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When was a mathematician, I worked as hard as I could until I was mentally exhausted. I actually calculated how much I worked per week over a period of two year

When was a mathematician, I worked as hard as I could until I was mentally exhausted. I actually calculated how much I worked per week over a period of two years. On actual "hard thinking", like working through logic, I spent about 7 hours. There was another 7 hours writing and clarifying topics, and another 6 hours or so on classes, seminars (sort of like meetings, but productive). That gives a total of 20 hours per week on work. Beyond that, I was not productive and so I didn't do any math-related work. If you add the administrative overhead of a job, that might be another 5 hours at most, so about 3 full workdays. I think if you are truly just doing productive, meaningful technical work, beyond 3 full days most people can't do it. People can do it for short periods of time, but more than 3 days leads to universal burnout. Now, I'm just talking about mentally demanding, technical work. I can work longer if the work isn't very mentally demanding, but even so, not for more than 4-5 hours a day. And now I'm an independent content creator, so every additional hour I work is proportional to profit. My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless, especially when it comes to fostering people in the long-term (short term is different). I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines.

themodelplumber 4y ago
That reasoning is complicated IMO by the fact that many jobs involve projects and tasks that are perceived as very important, yet will never be started, let alone continued, let alone completed. That's a pretty big deal as-is. It can easily make the boss feel justified--OK this employee said we need to do this thing, they said they want to take it on, but it's not being done. The boss is in the loop and may feel like the employee wants to be pushed, checked in on, and so on. But even then, add to this the stronger element of subjective mental torture often found at work, where the infantile pusher is none other than the self. This element will stick the butt in the chair and turn the individual into a workaholic who sees no point in leaving to go home, because they are staying until it gets done. So still--50, 60, 80 hours in the office. Frustration, try harder. See some progress. OK, keep doing this. Mix in a little bit of competitive thinking on the part of others ("wait, _they_ are working 50 hours even though we green-lit 25 hour weeks?") and this gets hour-reduction going sideways. (This also relates fairly easily to persona-based theories of personality dynamics)
- wnkrshm 4y ago
  So much about work is about the perception of what you do and not about what is really being done. Add to that, that even when one is actually providing lots of value, it may not be perceived as important by whoever you report to - but the firefighting du jour is.
permo-w 4y ago
I read somewhere that the 9-5 workweek was first implemented before the emancipation of women. whether it’s true or not I do not know, but it’s an interesting artifact to consider
- spoonfeeder006 4y ago
  Actually, it was the 1800s lol, though in the 1920s it became common https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/workforce-management/articles/the-9to5-workday-is-so-last-century/ https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/workforce-management/articles/...
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  Until the 1960s people worked on Saturday in my country. Economically giving people more time to spend money was a great idea.
dheera 4y ago
There's also that we once had a society where one person in a household worked 8 hours a day and one did house chores (including raising kids) for 8 hours a day. In a modern, fair society, that should translate into both people working 4 hours a day and house chores 4 hours a day. Unfortunately the reality right now is we're pushing both people to each work 12 hours a day AND do 4 hours of chores on top of that.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  Who is pushing for people to work extended hours? Assuming you’re talking about the tech industry and US market. I find this sentiment to be pretty rare.
  - dheera 4y ago
    > Who is pushing for people to work extended hours? Assuming you’re talking about the tech industry and US market. US tech industry can have some bad hours, but other industries in the US can be much worse. Talk to some nurses, Wall Street people, delivery drivers, they all have it much worse than most tech people. As for other countries, China's unofficially standard work schedule in tech is now 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days a week), Japan's finance work schedule has been 9am-midnight for a long time, most other Asian countries aren't much better.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    If you just factor in an hour commute each way that many people have that's already 10 hours. In most professional jobs its not great to be the guy in the door at 9 and out at 5 on the dot if you want a promotion. So that 8 hours turns to 9 and add in the commute you are at 10 or 11 hours of work.
    - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      I'm sorry to be so disagreeable, I understand your point including commute times into "hours of work", but I don't think that's what was being referred to here. (I also think there's a pervasive tendency to overstate commute times - 1 hour is an extremely long commute, a quick Google search shows the US average is ~27 minutes, which is still long, but...): > In most professional jobs its not great to be the guy in the door at 9 and out at 5 on the dot if you want a promotion. In my time in tech roles on the East Coast, I haven't encountered this sentiment. Maybe if there was extreme inflexibility in one's schedule, I could see it frustrating some people, but for the most part I've only ever seen (1) people getting promoted for their work and the impression of their work or (2) active ladder climbing, which can be done within the confines of an 8 hour day. The most common reason I see people work above and beyond their hours is a primarily-self-generated sense of compulsion that's mostly disconnected from the expectations of their supervisors or peers. Maybe I'm lucky.
idopmstuff 4y ago
I'm a PM and I work from home - far and away the biggest advantage IMHO isn't the lack of commute (though that's great), but rather the flexibility in schedule. My most productive hours are 6-9am - I can crank through what would take me most of 9am-5pm in that time period. That's wasted when I have to get ready and commute during that time period. When optimizing for most efficient working times, 40 hours a week is really 20-30 depending on meetings.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  My most productive time is similar to yours, from about 7 to 11am.
  - andromeduck 4y ago
    11 pm - 3 AM
    - code_biologist 4y ago
      +1. I really find that I hit my stride around 1am. Lovely for personal projects. Unfortunate for professional work.
    - berniedurfee 4y ago
      Same. I was built for the graveyard shift in a day shift world.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  The one thing I would go to the office for are sprint ceremonies. On my best functioning teams, we would plan and make sure everyone knew what was needed and solutions brainstormed until we had an agreed approach. Then you stay at home and just execute. And you can used your best hours to smash stuff out and then enjoy the rest of the day.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    Hot take: Sprint ceremonies are what I hate the most about our profession. In-office sprint ceremonies make it even worse. Please end this madness. One guy from customer success I had lunch with once told me: "wait, so you guys have team meetings every morning, every single day? but why? that sounds terrible. I would hate that" And yeah! I agree! but this has been the norm in the entire industry for the last ~10 years and you have no say in it. I once went a month by actively not paying attention to the daily meetings just to prove they're worthless and I didn't miss anything important. Weekly meetings are much better at keeping employees engaged without feeling like a burden/waste of everyone's time. This whole daily stand-ups and sprint ceremonies are useless bullshit. Quality software got shipped way before those were concocted and shoved into our worklives by agile "consultants" who have nothing better to do in their lives than selling employee micromanagement and control schemes to clueless managers making them feel more empowered over their workers, and creating more bullshit jobs like scrum masters or agile coaches just to give credibility to these management frameworks.
mavu 4y ago
As a software developer, I can 100% support your findings. Even counting deep concentration periods (flow, whatever you want to call it) this holds true.
lumost 4y ago
It’s Curious, I wonder if as the portion of time people spend on hard problems increases the rate of burnout increases. 10 years ago a much larger percentage of my day was spent on non-taxing activities that have since been automated.
- hackerfromthefu 4y ago
  I think so
- MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
  This speaks to the "labor" argument made above. More efficiency means harder work, but it must also be less work, unless we are trying to extract more from workers. OTOH, it might not be so bad to extract more from workers. More money and all.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Exactly - if you can do more, you can get paid more.
    - MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
      You can get paid more, or the value can be passed on to shareholders. Depends.
bhewes 4y ago
Coming from the sales side 9-5 is useful as people know when to find me, IE office hours. The service side of business, waiting on others.
agumonkey 4y ago
thanks for you input, i'd just want to add a pinch of chaos and averages into the mix.. a 9-5 is also an escape from problems elsewhere, or a somehow balanced dance/wave (morning, commute, work, come back), it's not just late stage capitalism imo thanks again
j1elo 4y ago
> if you are truly just doing productive, meaningful technical work, beyond 3 full days most people can't do it. Ok but an important detail is the distribution of those hours. You probably didn't do 7 consecutive hours of exhausting hard thinking work in one day, nor probably 3.5 hours across 2 days... you'll be able to confirm, but sounds to me like an important key part of most meaningful, intensively intellectual (or physical) work lots of people do is that those hours are more-or-less spread across the whole work week, so in your example, kind of 1h30m per day on a 5-day week or closer to 2h/day on a 4-day week. I would fully agree with the latter part of your comment. Even if you argue that you'd not get more than 3 days of actual work done during a week, it doesn't necessarily follow that your work week should have been 3 days long; more like your daily timetable should probably be shorter and you should not have to wait in your office, mentally tired and not being productive, until the clock says it's 5pm and so you can now go home.
rodgerd 4y ago
To add to your anecdote: Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species with a day that ran: Breakfast and a walk; 90 minutes of writing; spending time with his wife reading their letters and a novel; another 90 minutes of writing; and lunch. After lunch was attending to his correspondence, reading with his wife, then dinner and games. For all the talk of "crushing" and "changing the world" I doubt that anything almost anyone here works on or ever has worked on will have the same impact as Origin. The cult of productivity is unhinged, madness.
- fshr 4y ago
  Darwin was born to a rich family and the book was published when he was 50. I guess I see the point you're trying to make, but his life was very much not like the average person. It was also over 150 years ago; the world he lived in was so far different from 2023 it's absurd. I don't understand why you would use an example of someone extra-ordinary, a geo/biologist no less, in a critique of hustle culture. Edit: I'd also recommend reading about his health and overwork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Charles_Darwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Charles_Darwin
bavila 4y ago
> My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless... I'm not so sure about this. I was working in a remote "full-stack" (but really 90% front-end role) for 14 months from the start of January 2021 to the end of February 2022. I tracked my hours religiously the entire time I was employed there (not required, but just for my own sake). I had a spreadsheet containing the date, start/end times (rounded to the nearest quarter on an hour), task name, and notes. When I left the company, my team lead thought I was one of the hardest working people he had ever worked with. He thought I had to be working 60-hour weeks to be doing what I was doing. I showed him the spreadsheet and calculated the average hours worked per week - came out somewhere between 38~39 hours. My role wasn't a senior one so, for the most part, the vast majority hours were spent coding, but of course some was spent in meetings as well. But these were all real hours of real time spent working. It was all very doable and not useless time spent futzing around (I would also stop tracking my time for any break I took - no exceptions). Granted, I think being the type of person that acclimates well to remote work made this all doable. I would not have been this productive in office.
- sodapopcan 4y ago
  That's fine but many people can't, and don't, do this. Most people I've worked with have varying degrees of how long they can pay attention and how much they can get done in a day. It's also not just about quantity buy quality. I'm certainly not suggesting that you were doing subpar work or anything, just that there is a spectrum there. For example I had a teammate who made incredibly disruptive and positive changes to how and what my team worked on. Yet he would also arrive at work with barely a second to spare before standup and most days he would leave _at least_ an hour early. Some days he was clearly not doing much work and even pretty brazen about it if confronted about it (he wasn't a dick about it just be like, "Oh, I'm just trying to look busy"). When he did work (which was more often than I'm making it seem), he was very serious and focused about it and would put in extra time when he was really into what he was working on (this of course was not to make up all the leaving early, haha).
- Retric 4y ago
  Where these discussions trip up is different kinds of programming tasks vary in how mentality draining they are. Some days I can spend 10 long hours working through straightforward problems and come home energized. Other days I mentally check out after spending 3-4 hours beating my head against a really difficult problem then go home and have little desire to do anything but zone out and recover.
weaksauce 4y ago
> the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines. the current system is mainly because henry ford decided that it was the most he could make people do line work before productivity decreased and injuries increased. that of course was better working conditions of 10 hour days that the labor unions had negotiated before that. it's not impossible to forsee it going down to 32 hours or working more at home since the nature of work is different. https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-work-week-became-the-norm https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-wo...
- vidarh 4y ago
