7 ms·

> there is an important distinction between “working hard” and “maximising the number of hours during which one works”. In particular, forcing oneself to work

> there is an important distinction between “working hard” and “maximising the number of hours during which one works”. In particular, forcing oneself to work even when one is tired, unmotivated, unprepared, or distracted with other tasks can end up being counterproductive to one’s long-term work productivity, and there is a saturation point beyond which pushing oneself to work even longer will actually reduce the total amount of work you get done in the long run Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through.

pm90 5y ago
I'm glad you posted this as it goes against the "hard work cult" that seems to have gripped popular imagination. Hard work isn't just time spent on completing a task; this interpretation is maybe the easiest to understand and benefits employers the most.
gfodor 5y ago
I think there's an important point here too that cuts against a lot of memes: it's important to keep working hard right up until this point. A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a "work-a-holic." That's not a great mental model, if the work-a-holic is working more but not so much they are hitting these problems mentioned. There's a fairly wide margin between underwork and overwork. edit: Lo and behold my sibling is taking on one of the memes I mentioned. :) If you're working less because you feel it's doing too much in the favor of your employer, and not because you're otherwise going to start becoming less productive because of it, you're probably underworking in the sense outlined here.
- gopalv 5y ago
  > A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a "work-a-holic." There are two kinds of workaholics - the ones who enjoy work and those who suffer from their work. The article hits on the first kind in the passing >> Of course, to work hard, it really helps if you enjoy your work. Working hard when you enjoy your work is easier and might look like workaholism to someone who is definitely not. If work is play, you might play longer & that gets a lot done, because mistakes you throw away don't feel like wasted time. The workaholic that people knock are the ones who work because it gives them positive feedback they lack in the rest of their lives - from an inattentive parent, disrespectful spouse or demanding children. My work environment is extremely gamified and well designed to give me great feedback to improve, excellent rewards for performance and throw in some respect of my peers. The home life is Sisyphean in comparison - cook dinner today and it doesn't lie on a progression towards cooking less tomorrow. It's easy to get sucked into that and work on a death-march, because it feels like progress on a daily basis. That "How we built Internet Explorer" tweet felt very familiar to me, because I would definitely get sucked into a mission like that.
  - didibus 5y ago
    > >> Of course, to work hard, it really helps if you enjoy your work. > Working hard when you enjoy your work is easier and might look like workaholism to someone who is definitely not. If work is play, you might play longer & that gets a lot done, because mistakes you throw away don't feel like wasted time. Exactly, and it's a misnomer to call that hard work. When someone enjoys their work, the work is easy. They are not "hard workers". You falsely believe they are hard working because you personally would not enjoy doing that work and would therefore not be motivated to work as much. But that only means that the work is hard to you, it doesn't mean it's hard to them.
    - mym1990 5y ago
      I would disagree with this. Many professional athletes love their work, but that doesn't make training, recovery, and competition a walk in the park...professional athletes are the pinnacle of hard work because many of them have to utilize the 24 hours in near perfection to stay at the top. Also, often the reason that someone enjoys their work is directly because it IS difficult. And the payoff from solving hard problems can be amazing and worth it. Alternatively, people who are pigeon holed into mundane or uninteresting work in their career will find dissatisfaction, even if the tasks are incredibly easy.
      - didibus 5y ago
        I feel in general by "hard work" people imply "putting in the time and effort". And I still contend, people who do put the time and effort into something probably find it easier to do so than those who don't. Let's say that "putting in time and effort" is the key to success, aka, "hard work" is the key to success. Alright, now what if you're finding it hard to "put in the time and effort"? I would say if you find it hard to put in the time and effort, you need to either find ways to make it easier, or find something else which you find easier to put in time and effort into. I'm not sure if my point will land, but see, for me, the real trick to success is to find something that is easy for you to put in time and effort into. And I think a lot of successes are attributable to that, yes successful people did put in time and effort, but it was easier for them to do so, and that's why they are successful at it.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  > it's important to keep working hard right up until this point As a pretty hard worker who is very far from workaholic, I strongly disagree. Work hard. It's super important. Put the time in or else you won't progress. But you don't need to go right up to the edge. If you put in solid work reliably for years, other factors will matter so much more than whether you go right up until that point.
- SquishyPanda23 5y ago
  > it's important to keep working hard right up until this point I'm not sure there's any real empirical evidence for this in the absolute way you stated it. There are plenty of highly productive creative people who do 4 hours of highly focused work a day and then spend the rest of their time walking around a garden. If your goal is to produce great lasting work that seems to be a formula that works a lot. Working up to your limit is useful for other scenarios, like where you want to crank out much more routine work. If you want to get promoted in a structured environment like a big tech company, then this strategy works well. There are definitely cultures that value working long hours. You see it both in business and in academia, and I'm not aware of any evidence that it's better than the system where you empower workers to focus on as they need to and then take the time they need to recharge.
ttul 5y ago
And of course most of us are skipping through reading about “working hard…”
- reidjs 5y ago
  Because working hard can mean skimming articles or delegating it to someone else to get you the gist of it. I don't have time to read every single interesting sounding article I come across. Well maybe I do, but then I wouldn't have as much time for commenting :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tristanperry 5y ago
It's a great bit of advice. It does also apply to companies who demand that their workers have bums on seats in an office 8-9 hours a day... Companies often don't seem to understand that loading employees with meetings and bureaucracy, then wondering why productivity isn't higher, is fairly foolish.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Great point. I like to compare work capacity to exercise capacity. Too much exercise will actually harm your fitness rather than improve it. However, reasonable exertions, combined with appropriate rest, will improve your fitness over time. Like exercise capacity, one's ability to work hard can also be improved through practice. This doesn't mean pulling all-nighters and chugging caffeine to override the sleepiness, though. It means setting incremental goals to try a little bit harder and then following up with proper rest and recovery. For example, if you install time tracking software and measure that you spend 3 hours in your code editor every day (a reasonable amount for someone working an 8-hour day, due to time spent reading documentation, in meetings, and other activities), it would be a mistake to set a goal to spend 6 hours in your code editor. You'll get burned out and hate it. However, if you set a goal to spend 3.5 hours in your code editor every day, you can likely find low-impact ways to make that happen. Maybe you're more efficient with transitioning from meetings back to coding. Or maybe you cut down time spent reading articles on HN or Twitter by 30 minutes and apply it to coding instead. Over the course of a 5-day work week, that extra 30 minutes per day adds up to almost 3 hours extra work. If your starting point was 3 hours per day, you've basically added an extra work day to your week without giving up much.
- selestify 5y ago
  Are there any such tracking software that you’d recommend?
  - ralmeida 5y ago
    I use Timing for macOS, pretty good: https://timingapp.com/ https://timingapp.com/ (available also from Setapp)
    - superlopuh 5y ago
      I've had it pretty negatively affect my experience of using macOS due to hyperlinks taking seconds to open throughout the OS. Uninstalling it fixed the issue. I still haven't found a good alternative and am a bit sad about it.
garrickvanburen 5y ago
Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is take a nap in the middle of the day. On a daily basis, I do so more often than not.
- nolaspring 5y ago
  I’ve found that a lot of my co workers have stated to do this. It’s turned into a disconnected, tech siesta.
wvh 5y ago
> Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through. Like my employer...
quickthrower2 5y ago
Working smart then :-)
noduerme 5y ago
This really is important. Exhortations to work hard seem a bit tone-deaf right now. I'm a person who's been self-employed and therefore self-motivated, driven, and devoted all hours of day and night to realizing ideas and products for the past 20+ years, organizing my own time in ways I've always noticed 9-5 friends find difficult to understand. Once I get into an idea or a big piece of code, I can get lost for days, forgetting to eat or shower. But that's always been balanced by an active social life, travel, exercise - things that help me maintain a psychological equilibrium while helping me structure my own time. Covid has upended the outlets I depend on for sanity to the point where it's very hard to get into the flow of work and research I need to commit myself to in order to accomplish long tasks. So I'm really trying to be gentle and easy on myself when I don't want to work up to the breaking point... or even of days where I don't want to do any serious work at all. Maybe this is a bad thing, but before lockdowns I never felt like I had to make myself work at all... I just wanted to, and nothing could take me away from it. Usually one big night out would be enough to motivate me to spend the next week happily locked indoors of my own volition. But without that balance... you just have too much time.
emodendroket 5y ago
This is a very important distinction. I realized over time that what I wanted out of work was not a job where I lived at the stupid office, but not one where I was twiddling my thumbs all day either. I really want to put in serious work, but then go home.
pototo666 5y ago
This. Even though I know that working all night till 6 am is wrong, I still do this now and then, because work is sometimes addicting. I need such message from real genius to help me control myself.
amai 5y ago
My physics professor used to say: "power is work per unit of time."
arvinsim 5y ago
I think this point is obvious. What's not obvious is to find the line between doing too little and doo too much. There are just too many variables and a lot of nuance to consider.

