) that allowed me to control how many hours (or when) I worked beyond part/full time.
luffapi 5y ago
Working more than 40 hours a week has diminishing (or negative) returns. Proper scaling means delegation and systems. Grinding away isn’t just unproductive, it’s a sign of a poorly run company.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  >Working more than 40 hours a week has diminishing (or negative) returns. This can be so true. In the 24/7 operation it's important to recognize how this can occur and do whatever it takes to work around it. OTOH making progress with unique electronics (which is not going to last forever anyway) can be done in an ordinary company if the ordinary company work can be accomplished in 35 hours instead of 40, and the resulting surplus 5 hours devoted to the unique electronics. The equation says you have to actually work harder and more effectively for this to be true within the same 40 hours. Resulting in the perfect example of positive returns. Then if you put in 20 hours of overtime what have you got to show for it? Well you could get five times as much accomplished per week on the unique electronics if you were so motivated. The equation now says you have to actually work way harder and more effectively for this to be true and that 40 hours is out the window from the get go. Only you can decide whether that kind of accelerated progress is more positive or not, and compared to what. Probably your average job you could put in 80 hours and not even get nearly twice as much done as 40 hours, so why bother? >Proper scaling means delegation and systems. Ideally there would be backup gear and backup staff to insure 24 hour progress using only 40 hour weeks, but too many business operations are nonideal and build upon a relatively defective or incomplete foundation. >Grinding away isn’t just unproductive, it’s a sign of a poorly run company. I just can't let that bother me sometimes, most companies are not going to be that far above average if at all. Usually little or no progress is on the agenda for being deployed. If you're an innovator almost everything's always going to be underleveraged anyway since there's only so much resources to begin with. Plus progress takes time & effort, how much progress would you like to make?
  - luffapi 5y ago
    Your equation is missing a critical factor: performance degrades as you work more hours. When it comes to technical work, you can actually cause quite a bit of damage working in a degraded state. Bugs, missed opportunities for creative solutions, technical debt…

Scarblac 5y ago

I work a strict 40 hour work week, but I hardly know anybody else who works that much in my social group in the Netherlands. 32 is far more common; I think only about 4 of the 80 people in the company I work for work the full 40. I only work this much because my wife is jobless. So it's strange to see it described as the low end of the scale. I'd pick 24 hours per week.

mettamage 5y ago
We Dutchies have one of the best flexible part-time work systems available I think. I think that because when I read HN or read job postings from other countries, or ask US people then I'm noticing that 40 or 40+ hours is much more common. I've noticed that a 4 day work week has outsized mental health benefits compared to 5 days. Especially when your free day is at Wednesday. There's only so much "damage" a consecutive 2 days of work can do. That break on the Wednesday is truly a life saver. With that said, I'm noticing that if you want to upskill and immerse, then 5 days is better, but it comes at a cost, which is: not having a lot of time for much else since a lot of free time is actually spend on recuperation from the work day! That cost isn't there when you work 4 days since recuperation happens much faster. Also, if you have remote possibilities at work, you can basically start doing what Tim Ferriss wrote in the 4 hour work week years ago. It's quite easy to travel and see the world in this mode. I guess even with kids? You have 3 whole days per person to figure stuff out. Well perhaps not anymore, but being able to determine your own work location is always beneficial (even if all you want to do is go to the office). I think with a 3 day work week something even strangers happens. You're now capable of completely living a second live that can truly eclipse your work week (e.g. 4 day "work" weeks in your other life). I haven't experimented with this though. A lot of fun can be had when you and your significant other both work 3/4 days per week :) It won't make you rich, but the upside is that you get to enjoy life now and practice your mind every now and then at work ;-) In that sense, I think Dutch people that truly fine tune this with regards to their needs, location expensens and so on can live a really rich life.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  As an American, Inhave never had a job (whether hourly or salaried) that allowed me to control how many hours (or when) I worked beyond part/full time.

luffapi 5y ago

Working more than 40 hours a week has diminishing (or negative) returns. Proper scaling means delegation and systems. Grinding away isn’t just unproductive, it’s a sign of a poorly run company.

fuzzfactor 5y ago
>Working more than 40 hours a week has diminishing (or negative) returns. This can be so true. In the 24/7 operation it's important to recognize how this can occur and do whatever it takes to work around it. OTOH making progress with unique electronics (which is not going to last forever anyway) can be done in an ordinary company if the ordinary company work can be accomplished in 35 hours instead of 40, and the resulting surplus 5 hours devoted to the unique electronics. The equation says you have to actually work harder and more effectively for this to be true within the same 40 hours. Resulting in the perfect example of positive returns. Then if you put in 20 hours of overtime what have you got to show for it? Well you could get five times as much accomplished per week on the unique electronics if you were so motivated. The equation now says you have to actually work way harder and more effectively for this to be true and that 40 hours is out the window from the get go. Only you can decide whether that kind of accelerated progress is more positive or not, and compared to what. Probably your average job you could put in 80 hours and not even get nearly twice as much done as 40 hours, so why bother? >Proper scaling means delegation and systems. Ideally there would be backup gear and backup staff to insure 24 hour progress using only 40 hour weeks, but too many business operations are nonideal and build upon a relatively defective or incomplete foundation. >Grinding away isn’t just unproductive, it’s a sign of a poorly run company. I just can't let that bother me sometimes, most companies are not going to be that far above average if at all. Usually little or no progress is on the agenda for being deployed. If you're an innovator almost everything's always going to be underleveraged anyway since there's only so much resources to begin with. Plus progress takes time & effort, how much progress would you like to make?
- luffapi 5y ago
  Your equation is missing a critical factor: performance degrades as you work more hours. When it comes to technical work, you can actually cause quite a bit of damage working in a degraded state. Bugs, missed opportunities for creative solutions, technical debt…