  That article is whitewashing. There were demands for 8 hour work days decades before Ford. 10 hours had become widespread, sure, and some only asked for 10, but Robert Owen's slogan "eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest" dates to 1817, and had been picked up by unions and socialist groups over the following decades. May 1st as an international day for workers demonstrations even came about as a result of the aftermath of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre in 1886 during one of the demonstrations for the 8 hour day. The then AFL proposed May 1st demonstrations as part of relaunching the fight for the 8 hour day. That some employers saw the writing on the wall and cut it to 8 with less pressure applied than others was in large part because the multiple decades long, sometimes bloody, fight for earlier cuts had shown it did not affect production anywhere near as much as opponents had claimed.
  - weaksauce 4y ago
    I don't see how anything of what you said is incompatible with the article. the unions got 10 hours, probably wanted better but that's all they could negotiate. ford wanted the most profit he could get and he found that through 8 hour work days it would be the most profitable for him. he, of course like much of the capitalist class(of course not all but most of the ultra-wealthy capital owners are sociopaths), didn't care that much about workers.
    - 4y ago
carlosjobim 4y ago
What you write might be true for working only with your mind, but it is absolutely possible to work efficiently all day every day for several months in other fields, that are not only grunt style work. And when it comes to seasonal work, it is the most reasonable way to do it. You can work also work long hours efficiently if you are forced to it.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Personally, I have been observing my own technical work habits a lot recently. What I have noticed agrees with your narrative but disagrees with your point. Here's the rundown: * I can sustain hard mental labor (including but not limited to work) for about 50 hours per week total * I don't know when I'm going to be in the best state to do that work, and it depends on a lot of factors * Some of those factors are external, some depend on the project, etc. * Sometimes, that mental labor needs to go somewhere else, and that subtracts from my overall work budget. That includes things like weird social situations, fixing something around the house, etc. * I also spend a lot of time passively daydreaming about the last thing I worked on. This is often productive, but also often isn't. * My productive output also varies a lot on those factors: some weeks, I can produce 60 hours of work, and others only 15-20 I think if you have bursty work patterns like this, it is actually beneficial to have more office days rather than fewer, to "catch" as much productive time and daydreaming time as possible. However, it's an even better argument for remote work, because that minimizes other forms of mental labor, like driving.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I think I'm like this. I've pushed myself fairly hard with technical work in the past, and got up to about 80 hours a week for weeks at a time, but about 50 is my useful maximum without diminishing returns.
- hnews_account_1 4y ago
  The productivity in office suits certain work styles that are people heavy. The argument for and against remote work isn't as dependent on the productivity time as people think. Sure, some people are unproductive for periods between 9am - 5pm. Most people are not. That's why those times work. I am myself very productive during those times but only for analytical work. When I need to code, I have to be home with ANC earphones and get lost in the iterations (assuming I'm not stuck somewhere). The whole idiocy around 5 days a week 9-5 is because people think you have to be in office all that time. People can and do take random half days, hours off to go to the dentist or the doctor or to the post office or whatever the fuck. That's how it has always been. There are very few jobs that require you to literally never fuck off if there's nothing going on. Work adjusts around you if you're a productive person. Some of us can get stuck with shitty bosses and everyone empathizes with that, but for the vast majority of folks, the boss absolutely does not give a flying fuck about when you come in as long as he knows you're disciplined.
therealdrag0 4y ago
Your conclusions don’t follow. Most people are not doing exclusively mentally demanding technical work, which you admit, so why would you limit the work week based on that? And non strenuous work takes a nontrivial amount of time? I’m regularly solidly productive for 30-40 hours a week (tracked with RescueTime app). Today I did around a dozen PRs (among other things like design reviews) that were tiny changes (cleanup, or migration config flags over various repos). It wasn’t hard work, but it’s important work that has to get done. Shortening the week doesn’t magically get this done faster.
- I_AM_A_SMURF 4y ago
  A lot of time spent doing "hard" things is unproductive. So many times I've worked on a hard bug long fruitless hours just to come back the next day and spotting the problem almost immediately. Quick cleanup tasks are important yes, but most of the time you can delegate those to newer employees that can actually learn from them.
  - therealdrag0 4y ago
    Just because the journey feels unproductive doesn’t mean you can cut the journey in half and get to the destination. Who says your brain would have still found the bug without the time invested in it that you’re interpreting as “unproductive”? Who says if you r brain didn’t need that investment in the big just a break that a break working on other productive things wouldn’t have been just as good as a day at the beach? Also I do give my newer employees smaller easier tasks, but they still need review, mentoring, etc. which is just another “not hard activity that takes time”. One again the idea that you can just cut work hours with no impact seems silly unless you’re working like 70 hours, or unless you’re already just a voluntarily unproductive worker. Maybe that’s an underdiscusssd angle to this; some people just don’t know how to productively organize their time.
wonderwonder 4y ago
I agree with the 20 - 25 hours of productive mental work per week. So much of my day is wasted with meetings that could be an email. The worst are recurring weekly meetings. Why? Tomorrow I have meeting starting from 9am. From 9-5 I only have 1.5 hours that are not meetings and they are not concurrent, they are 3 30 minute blocks between meetings. I have an insane deadline I am trying to make in 2 weeks. How am I supposed to get any work done if I am constantly in meetings? I feel like companies should designate at most 2 hours a day as meeting hours, after that let tech workers build tech, its not right to fill days with meetings and then expect us to produce at night. My last job had almost no meetings it was awesome. I really only worked maybe 20 hours a week but it was solid deep work. Its been a year and the company CTO still reaches out occasionally to see if I want a position for various projects they have coming up. If you let developers just work when they are in work mode you will get solid results.
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
>I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines. Hanlon's razor applies here. As does Chesterton's Fence for that matter The 40 hour work week was won in actual blood from labor activists long before any of us were conceptions. The fact that we still live within it, is simply a proof of counter-revolution being pervasive such that the world has structured itself around this. We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor. Labor lost most power with the rise in globalization. It was much easier to strike and affect businesses when they had a limited hiring pool restricted to one country. Now they can just move to another country where labor is less demanding.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    While that is true to a limited extent, labour is doing much better in plenty of countries where people have demanded - and gotten - far more than in the US also post-globalisation. Labour has lost power mainly in those countries where people bought into the employers narrative and stopped or scaled back the fighting. Much of it correlates with media ownership support or hostility - e.g. in Norway the second largest media group was founded by the unions and remains owned by a charitable foundation, and so there has consistently been a strongly pro-union voice in media.
