How much should we work?

June 17, 2020

How much to Work?

4 hours of deep, hyper-focused, intensive work. The number is based on studies by Roy Baumeister on willpower depletion¹, but is that really all we've got?

Subsequent studies have challenged this²³ and showed it to be a self limiting belief. If you believe will power is limited like an oxygen tank, then your wish comes true.

But those who believed that willpower replenishes itself like Popeye's spinach showed no such signs of willpower depletion. So we’ve gone meta? If I believe in a limited 4 hours of creative hours, then it actually does me harm, because then I’d go “Welp that’s all I can do for today, I’ve spent my hours”, when I could have pushed a bit further.

So the question is: knowing all of the above, how long or hard should we work? What is the right balance? Herculean achievements like making the atomic bomb aren't built on 8 hours a day, but nothing's substantial gets made going hardcore for single day either, unless you're Rocky Balboa, who wrote Rocky in three days⁴.

The case for working less

Shopify's founder rarely went over 40 hour weeks⁵. Patrick Mackenzie supports working less because purely working harder is not difficult or valuable and does not correspond to business results⁶.

Gumroad’s founder⁷ failed to start the rocketship expected by venture capitalists despite putting in enormous hours. They had a good product, but investors expected exponential growth, and nothing they did could make that happen.

Basecamp strives for work life balance and sustainable growth⁸ over endless emails and the “always on” mentality that screws over your personal life and well-being and leads to burn-out. This is a nice balance in an industry where employees have to keep on top of latest technologies and trends. The above talks about working more in a business sense. Less meetings and useless cruft and only focus on the essential. There is a difference between run off the mill companies and research, and truly great innovations and Nobel prize winning research

Things are easy when you’re doing good and money is flowing.

If the companies are in a good place economically, product-market fit, and a predictable roadmap, they can afford to do less work to keep their train running. It’s hard to fuck up at at point. It's easy for google to give employees 20% time to work on whatever when they already have a money printing machine.

There's nothing wrong with hard work

Richard Hemming describes knowledge as compounding in the same way as compound interest⁹. Working extremely hard in your 20s compounds into your 30s and so on. Hockey players born earlier in the year have a slight advantage in maturity early on get more focus and resources. Early achieving scientists get grants and awards to fund future research.

Paul Erdos lived on coffee, took meth-amphetamines, worked 19 hours a day and produced some of the best work in mathematics. Elon works over 80 hours and claims that nobody changes the world working regular work weeks. Those who have done ground breaking work were borderline obsessed with their craft. To Erdos, doing maths was also like doing meth.

For this to work, you have to actually like what you’re doing. Not everybody is changing the world, but for those that enjoy what they do and feel like they can and want to push harder can go far beyond the 4 hour limit.

What is more important than how

In these cases the work we do is more important than the total number of hours or any kind of productivity system. 80 hours of busy work and answering emails and dealing with politics would burn anyone out (unless they love politics). I even dread doing taxes for a couple hours on the weekend.

But when work is fun, exciting and important to us, there's no need to hold onto the belief of limited will power. We can push far beyond upper limits that psychology students have in a lab. Erdos and Musk don’t need to force themselves to work, because doing mathematics and building rockets is their version of binging Netflix.

Play is doubly important. Richard Feynman saw a guy throwing plates in the air and worked out equations for wobbles, which was later turned into equations for quantum electrodynamics. He didn't do it for any purpose, it was just fun and effortless and easy. It doesn't always have to leave somewhere, as long as it was fun. In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s interviews with exceptional scientists, politicians, and artists, every person said that despite working extremely hard, it was an exhilarating and playful experience.

For the rest of us who have to force ourselves, perhaps Anthony Bourdain’s quote is more relatable.

"I understand there’s a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy."