5 ms·

I wonder if the science on the 40-hour work week applies mostly to specialized jobs, or if it can be broadly applied to more generalized roles, i.e. _entrepren

by bsmith 12y ago

I wonder if the science on the 40-hour work week applies mostly to specialized jobs, or if it can be broadly applied to more generalized roles, i.e. _entrepreneur_, where one switches contexts several times per day/week. How many 'successful' startup founders only worked about 40 hours a week versus 60+? Is Elon deluding himself when he claims his 100+ hour weeks allow him to accomplish more than his less-disciplined competitors?

AhtiK 12y ago
If the daily work is built around being in the flow and rhythm then mental muscle is not that much stressed. You wake up, you know that your limo is waiting in 20 minutes. You'll start with a scheduled call on the way to gym. At the gym personal trainer makes sure you're giving maximum. Then the limo takes you to the private jet so you can catch the conference in Europe at 4pm. etc. My point is, if the world around you revolves in a rhythm where falling out is not an option, you can find the balanced flow and rhythm so 100+ hour week full of balanced work is absolutely normal. You just stop wasting non-work time over the weekend and use it for maximum recovery and family-time. Add a bit of humour and laughter to these 100+ hours and stop caring about issues you can't fix and it's a paradise to live in.
- Roboprog 12y ago
  Huh?
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    If you have the insane financial position that someone like Musk does, it gives you the ability to edit a lot of annoyance/stress out of your life. Most of the day to day crap that most of us deal with can be automated or delegated away.
Rapzid 12y ago
I suspect sleep, and routine, is more the determining factor. I imagine most people should be capable of maintaining high levels of productivity for 77+ hour weeks if they could get 9+ hours of solid sleep every night. That leaves enough time for an 11 work day, 1 one hour workout, 30 minutes of commute, and 2.5 hours of misc time. As a single persons game. However, that's a big SHOULD/COULD/WOULD. Real world statistics probably reflect that most people either aren't capable or simply wouldn't maintain this kind of routine.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Elon probably has built up a huge support system around him that he knows, both implicitly and explicitly, has his back and will help him out. As opposed to "your project is behind, time for 11½ hour work days." I got that earlier this year. At least I was paid hourly at the time.
- PeterisP 12y ago
  Experiments have repeatedly shown a solid increase in day-total productivity when going from 10 hour workdays to 8 hour workdays; similarly, there is an increase in total weekly productivity when comparing 6 days a week to 5 day workweek. I doubt that the people who work[ed] on saturdays had a much different daily routine than those who didn't; but still, working that extra day only results in less work done.
  - crpatino 12y ago
    No, no less work done in total. You work that extra hour/day, week after week, and you see real productivity gains (not necessarily per-hour productivity gains, but marginally speaking, you make progress faster). As others have mentioned before, this trick can work very well in the short term. However three months into it (roughly +150 man-hrs), you make a small blunder that nobody notices at first. One year later, it will blow up and set your whole team back for a whole month (assuming team_size = 5, -800 man-hrs). Everybody will try to catch up by staying an hour later, or working on the weekends... rinse and repeat. The problem is that cause and effect are so far apart in time that nobody notices why this is happening. Usual suspects such as "rusty codebase" or "technical debt" get assigned with the blame and no lesson is learned.
    - PeterisP 12y ago
      As far as I understand, the experiments show explicitly less work done, as in, if you do the 60 hour workweek for prolonged time, then you have less widgets produced per week, period. It's NOT a tradeoff of more volume for less quality and increased risk. All the drawbacks you list are valid, and come on top of less total productivity. You don't get a product built faster but with more defects and technical debt. You get the product built slower; with more defects and techical debt; and at a cost to the workers personal life in a true lose-lose tradeoff.
julie1 12y ago
Well, it 48 hours a week vs 60 jours is the secret of the success of british & USA vs Germany during WWI : * WWI = death by explosive * over work == more defaults => more of your soldiers killed less of theirs, more money spent * so british army edicted a ban on overwork ~ 1917 followed by USA. The question is does it matter more to produce the most defective products, or to produce stuff that works?
rubinelli 12y ago
I can't comment on context switching, but one thing to keep in mind is that 40 hours is the peak of a bell curve. That implies that some individuals can in fact work 50, 60-hour weeks for months without a significant drop in productivity, and some probably shouldn't work more than 4 days a week. Maybe Elon Musk is the one-in-a-billion guy that can actually stay productive for 100+ hours, but thinking that's reason for you working 50+ hours is like saying you should be able to swim 100m in 70 seconds because they do it in less than 50 in the Olympics.
- hawkice 12y ago
  Or, to add in the more specifically measured element: 40 hours is the peak of the Laffer curve [productivity being inversely proportional to hours worked a week]. I have absolutely no data on variance for the peak of the Laffer curve (if you imagine attempting to gather this data, you'll notice it is extremely difficult). That being said, despite this lack of data, I have heard a lot of people claiming they can work a whole lot more and get more and more done. I do not believe their ad hoc methods have secretly outsmarted science. It seems more likely that they are mistaken (if only for the reason that it is very hard to measure and they universally lack specific reason to choose "my peak productivity happens at >60 hours a week" over "the volume of my work is more noticeable than the quality of my work", which is essentially universal -- but lines of code, as a metric, don't pay the bills).
- Fishkins 12y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the research actually only shows the peak is no higher than 40 hours per week. Are there studies indicating people are more productive working 40-hour weeks than 30 or 35-hour weeks? Of course your point still stands, they'd just have to be even more of an outlier.
Symmetry 12y ago
It really depends what you're doing. For me, meetings don't result in nearly the same mental fatigue as coding does.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  and just the opposite for me! One meeting can depress me for half a day. But I can get in a coding thrall and go 4 or 5 hours without noticing time pass.
  - Roboprog 12y ago
    I hear you. I hate having scheduled meeting almost every day, early, that ramble about things that usually don't affect me. My time would have been better spent still in bed until it was time to start building (coding, designing, writing, etc)
spinlock 12y ago
Entrepreneurs are, by definition, outliers. I don't think it makes much sense to compare them to -- or include data for them in -- an analysis of the average worker.