    - ticviking 4y ago
      My question is why didn’t US labor try things like that? It seems to me that in the early radio era this was possible.
      - vidarh 4y ago
sjtgraham 4y ago
> > My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless... If there are people who can't run a mile and those who can run over 100, what makes you think everyone universally can sustain 20-25 hours of focussed work per week?
- cinntaile 4y ago
  Are you suggesting the number of focused hours per week can be trained just like running a mile?
  - sh4rks 4y ago
    Yes. Most people are lazy. Make sure you get 8-9 hours of sleep, prep your meals for the day, and slowly increase the number of focused hours over time (progressive overload). "Burnout" is a myth if you focus on good recovery. (of course this doesn't apply to everyone, as some people may have certain medical conditions or other important commitments)
- koonsolo 4y ago
  If I do 20-25 hours a week, and nobody else can outperform me in productive output, I don't really care how much hours they put in. I've had jobs where I was productive maybe 4 hours a week, and got excellent reviews. So I always wondered if I got that, WTF were the other devs doing?
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
for programming work I would say 20-25 hours a week on complicated things, and an extra 5 - 10 hours on simple things. The complicated things are stressing and you need to relax a bit afterwards, and then you can take easy stuff, like maybe an evaluation of what one might do to speed up some process without actually writing the code, just a report. Or simple fixing of design issues, code cleanup stuff like that.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
The main reason for meddle management existence is a recursive loop. The narcissts produce unsolveable problems, intertribal conflict and other pressure related sypmtoms. After they poisoned the workspace, they themselves become necessary to work around the problems and coping behaviour they created. They are literaly self-employed.
j7ake 4y ago
This resonates with Sara Billeys advice for PhDs : https://sites.math.washington.edu/~billey/advice/timely.fashion.pdf https://sites.math.washington.edu/~billey/advice/timely.fash... She recommends 20 hours of research a week. But there is a high bar to what qualifies an hour. Maybe relevant for HN community is that they count programming as half time (ie 2 hours programming is 1 hour of work). When mathematicians say they “work” it’s different than what normal people say is “work”. An analogy is people who do a full proper pull-up versus people who “cheat” to pull themselves up, but both types of people are counting them as pull ups.
jacobjwebber 4y ago
I’m doing a phd in informatics. 4 hours per weekday of actual work is what I have found to be my sustainable limit. Not sure I could even do this 5 days a week, more like 3 or 4.
keyraycheck 4y ago
+1 That is true for deep work like: - solving mathematical problems - coding non-trivial stuff - teaching non-trival stuff The challange is shallow work e.g. - replying to emails - meetings - scheduling meetings And than there is no-work: - checking your phone - lunch - walking and chatting before the next meeting Shallow and no-work can easily eat anywhere between 20 and infinity :)
- stuaxo 4y ago
  Even "shallow work" isn't done as well during the extra time. Besides - doing meetings well is not shallow work at all; scheduling is a pain etc and emails are written better when people aren't tired.
vouwfietsman 4y ago
> I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines. Not really though, this is deeply culturally ingrained in everybody. You may not like a 40 hour workweek, but you like to own a Tesla, and you are envious of rich people, and you judge people who are homeless or don't have work or don't "apply themselves". (using "you" to mean "people") The issue is deeply cultural, and cannot be blamed on any single evil entity or person. If everybody wanted this, it would be so. The question is, why does not everybody want this? This is largely due to cultural forces, which can be manipulated through marketing and politics, but are mostly upheld by every single individual going with the flow.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
what about useful jobs which are not productive (in terms of monetization of the time units worked) nor physically demanding? I guess 4 days work for a librarian doesn't mean anything meaningful and the said librarian productivity doesn't plummet like in a "writing math papers" scenario. Or for an emergency doctor, a fireman, a shop owner, a sportsman etc. etc. A friend of mine is an air traffic controller, they work 8 hours straight in 3 8 hours shifts during the 24h they need to cover constantly (meaning they don't even stop for a lunch break, only a few short 10 minutes breaks to stretch or to go to the bathroom) for 5 days straight and then they stay 3 days and 1/2 home, so they work 17-18 days a month. Anyway 9-5 (which is more like 8-~16 in my Country on average, with an hour long lunch break, so ~36 hours/week in total) was won by workers with actual real social battles and 9-5 is the time of the day where the presence of natural light is more probable. We could switch to working 23:00-6:00 but I guess it wouldn't be so good for the morale. Also, I generally really work no more than 1-2 hours per day, the rest is spent thinking about the problem, reading documentation, watching a tutorial, participating in a meeting when I do not have to talk an I can keep the camera turned off and the mic on mute, but mostly is doing something else entirely, completely disconnected from my duties, to enable my brain to absorb the problem and have a fresh view on it sometimes later. Best ideas happen when you're not actively thinking about them.
pwpw 4y ago
> I think if you are truly just doing productive, meaningful technical work, beyond 3 full days most people can't do it. People can do it for short periods of time, but more than 3 days leads to universal burnout. This is similar to my experience. Back in 2020 I decided to make a career switch from accounting to software engineering. I began studying in the morning, at lunch, and in the evening while working a full-time job. I quickly discovered that I could only study in the morning with a lighter review in the evening. Eventually, I got to the point where I had to walk away from work and study full-time because it was so mentally exhausting. Around that time, I started learning Greek as well. I attended classes once per week and observed that I had to lighten my CompSci studying workload on days I had Greek class. Otherwise, I would have a high degree of difficulty learning Greek that evening. I was hitting my mental exhaustion limit after 5 hours of intense, technical learning every day. If I tried to push past that point, I would burn myself out and become noticeably less productive. This was something I had never realized while in school with frequent built in breaks (and perhaps more energy from being younger). When I was studying for the CPA exam in the library for 8 hours per day, I thought I was being highly efficient the entire time. However, looking back on it, I was spending a good portion of that time taking breaks and doing lighter review of material I already knew, which was not too taxing (pun intended) on my mental energy. Now, I’m well aware of my upper limits of hard work and find that forcing myself past that point isn’t worth the trade-off of mental exhaustion. I realistically believe that I could switch to a 4 day work week and accomplish the same amount while being more energized in the long-run. I’d love to get the opportunity to test my hypothesis. As a side note: I found when I was studying full-stack material, switching between backend and front end work when I began to tire of one slowed the rate of my mental exhaustion.
javier2 4y ago
To be honest, I cant do more than 5H of good technical work per day either

