Naively, working more will lead to more output and if someone thinks they feel good while working a lot, I think the default guess should be that working more is improving their output. I would be interested in the evidence you have for the claim that people operating similar to Ben described should take more vacation.
I think there is some minimum amount of breaks and vacation that people should strongly default to taking and it also seems good to take some non-trivial amount of time to at least reflect on their situation and goals in different environments (you can think of this as a break, or as a retreat).
But, 2-4 weeks per year of vacation combined with working more like 70 hours a week seems like a non-crazy default if it feels good. This is only working around 2⁄3 of waking hours (supposing 9 hours for sleep and getting ready for sleep) and working ~95% of weeks. (And Ben said he works 50-70 hours, not always 70.)
It’s worth noting that “human perform better with more rest” isn’t a sufficient argument for thinking more rest is impactful: you need to argue this effect overwhelms the upsides of additional work. (Including things like returns to being particularly fast and possible returns to scale on working hours.)
I mean, two points: 1. We all work too many hours, working 70 hours a week persistently is definitely too many to maximize output. You get dumb fast after hour 40 and dive into negative productivity. There’s a robust organizational psych literature on this, I’m given to understand, that we all choose to ignore, because the first ~12 weeks or so, you can push beyond and get more done, but then it backfires.
2. You’re literally saying statements that I used to say before burning out, and that the average consultant or banker says as part of their path to burnout. And we cannot afford to lose either of you to burnout, especially not right now.
If you’re taking a full 4 weeks, great. 2 weeks a year is definitely not enough at a 70 hours a week pace, based on the observed long term health patterns of everyone I’ve known who works that pace for a long time. I’m willing to assert that you working 48/50ths of the hours a year you’d work otherwise is worth it, assuming fairly trivial speedups in productivity of literally just over 4% from being more refreshed, getting new perspectives from downing tools, etc.
Burnout is not a result of working a lot, it’s a result of work not feeling like it pays out in ape-enjoyableness[citation needed]. So they very well could be having a grand ol time working a lot if their attitude towards intended amount of success matches up comfortably with actual success and they find this to pay out in a felt currency which is directly satisfying. I get burned out when effort ⇒ results ⇒ natural rewards gets broken, eg because of being unable to succeed at something hard, or forgetting to use money to buy things my body would like to be paid with.
If someone did a detailed literature review or had relatively serious evidence, I’d be interested. By default, I’m quite skeptical of your level of confidence in this claims given that they directly contradict my experience and the experience of people I know. (E.g., I’ve done similar things for way longer than 12 weeks.)
To be clear, I think I currently work more like 60 hours a week depending on how you do the accounting, I was just defending 70 hours as reasonable and I think it makes sense to work up to this.
That said, I do think there’s enough evidence that I would bet (not at extreme odds) that it is bad for productivity to have organizational cultures that emphasize working very long hours (say > 60 hours / week), unless you are putting in special care to hire people compatible with that culture. Partly this is because I expect organizations to often be unable to overcome weak priors even when faced with blatant evidence.
Naively, working more will lead to more output and if someone thinks they feel good while working a lot, I think the default guess should be that working more is improving their output. I would be interested in the evidence you have for the claim that people operating similar to Ben described should take more vacation.
I think there is some minimum amount of breaks and vacation that people should strongly default to taking and it also seems good to take some non-trivial amount of time to at least reflect on their situation and goals in different environments (you can think of this as a break, or as a retreat).
But, 2-4 weeks per year of vacation combined with working more like 70 hours a week seems like a non-crazy default if it feels good. This is only working around 2⁄3 of waking hours (supposing 9 hours for sleep and getting ready for sleep) and working ~95% of weeks. (And Ben said he works 50-70 hours, not always 70.)
It’s worth noting that “human perform better with more rest” isn’t a sufficient argument for thinking more rest is impactful: you need to argue this effect overwhelms the upsides of additional work. (Including things like returns to being particularly fast and possible returns to scale on working hours.)
I mean, two points:
1. We all work too many hours, working 70 hours a week persistently is definitely too many to maximize output. You get dumb fast after hour 40 and dive into negative productivity. There’s a robust organizational psych literature on this, I’m given to understand, that we all choose to ignore, because the first ~12 weeks or so, you can push beyond and get more done, but then it backfires.
2. You’re literally saying statements that I used to say before burning out, and that the average consultant or banker says as part of their path to burnout. And we cannot afford to lose either of you to burnout, especially not right now.
If you’re taking a full 4 weeks, great. 2 weeks a year is definitely not enough at a 70 hours a week pace, based on the observed long term health patterns of everyone I’ve known who works that pace for a long time. I’m willing to assert that you working 48/50ths of the hours a year you’d work otherwise is worth it, assuming fairly trivial speedups in productivity of literally just over 4% from being more refreshed, getting new perspectives from downing tools, etc.
Burnout is not a result of working a lot, it’s a result of work not feeling like it pays out in ape-enjoyableness[citation needed]. So they very well could be having a grand ol time working a lot if their attitude towards intended amount of success matches up comfortably with actual success and they find this to pay out in a felt currency which is directly satisfying. I get burned out when effort ⇒ results ⇒ natural rewards gets broken, eg because of being unable to succeed at something hard, or forgetting to use money to buy things my body would like to be paid with.
If someone did a detailed literature review or had relatively serious evidence, I’d be interested. By default, I’m quite skeptical of your level of confidence in this claims given that they directly contradict my experience and the experience of people I know. (E.g., I’ve done similar things for way longer than 12 weeks.)
To be clear, I think I currently work more like 60 hours a week depending on how you do the accounting, I was just defending 70 hours as reasonable and I think it makes sense to work up to this.
I think the evidence is roughly at “this should be a weakly held prior easily overturned by personal experience”: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c8EeJtqnsKyXdLtc5/how-long-can-people-usefully-work
That said, I do think there’s enough evidence that I would bet (not at extreme odds) that it is bad for productivity to have organizational cultures that emphasize working very long hours (say > 60 hours / week), unless you are putting in special care to hire people compatible with that culture. Partly this is because I expect organizations to often be unable to overcome weak priors even when faced with blatant evidence.