by bsmith 12y ago

AhtiK 12y ago

If the daily work is built around being in the flow and rhythm then mental muscle is not that much stressed. You wake up, you know that your limo is waiting in 20 minutes. You'll start with a scheduled call on the way to gym. At the gym personal trainer makes sure you're giving maximum. Then the limo takes you to the private jet so you can catch the conference in Europe at 4pm. etc. My point is, if the world around you revolves in a rhythm where falling out is not an option, you can find the balanced flow and rhythm so 100+ hour week full of balanced work is absolutely normal. You just stop wasting non-work time over the weekend and use it for maximum recovery and family-time. Add a bit of humour and laughter to these 100+ hours and stop caring about issues you can't fix and it's a paradise to live in.

Roboprog 12y ago
Huh?
- Karunamon 12y ago
  If you have the insane financial position that someone like Musk does, it gives you the ability to edit a lot of annoyance/stress out of your life. Most of the day to day crap that most of us deal with can be automated or delegated away.

Rapzid 12y ago

I suspect sleep, and routine, is more the determining factor. I imagine most people should be capable of maintaining high levels of productivity for 77+ hour weeks if they could get 9+ hours of solid sleep every night. That leaves enough time for an 11 work day, 1 one hour workout, 30 minutes of commute, and 2.5 hours of misc time. As a single persons game. However, that's a big SHOULD/COULD/WOULD. Real world statistics probably reflect that most people either aren't capable or simply wouldn't maintain this kind of routine.