themodelplumber 4y ago

That reasoning is complicated IMO by the fact that many jobs involve projects and tasks that are perceived as very important, yet will never be started, let alone continued, let alone completed. That's a pretty big deal as-is. It can easily make the boss feel justified--OK this employee said we need to do this thing, they said they want to take it on, but it's not being done. The boss is in the loop and may feel like the employee wants to be pushed, checked in on, and so on. But even then, add to this the stronger element of subjective mental torture often found at work, where the infantile pusher is none other than the self. This element will stick the butt in the chair and turn the individual into a workaholic who sees no point in leaving to go home, because they are staying until it gets done. So still--50, 60, 80 hours in the office. Frustration, try harder. See some progress. OK, keep doing this. Mix in a little bit of competitive thinking on the part of others ("wait, _they_ are working 50 hours even though we green-lit 25 hour weeks?") and this gets hour-reduction going sideways. (This also relates fairly easily to persona-based theories of personality dynamics)

wnkrshm 4y ago
So much about work is about the perception of what you do and not about what is really being done. Add to that, that even when one is actually providing lots of value, it may not be perceived as important by whoever you report to - but the firefighting du jour is.

permo-w 4y ago

I read somewhere that the 9-5 workweek was first implemented before the emancipation of women. whether it’s true or not I do not know, but it’s an interesting artifact to consider

spoonfeeder006 4y ago
Actually, it was the 1800s lol, though in the 1920s it became common https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/workforce-management/articles/the-9to5-workday-is-so-last-century/ https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/workforce-management/articles/...
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Until the 1960s people worked on Saturday in my country. Economically giving people more time to spend money was a great idea.

dheera 4y ago

There's also that we once had a society where one person in a household worked 8 hours a day and one did house chores (including raising kids) for 8 hours a day. In a modern, fair society, that should translate into both people working 4 hours a day and house chores 4 hours a day. Unfortunately the reality right now is we're pushing both people to each work 12 hours a day AND do 4 hours of chores on top of that.

DiggyJohnson 4y ago
Who is pushing for people to work extended hours? Assuming you’re talking about the tech industry and US market. I find this sentiment to be pretty rare.
- dheera 4y ago
  > Who is pushing for people to work extended hours? Assuming you’re talking about the tech industry and US market. US tech industry can have some bad hours, but other industries in the US can be much worse. Talk to some nurses, Wall Street people, delivery drivers, they all have it much worse than most tech people. As for other countries, China's unofficially standard work schedule in tech is now 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days a week), Japan's finance work schedule has been 9am-midnight for a long time, most other Asian countries aren't much better.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  If you just factor in an hour commute each way that many people have that's already 10 hours. In most professional jobs its not great to be the guy in the door at 9 and out at 5 on the dot if you want a promotion. So that 8 hours turns to 9 and add in the commute you are at 10 or 11 hours of work.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    I'm sorry to be so disagreeable, I understand your point including commute times into "hours of work", but I don't think that's what was being referred to here. (I also think there's a pervasive tendency to overstate commute times - 1 hour is an extremely long commute, a quick Google search shows the US average is ~27 minutes, which is still long, but...): > In most professional jobs its not great to be the guy in the door at 9 and out at 5 on the dot if you want a promotion. In my time in tech roles on the East Coast, I haven't encountered this sentiment. Maybe if there was extreme inflexibility in one's schedule, I could see it frustrating some people, but for the most part I've only ever seen (1) people getting promoted for their work and the impression of their work or (2) active ladder climbing, which can be done within the confines of an 8 hour day. The most common reason I see people work above and beyond their hours is a primarily-self-generated sense of compulsion that's mostly disconnected from the expectations of their supervisors or peers. Maybe I'm lucky.

idopmstuff 4y ago

I'm a PM and I work from home - far and away the biggest advantage IMHO isn't the lack of commute (though that's great), but rather the flexibility in schedule. My most productive hours are 6-9am - I can crank through what would take me most of 9am-5pm in that time period. That's wasted when I have to get ready and commute during that time period. When optimizing for most efficient working times, 40 hours a week is really 20-30 depending on meetings.

JohnFen 4y ago
My most productive time is similar to yours, from about 7 to 11am.
- andromeduck 4y ago
  11 pm - 3 AM
  - code_biologist 4y ago
    +1. I really find that I hit my stride around 1am. Lovely for personal projects. Unfortunate for professional work.
  - berniedurfee 4y ago
    Same. I was built for the graveyard shift in a day shift world.
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
The one thing I would go to the office for are sprint ceremonies. On my best functioning teams, we would plan and make sure everyone knew what was needed and solutions brainstormed until we had an agreed approach. Then you stay at home and just execute. And you can used your best hours to smash stuff out and then enjoy the rest of the day.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Hot take: Sprint ceremonies are what I hate the most about our profession. In-office sprint ceremonies make it even worse. Please end this madness. One guy from customer success I had lunch with once told me: "wait, so you guys have team meetings every morning, every single day? but why? that sounds terrible. I would hate that" And yeah! I agree! but this has been the norm in the entire industry for the last ~10 years and you have no say in it. I once went a month by actively not paying attention to the daily meetings just to prove they're worthless and I didn't miss anything important. Weekly meetings are much better at keeping employees engaged without feeling like a burden/waste of everyone's time. This whole daily stand-ups and sprint ceremonies are useless bullshit. Quality software got shipped way before those were concocted and shoved into our worklives by agile "consultants" who have nothing better to do in their lives than selling employee micromanagement and control schemes to clueless managers making them feel more empowered over their workers, and creating more bullshit jobs like scrum masters or agile coaches just to give credibility to these management frameworks.