pm90 5y ago

I'm glad you posted this as it goes against the "hard work cult" that seems to have gripped popular imagination. Hard work isn't just time spent on completing a task; this interpretation is maybe the easiest to understand and benefits employers the most.

gfodor 5y ago

I think there's an important point here too that cuts against a lot of memes: it's important to keep working hard right up until this point. A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a "work-a-holic." That's not a great mental model, if the work-a-holic is working more but not so much they are hitting these problems mentioned. There's a fairly wide margin between underwork and overwork. edit: Lo and behold my sibling is taking on one of the memes I mentioned. :) If you're working less because you feel it's doing too much in the favor of your employer, and not because you're otherwise going to start becoming less productive because of it, you're probably underworking in the sense outlined here.

gopalv 5y ago
> A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a "work-a-holic." There are two kinds of workaholics - the ones who enjoy work and those who suffer from their work. The article hits on the first kind in the passing >> Of course, to work hard, it really helps if you enjoy your work. Working hard when you enjoy your work is easier and might look like workaholism to someone who is definitely not. If work is play, you might play longer & that gets a lot done, because mistakes you throw away don't feel like wasted time. The workaholic that people knock are the ones who work because it gives them positive feedback they lack in the rest of their lives - from an inattentive parent, disrespectful spouse or demanding children. My work environment is extremely gamified and well designed to give me great feedback to improve, excellent rewards for performance and throw in some respect of my peers. The home life is Sisyphean in comparison - cook dinner today and it doesn't lie on a progression towards cooking less tomorrow. It's easy to get sucked into that and work on a death-march, because it feels like progress on a daily basis. That "How we built Internet Explorer" tweet felt very familiar to me, because I would definitely get sucked into a mission like that.
- didibus 5y ago
  > >> Of course, to work hard, it really helps if you enjoy your work. > Working hard when you enjoy your work is easier and might look like workaholism to someone who is definitely not. If work is play, you might play longer & that gets a lot done, because mistakes you throw away don't feel like wasted time. Exactly, and it's a misnomer to call that hard work. When someone enjoys their work, the work is easy. They are not "hard workers". You falsely believe they are hard working because you personally would not enjoy doing that work and would therefore not be motivated to work as much. But that only means that the work is hard to you, it doesn't mean it's hard to them.
  - mym1990 5y ago
    I would disagree with this. Many professional athletes love their work, but that doesn't make training, recovery, and competition a walk in the park...professional athletes are the pinnacle of hard work because many of them have to utilize the 24 hours in near perfection to stay at the top. Also, often the reason that someone enjoys their work is directly because it IS difficult. And the payoff from solving hard problems can be amazing and worth it. Alternatively, people who are pigeon holed into mundane or uninteresting work in their career will find dissatisfaction, even if the tasks are incredibly easy.
    - didibus 5y ago
      I feel in general by "hard work" people imply "putting in the time and effort". And I still contend, people who do put the time and effort into something probably find it easier to do so than those who don't. Let's say that "putting in time and effort" is the key to success, aka, "hard work" is the key to success. Alright, now what if you're finding it hard to "put in the time and effort"? I would say if you find it hard to put in the time and effort, you need to either find ways to make it easier, or find something else which you find easier to put in time and effort into. I'm not sure if my point will land, but see, for me, the real trick to success is to find something that is easy for you to put in time and effort into. And I think a lot of successes are attributable to that, yes successful people did put in time and effort, but it was easier for them to do so, and that's why they are successful at it.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
> it's important to keep working hard right up until this point As a pretty hard worker who is very far from workaholic, I strongly disagree. Work hard. It's super important. Put the time in or else you won't progress. But you don't need to go right up to the edge. If you put in solid work reliably for years, other factors will matter so much more than whether you go right up until that point.
SquishyPanda23 5y ago
> it's important to keep working hard right up until this point I'm not sure there's any real empirical evidence for this in the absolute way you stated it. There are plenty of highly productive creative people who do 4 hours of highly focused work a day and then spend the rest of their time walking around a garden. If your goal is to produce great lasting work that seems to be a formula that works a lot. Working up to your limit is useful for other scenarios, like where you want to crank out much more routine work. If you want to get promoted in a structured environment like a big tech company, then this strategy works well. There are definitely cultures that value working long hours. You see it both in business and in academia, and I'm not aware of any evidence that it's better than the system where you empower workers to focus on as they need to and then take the time they need to recharge.