danielweber 12y ago
Elon probably has built up a huge support system around him that he knows, both implicitly and explicitly, has his back and will help him out. As opposed to "your project is behind, time for 11½ hour work days." I got that earlier this year. At least I was paid hourly at the time.
PeterisP 12y ago
Experiments have repeatedly shown a solid increase in day-total productivity when going from 10 hour workdays to 8 hour workdays; similarly, there is an increase in total weekly productivity when comparing 6 days a week to 5 day workweek. I doubt that the people who work[ed] on saturdays had a much different daily routine than those who didn't; but still, working that extra day only results in less work done.
- crpatino 12y ago
  No, no less work done in total. You work that extra hour/day, week after week, and you see real productivity gains (not necessarily per-hour productivity gains, but marginally speaking, you make progress faster). As others have mentioned before, this trick can work very well in the short term. However three months into it (roughly +150 man-hrs), you make a small blunder that nobody notices at first. One year later, it will blow up and set your whole team back for a whole month (assuming team_size = 5, -800 man-hrs). Everybody will try to catch up by staying an hour later, or working on the weekends... rinse and repeat. The problem is that cause and effect are so far apart in time that nobody notices why this is happening. Usual suspects such as "rusty codebase" or "technical debt" get assigned with the blame and no lesson is learned.
  - PeterisP 12y ago
    As far as I understand, the experiments show explicitly less work done, as in, if you do the 60 hour workweek for prolonged time, then you have less widgets produced per week, period. It's NOT a tradeoff of more volume for less quality and increased risk. All the drawbacks you list are valid, and come on top of less total productivity. You don't get a product built faster but with more defects and technical debt. You get the product built slower; with more defects and techical debt; and at a cost to the workers personal life in a true lose-lose tradeoff.

julie1 12y ago

Well, it 48 hours a week vs 60 jours is the secret of the success of british & USA vs Germany during WWI : * WWI = death by explosive * over work == more defaults => more of your soldiers killed less of theirs, more money spent * so british army edicted a ban on overwork ~ 1917 followed by USA. The question is does it matter more to produce the most defective products, or to produce stuff that works?

rubinelli 12y ago

I can't comment on context switching, but one thing to keep in mind is that 40 hours is the peak of a bell curve. That implies that some individuals can in fact work 50, 60-hour weeks for months without a significant drop in productivity, and some probably shouldn't work more than 4 days a week. Maybe Elon Musk is the one-in-a-billion guy that can actually stay productive for 100+ hours, but thinking that's reason for you working 50+ hours is like saying you should be able to swim 100m in 70 seconds because they do it in less than 50 in the Olympics.

hawkice 12y ago
Or, to add in the more specifically measured element: 40 hours is the peak of the Laffer curve [productivity being inversely proportional to hours worked a week]. I have absolutely no data on variance for the peak of the Laffer curve (if you imagine attempting to gather this data, you'll notice it is extremely difficult). That being said, despite this lack of data, I have heard a lot of people claiming they can work a whole lot more and get more and more done. I do not believe their ad hoc methods have secretly outsmarted science. It seems more likely that they are mistaken (if only for the reason that it is very hard to measure and they universally lack specific reason to choose "my peak productivity happens at >60 hours a week" over "the volume of my work is more noticeable than the quality of my work", which is essentially universal -- but lines of code, as a metric, don't pay the bills).
Fishkins 12y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the research actually only shows the peak is no higher than 40 hours per week. Are there studies indicating people are more productive working 40-hour weeks than 30 or 35-hour weeks? Of course your point still stands, they'd just have to be even more of an outlier.

Symmetry 12y ago

It really depends what you're doing. For me, meetings don't result in nearly the same mental fatigue as coding does.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
and just the opposite for me! One meeting can depress me for half a day. But I can get in a coding thrall and go 4 or 5 hours without noticing time pass.
- Roboprog 12y ago
  I hear you. I hate having scheduled meeting almost every day, early, that ramble about things that usually don't affect me. My time would have been better spent still in bed until it was time to start building (coding, designing, writing, etc)

spinlock 12y ago

Entrepreneurs are, by definition, outliers. I don't think it makes much sense to compare them to -- or include data for them in -- an analysis of the average worker.