mavu 4y ago

As a software developer, I can 100% support your findings. Even counting deep concentration periods (flow, whatever you want to call it) this holds true.

lumost 4y ago

It’s Curious, I wonder if as the portion of time people spend on hard problems increases the rate of burnout increases. 10 years ago a much larger percentage of my day was spent on non-taxing activities that have since been automated.

hackerfromthefu 4y ago
I think so
MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
This speaks to the "labor" argument made above. More efficiency means harder work, but it must also be less work, unless we are trying to extract more from workers. OTOH, it might not be so bad to extract more from workers. More money and all.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Exactly - if you can do more, you can get paid more.
  - MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
    You can get paid more, or the value can be passed on to shareholders. Depends.

bhewes 4y ago

Coming from the sales side 9-5 is useful as people know when to find me, IE office hours. The service side of business, waiting on others.

agumonkey 4y ago

thanks for you input, i'd just want to add a pinch of chaos and averages into the mix.. a 9-5 is also an escape from problems elsewhere, or a somehow balanced dance/wave (morning, commute, work, come back), it's not just late stage capitalism imo thanks again

j1elo 4y ago

> if you are truly just doing productive, meaningful technical work, beyond 3 full days most people can't do it. Ok but an important detail is the distribution of those hours. You probably didn't do 7 consecutive hours of exhausting hard thinking work in one day, nor probably 3.5 hours across 2 days... you'll be able to confirm, but sounds to me like an important key part of most meaningful, intensively intellectual (or physical) work lots of people do is that those hours are more-or-less spread across the whole work week, so in your example, kind of 1h30m per day on a 5-day week or closer to 2h/day on a 4-day week. I would fully agree with the latter part of your comment. Even if you argue that you'd not get more than 3 days of actual work done during a week, it doesn't necessarily follow that your work week should have been 3 days long; more like your daily timetable should probably be shorter and you should not have to wait in your office, mentally tired and not being productive, until the clock says it's 5pm and so you can now go home.

rodgerd 4y ago

To add to your anecdote: Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species with a day that ran: Breakfast and a walk; 90 minutes of writing; spending time with his wife reading their letters and a novel; another 90 minutes of writing; and lunch. After lunch was attending to his correspondence, reading with his wife, then dinner and games. For all the talk of "crushing" and "changing the world" I doubt that anything almost anyone here works on or ever has worked on will have the same impact as Origin. The cult of productivity is unhinged, madness.

fshr 4y ago
Darwin was born to a rich family and the book was published when he was 50. I guess I see the point you're trying to make, but his life was very much not like the average person. It was also over 150 years ago; the world he lived in was so far different from 2023 it's absurd. I don't understand why you would use an example of someone extra-ordinary, a geo/biologist no less, in a critique of hustle culture. Edit: I'd also recommend reading about his health and overwork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Charles_Darwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Charles_Darwin

bavila 4y ago

> My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless... I'm not so sure about this. I was working in a remote "full-stack" (but really 90% front-end role) for 14 months from the start of January 2021 to the end of February 2022. I tracked my hours religiously the entire time I was employed there (not required, but just for my own sake). I had a spreadsheet containing the date, start/end times (rounded to the nearest quarter on an hour), task name, and notes. When I left the company, my team lead thought I was one of the hardest working people he had ever worked with. He thought I had to be working 60-hour weeks to be doing what I was doing. I showed him the spreadsheet and calculated the average hours worked per week - came out somewhere between 38~39 hours. My role wasn't a senior one so, for the most part, the vast majority hours were spent coding, but of course some was spent in meetings as well. But these were all real hours of real time spent working. It was all very doable and not useless time spent futzing around (I would also stop tracking my time for any break I took - no exceptions). Granted, I think being the type of person that acclimates well to remote work made this all doable. I would not have been this productive in office.

sodapopcan 4y ago
That's fine but many people can't, and don't, do this. Most people I've worked with have varying degrees of how long they can pay attention and how much they can get done in a day. It's also not just about quantity buy quality. I'm certainly not suggesting that you were doing subpar work or anything, just that there is a spectrum there. For example I had a teammate who made incredibly disruptive and positive changes to how and what my team worked on. Yet he would also arrive at work with barely a second to spare before standup and most days he would leave _at least_ an hour early. Some days he was clearly not doing much work and even pretty brazen about it if confronted about it (he wasn't a dick about it just be like, "Oh, I'm just trying to look busy"). When he did work (which was more often than I'm making it seem), he was very serious and focused about it and would put in extra time when he was really into what he was working on (this of course was not to make up all the leaving early, haha).
Retric 4y ago
Where these discussions trip up is different kinds of programming tasks vary in how mentality draining they are. Some days I can spend 10 long hours working through straightforward problems and come home energized. Other days I mentally check out after spending 3-4 hours beating my head against a really difficult problem then go home and have little desire to do anything but zone out and recover.

weaksauce 4y ago

> the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines. the current system is mainly because henry ford decided that it was the most he could make people do line work before productivity decreased and injuries increased. that of course was better working conditions of 10 hour days that the labor unions had negotiated before that. it's not impossible to forsee it going down to 32 hours or working more at home since the nature of work is different. https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-work-week-became-the-norm https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-wo...

vidarh 4y ago
That article is whitewashing. There were demands for 8 hour work days decades before Ford. 10 hours had become widespread, sure, and some only asked for 10, but Robert Owen's slogan "eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest" dates to 1817, and had been picked up by unions and socialist groups over the following decades. May 1st as an international day for workers demonstrations even came about as a result of the aftermath of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre in 1886 during one of the demonstrations for the 8 hour day. The then AFL proposed May 1st demonstrations as part of relaunching the fight for the 8 hour day. That some employers saw the writing on the wall and cut it to 8 with less pressure applied than others was in large part because the multiple decades long, sometimes bloody, fight for earlier cuts had shown it did not affect production anywhere near as much as opponents had claimed.
- weaksauce 4y ago
  I don't see how anything of what you said is incompatible with the article. the unions got 10 hours, probably wanted better but that's all they could negotiate. ford wanted the most profit he could get and he found that through 8 hour work days it would be the most profitable for him. he, of course like much of the capitalist class(of course not all but most of the ultra-wealthy capital owners are sociopaths), didn't care that much about workers.
  - 4y ago

carlosjobim 4y ago

What you write might be true for working only with your mind, but it is absolutely possible to work efficiently all day every day for several months in other fields, that are not only grunt style work. And when it comes to seasonal work, it is the most reasonable way to do it. You can work also work long hours efficiently if you are forced to it.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

