Interesting post, but I wonder if even when you are working smart, sustained intense effort isn't sometimes worth it. The late Randy Pausch, in a lecture on Tim

Interesting post, but I wonder if even when you are working smart, sustained intense effort isn't sometimes worth it. The late Randy Pausch, in a lecture on Time Management mentions the importance of working smart but also refers to the years he worked late into the night working on his research. I suspect regularity/ sustaining effort maybe the key. Work a solid 8 hours a day every day without fail for a few years might be a "harder" thing to undertake than a couple of months worth of eighty hour work weeks. You still use metrics to optinmize what you are working on of course, though it maybe harder for something like a research effort or a PhD thesis to get meaningful metrics.