A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

My name is Rick and I'm a 80 hour a week guy.

I'm 26, single, and have no pets. I have a family and friends, but I'm very transparent about my work habits and priorities as a full-stack engineer.

Being so young, I see myself as training to be the person I want to be in the future. The best programmers in the world worked at it relentlessly. Sure, there are variances in the amount that they all worked, and some did it with much less work than others. But if I want to be the best in the world, or at least attain my personal upper bound, I have to work hard at it and I have to work consistently at it.

John Resig didn't wake up one day and write jQuery. Steve Wozniak didn't just throw together the Apple I. Linus didn't just decide to write the Linux kernel one afternoon. They all put to work the investments they made in themselves.

I don't do it because I want money, success, or fame. I do it because I deeply want to make a meaningful impact on the world. I want it so bad that when I think about it my palms sweat and my chest gets heavy. When you look at the future of humanity as a whole, we need to either improve or die. And to improve, we need improvers. I want to be an improver and I don't want to rest until I am.

To be clear, I love what I do and I don't really consider it work. Solving hard problems with creative techniques is one of my favorite things to do. I really enjoy learning new things, and being able to pull them into my work is really satisfying. Being able to build something that I imagine, push it out to people, and see them get excited about it is surreal. I don't want to be doing anything else. I don't want to stop working.

But I understand the research. I understand that the work I put in will be more productive and beneficial to me if I have a balance in all areas of my life--which means that I need to be social, have hobbies, and live a healthy lifestyle.

So I've aligned my life such that those interactions still help me reach my upper bound. My friends are smarter than I am and many are in technical fields so getting a beer with them involves talking about a hard problem we solved. My hobbies include writing StackOverflow posts, trying out new frameworks, and reading books like Thinking, Fast and Slow, RabbitMQ in Action, and Secrets of the Javascript Ninja. I truly enjoy and am satisfied with these parts of my life, even though I'm never really leaving the mindset of work.

One day I want to write those books, not just read them, and I want those books to meaningfully impact the world. So I train, and that means I'm an 80 hours a week guy.

That's actually an interesting problem at work. How do you actually distance yourself from the project?

This false dichotomy is seriously getting annoying. If 60 hours is sustainable for you, do it. If only 30 hours is sustainable for you, do that instead. But stop imposing onto others what is right or wrong when there are so many factors at play.

Some of my most productive memories are summers studying and working for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (= 72 hours). I didn't get tired, burned out, or anything. Another summer had me working at a company making "apps" for 40 hours a week, and it fucking drained me... despite taking far less intelligence and brain effort. I suppose that's not true, the brain effort was constantly justifying why I wasn't quitting haha.

Regarding friends/partners/etc. If the amount of hours you want to work isn't compatible with your partner's expectations... get a new partner. Seriously. Your priorities aren't aligned. I don't know what I'd do if my partner expected me to be home for dinner at 6pm on weeknights... Oh wait I do, I'd get a new partner, which I did. Now everyone involved (myself, previous partner, new partner) are very happy.

Finally regarding productivity vs. hours put in. Again, this is completely irrelevant if you're following the right metrics - results. Long hours obviously don't make sense if they're making you too tired to deliver results. If you're delivering but not in a sustainable way, well, you need to calibrate and lower expectations so you don't under deliver.

In short, people should optimize for long-term productivity appropriate to their goals. This, combined with your unique physiology and work circumstances, will dictate how many hours you should work. Oh and definitely exercise every week.

Same as with anything else in life, really. Take fitness for example- I hear guys bragging about how hard their routine is, how they train every day till exhaustion. That doesn't necessarily mean anything. Trying to constantly be busy with something is a form of laziness if you think about it. It means not doing the things that really make the difference- those annoying ones, the ones we always leave for later.