A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

I think that mode where you need to work hard and not smart is quite similar to creating technical debt: Sometimes you need to do it, usually to meet some timeline you have no control over, and it's best done consciously.

Personally, I work with multiple companies and kinda found my holy grail in that: When I find myself doing questionable work in one place, I can always switch gears to something else and get back to it with some distance and fresh ideas. As an employee expected to work 40+ hours per week for a single company, that was a lot more difficult.

On HN, one simply reads the title, assumes the content, and comments based on one’s prior beliefs.

As a fellow ML researcher, I actually have a good answer to this. It's a creative task, not a labor task. Creative tasks require your brain to be exceptionally flexible and to view things from unique perspectives. Research is literally creating something that no one has thought of before so you clearly have to do things no one did before. Plus, the truth is that if you're a researcher, do you ever really "stop"? Because I'll even be sitting down playing videogames and sometimes thats when ideas come to be. Other times when I'm out for a walk. Sometimes it's also when I'm deep in the codebase tearing stuff apart because it's already 5 levels of spagetti figuring out exactly what each line does and thinking a lot about it and its connection to the rest of the program (seriously, we could do a lot more testing if we'd rewrite code from the ground up. Not doing this is like thinking your first attempt at anything is good. Idk about you, but my first attempts are absolute shit and I've learned a lot by the next go around). But all those things are connected together. Because science is very much an art. My best ideas always come from after time I've taken off which is usually long overdue (as in I can barely name 2 realistic vacations in the last 5 years), but exactly like you say, it feels like I can't take the time.

> The moment I try to talk about the creative type of work my colleagues look at me like I'm making excuses or that I'm a slacker.

Just me and the teams I've worked on/with or are these people also typically low productivity and not the most creative? The type of people that treat science as something you can just hammer away at like there's a clear algorithm to solving any problem. I know it's wrong, but that shit gives me mad imposter syndrome.

Like our literally job is about optimization. You think we'd be able to at least optimize a work day, or maybe a month?