Personally, I have been observing my own technical work habits a lot recently. What I have noticed agrees with your narrative but disagrees with your point. Here's the rundown: * I can sustain hard mental labor (including but not limited to work) for about 50 hours per week total * I don't know when I'm going to be in the best state to do that work, and it depends on a lot of factors * Some of those factors are external, some depend on the project, etc. * Sometimes, that mental labor needs to go somewhere else, and that subtracts from my overall work budget. That includes things like weird social situations, fixing something around the house, etc. * I also spend a lot of time passively daydreaming about the last thing I worked on. This is often productive, but also often isn't. * My productive output also varies a lot on those factors: some weeks, I can produce 60 hours of work, and others only 15-20 I think if you have bursty work patterns like this, it is actually beneficial to have more office days rather than fewer, to "catch" as much productive time and daydreaming time as possible. However, it's an even better argument for remote work, because that minimizes other forms of mental labor, like driving.

robertlagrant 4y ago
I think I'm like this. I've pushed myself fairly hard with technical work in the past, and got up to about 80 hours a week for weeks at a time, but about 50 is my useful maximum without diminishing returns.
hnews_account_1 4y ago
The productivity in office suits certain work styles that are people heavy. The argument for and against remote work isn't as dependent on the productivity time as people think. Sure, some people are unproductive for periods between 9am - 5pm. Most people are not. That's why those times work. I am myself very productive during those times but only for analytical work. When I need to code, I have to be home with ANC earphones and get lost in the iterations (assuming I'm not stuck somewhere). The whole idiocy around 5 days a week 9-5 is because people think you have to be in office all that time. People can and do take random half days, hours off to go to the dentist or the doctor or to the post office or whatever the fuck. That's how it has always been. There are very few jobs that require you to literally never fuck off if there's nothing going on. Work adjusts around you if you're a productive person. Some of us can get stuck with shitty bosses and everyone empathizes with that, but for the vast majority of folks, the boss absolutely does not give a flying fuck about when you come in as long as he knows you're disciplined.

therealdrag0 4y ago

Your conclusions don’t follow. Most people are not doing exclusively mentally demanding technical work, which you admit, so why would you limit the work week based on that? And non strenuous work takes a nontrivial amount of time? I’m regularly solidly productive for 30-40 hours a week (tracked with RescueTime app). Today I did around a dozen PRs (among other things like design reviews) that were tiny changes (cleanup, or migration config flags over various repos). It wasn’t hard work, but it’s important work that has to get done. Shortening the week doesn’t magically get this done faster.

I_AM_A_SMURF 4y ago
A lot of time spent doing "hard" things is unproductive. So many times I've worked on a hard bug long fruitless hours just to come back the next day and spotting the problem almost immediately. Quick cleanup tasks are important yes, but most of the time you can delegate those to newer employees that can actually learn from them.
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  Just because the journey feels unproductive doesn’t mean you can cut the journey in half and get to the destination. Who says your brain would have still found the bug without the time invested in it that you’re interpreting as “unproductive”? Who says if you r brain didn’t need that investment in the big just a break that a break working on other productive things wouldn’t have been just as good as a day at the beach? Also I do give my newer employees smaller easier tasks, but they still need review, mentoring, etc. which is just another “not hard activity that takes time”. One again the idea that you can just cut work hours with no impact seems silly unless you’re working like 70 hours, or unless you’re already just a voluntarily unproductive worker. Maybe that’s an underdiscusssd angle to this; some people just don’t know how to productively organize their time.

wonderwonder 4y ago

I agree with the 20 - 25 hours of productive mental work per week. So much of my day is wasted with meetings that could be an email. The worst are recurring weekly meetings. Why? Tomorrow I have meeting starting from 9am. From 9-5 I only have 1.5 hours that are not meetings and they are not concurrent, they are 3 30 minute blocks between meetings. I have an insane deadline I am trying to make in 2 weeks. How am I supposed to get any work done if I am constantly in meetings? I feel like companies should designate at most 2 hours a day as meeting hours, after that let tech workers build tech, its not right to fill days with meetings and then expect us to produce at night. My last job had almost no meetings it was awesome. I really only worked maybe 20 hours a week but it was solid deep work. Its been a year and the company CTO still reaches out occasionally to see if I want a position for various projects they have coming up. If you let developers just work when they are in work mode you will get solid results.

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

>I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines. Hanlon's razor applies here. As does Chesterton's Fence for that matter The 40 hour work week was won in actual blood from labor activists long before any of us were conceptions. The fact that we still live within it, is simply a proof of counter-revolution being pervasive such that the world has structured itself around this. We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>We should continue to demand the value that efficiency has brought us go where it rightfully sits, with labor. Labor lost most power with the rise in globalization. It was much easier to strike and affect businesses when they had a limited hiring pool restricted to one country. Now they can just move to another country where labor is less demanding.
- vidarh 4y ago
  While that is true to a limited extent, labour is doing much better in plenty of countries where people have demanded - and gotten - far more than in the US also post-globalisation. Labour has lost power mainly in those countries where people bought into the employers narrative and stopped or scaled back the fighting. Much of it correlates with media ownership support or hostility - e.g. in Norway the second largest media group was founded by the unions and remains owned by a charitable foundation, and so there has consistently been a strongly pro-union voice in media.
  - ticviking 4y ago
    My question is why didn’t US labor try things like that? It seems to me that in the early radio era this was possible.
    - vidarh 4y ago

sjtgraham 4y ago

> > My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless... If there are people who can't run a mile and those who can run over 100, what makes you think everyone universally can sustain 20-25 hours of focussed work per week?

cinntaile 4y ago
Are you suggesting the number of focused hours per week can be trained just like running a mile?
- sh4rks 4y ago
  Yes. Most people are lazy. Make sure you get 8-9 hours of sleep, prep your meals for the day, and slowly increase the number of focused hours over time (progressive overload). "Burnout" is a myth if you focus on good recovery. (of course this doesn't apply to everyone, as some people may have certain medical conditions or other important commitments)
koonsolo 4y ago
If I do 20-25 hours a week, and nobody else can outperform me in productive output, I don't really care how much hours they put in. I've had jobs where I was productive maybe 4 hours a week, and got excellent reviews. So I always wondered if I got that, WTF were the other devs doing?