ttul 5y ago

And of course most of us are skipping through reading about “working hard…”

reidjs 5y ago
Because working hard can mean skimming articles or delegating it to someone else to get you the gist of it. I don't have time to read every single interesting sounding article I come across. Well maybe I do, but then I wouldn't have as much time for commenting :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tristanperry 5y ago

It's a great bit of advice. It does also apply to companies who demand that their workers have bums on seats in an office 8-9 hours a day... Companies often don't seem to understand that loading employees with meetings and bureaucracy, then wondering why productivity isn't higher, is fairly foolish.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Great point. I like to compare work capacity to exercise capacity. Too much exercise will actually harm your fitness rather than improve it. However, reasonable exertions, combined with appropriate rest, will improve your fitness over time. Like exercise capacity, one's ability to work hard can also be improved through practice. This doesn't mean pulling all-nighters and chugging caffeine to override the sleepiness, though. It means setting incremental goals to try a little bit harder and then following up with proper rest and recovery. For example, if you install time tracking software and measure that you spend 3 hours in your code editor every day (a reasonable amount for someone working an 8-hour day, due to time spent reading documentation, in meetings, and other activities), it would be a mistake to set a goal to spend 6 hours in your code editor. You'll get burned out and hate it. However, if you set a goal to spend 3.5 hours in your code editor every day, you can likely find low-impact ways to make that happen. Maybe you're more efficient with transitioning from meetings back to coding. Or maybe you cut down time spent reading articles on HN or Twitter by 30 minutes and apply it to coding instead. Over the course of a 5-day work week, that extra 30 minutes per day adds up to almost 3 hours extra work. If your starting point was 3 hours per day, you've basically added an extra work day to your week without giving up much.

selestify 5y ago
Are there any such tracking software that you’d recommend?
- ralmeida 5y ago
  I use Timing for macOS, pretty good: https://timingapp.com/ https://timingapp.com/ (available also from Setapp)
  - superlopuh 5y ago
    I've had it pretty negatively affect my experience of using macOS due to hyperlinks taking seconds to open throughout the OS. Uninstalling it fixed the issue. I still haven't found a good alternative and am a bit sad about it.

garrickvanburen 5y ago

Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is take a nap in the middle of the day. On a daily basis, I do so more often than not.

nolaspring 5y ago
I’ve found that a lot of my co workers have stated to do this. It’s turned into a disconnected, tech siesta.

wvh 5y ago

> Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through. Like my employer...

quickthrower2 5y ago

Working smart then :-)

noduerme 5y ago

This really is important. Exhortations to work hard seem a bit tone-deaf right now. I'm a person who's been self-employed and therefore self-motivated, driven, and devoted all hours of day and night to realizing ideas and products for the past 20+ years, organizing my own time in ways I've always noticed 9-5 friends find difficult to understand. Once I get into an idea or a big piece of code, I can get lost for days, forgetting to eat or shower. But that's always been balanced by an active social life, travel, exercise - things that help me maintain a psychological equilibrium while helping me structure my own time. Covid has upended the outlets I depend on for sanity to the point where it's very hard to get into the flow of work and research I need to commit myself to in order to accomplish long tasks. So I'm really trying to be gentle and easy on myself when I don't want to work up to the breaking point... or even of days where I don't want to do any serious work at all. Maybe this is a bad thing, but before lockdowns I never felt like I had to make myself work at all... I just wanted to, and nothing could take me away from it. Usually one big night out would be enough to motivate me to spend the next week happily locked indoors of my own volition. But without that balance... you just have too much time.

emodendroket 5y ago

This is a very important distinction. I realized over time that what I wanted out of work was not a job where I lived at the stupid office, but not one where I was twiddling my thumbs all day either. I really want to put in serious work, but then go home.

pototo666 5y ago

This. Even though I know that working all night till 6 am is wrong, I still do this now and then, because work is sometimes addicting. I need such message from real genius to help me control myself.

amai 5y ago

My physics professor used to say: "power is work per unit of time."

arvinsim 5y ago

I think this point is obvious. What's not obvious is to find the line between doing too little and doo too much. There are just too many variables and a lot of nuance to consider.