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

for programming work I would say 20-25 hours a week on complicated things, and an extra 5 - 10 hours on simple things. The complicated things are stressing and you need to relax a bit afterwards, and then you can take easy stuff, like maybe an evaluation of what one might do to speed up some process without actually writing the code, just a report. Or simple fixing of design issues, code cleanup stuff like that.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

The main reason for meddle management existence is a recursive loop. The narcissts produce unsolveable problems, intertribal conflict and other pressure related sypmtoms. After they poisoned the workspace, they themselves become necessary to work around the problems and coping behaviour they created. They are literaly self-employed.

j7ake 4y ago

This resonates with Sara Billeys advice for PhDs : https://sites.math.washington.edu/~billey/advice/timely.fashion.pdf https://sites.math.washington.edu/~billey/advice/timely.fash... She recommends 20 hours of research a week. But there is a high bar to what qualifies an hour. Maybe relevant for HN community is that they count programming as half time (ie 2 hours programming is 1 hour of work). When mathematicians say they “work” it’s different than what normal people say is “work”. An analogy is people who do a full proper pull-up versus people who “cheat” to pull themselves up, but both types of people are counting them as pull ups.

jacobjwebber 4y ago

I’m doing a phd in informatics. 4 hours per weekday of actual work is what I have found to be my sustainable limit. Not sure I could even do this 5 days a week, more like 3 or 4.

keyraycheck 4y ago

+1 That is true for deep work like: - solving mathematical problems - coding non-trivial stuff - teaching non-trival stuff The challange is shallow work e.g. - replying to emails - meetings - scheduling meetings And than there is no-work: - checking your phone - lunch - walking and chatting before the next meeting Shallow and no-work can easily eat anywhere between 20 and infinity :)

stuaxo 4y ago
Even "shallow work" isn't done as well during the extra time. Besides - doing meetings well is not shallow work at all; scheduling is a pain etc and emails are written better when people aren't tired.

vouwfietsman 4y ago

> I feel the only reason why we have 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs is because of infantile narcissists who have no other purpose in life than to go to work and push people like machines. Not really though, this is deeply culturally ingrained in everybody. You may not like a 40 hour workweek, but you like to own a Tesla, and you are envious of rich people, and you judge people who are homeless or don't have work or don't "apply themselves". (using "you" to mean "people") The issue is deeply cultural, and cannot be blamed on any single evil entity or person. If everybody wanted this, it would be so. The question is, why does not everybody want this? This is largely due to cultural forces, which can be manipulated through marketing and politics, but are mostly upheld by every single individual going with the flow.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

what about useful jobs which are not productive (in terms of monetization of the time units worked) nor physically demanding? I guess 4 days work for a librarian doesn't mean anything meaningful and the said librarian productivity doesn't plummet like in a "writing math papers" scenario. Or for an emergency doctor, a fireman, a shop owner, a sportsman etc. etc. A friend of mine is an air traffic controller, they work 8 hours straight in 3 8 hours shifts during the 24h they need to cover constantly (meaning they don't even stop for a lunch break, only a few short 10 minutes breaks to stretch or to go to the bathroom) for 5 days straight and then they stay 3 days and 1/2 home, so they work 17-18 days a month. Anyway 9-5 (which is more like 8-~16 in my Country on average, with an hour long lunch break, so ~36 hours/week in total) was won by workers with actual real social battles and 9-5 is the time of the day where the presence of natural light is more probable. We could switch to working 23:00-6:00 but I guess it wouldn't be so good for the morale. Also, I generally really work no more than 1-2 hours per day, the rest is spent thinking about the problem, reading documentation, watching a tutorial, participating in a meeting when I do not have to talk an I can keep the camera turned off and the mic on mute, but mostly is doing something else entirely, completely disconnected from my duties, to enable my brain to absorb the problem and have a fresh view on it sometimes later. Best ideas happen when you're not actively thinking about them.

pwpw 4y ago

> I think if you are truly just doing productive, meaningful technical work, beyond 3 full days most people can't do it. People can do it for short periods of time, but more than 3 days leads to universal burnout. This is similar to my experience. Back in 2020 I decided to make a career switch from accounting to software engineering. I began studying in the morning, at lunch, and in the evening while working a full-time job. I quickly discovered that I could only study in the morning with a lighter review in the evening. Eventually, I got to the point where I had to walk away from work and study full-time because it was so mentally exhausting. Around that time, I started learning Greek as well. I attended classes once per week and observed that I had to lighten my CompSci studying workload on days I had Greek class. Otherwise, I would have a high degree of difficulty learning Greek that evening. I was hitting my mental exhaustion limit after 5 hours of intense, technical learning every day. If I tried to push past that point, I would burn myself out and become noticeably less productive. This was something I had never realized while in school with frequent built in breaks (and perhaps more energy from being younger). When I was studying for the CPA exam in the library for 8 hours per day, I thought I was being highly efficient the entire time. However, looking back on it, I was spending a good portion of that time taking breaks and doing lighter review of material I already knew, which was not too taxing (pun intended) on my mental energy. Now, I’m well aware of my upper limits of hard work and find that forcing myself past that point isn’t worth the trade-off of mental exhaustion. I realistically believe that I could switch to a 4 day work week and accomplish the same amount while being more energized in the long-run. I’d love to get the opportunity to test my hypothesis. As a side note: I found when I was studying full-stack material, switching between backend and front end work when I began to tire of one slowed the rate of my mental exhaustion.

javier2 4y ago

To be honest, I cant do more than 5H of good technical work per day either