Outside of the office, I generally find it difficult to get appreciable amounts of work done. It feels like it takes a significant exertion of willpower to go from not doing a work-related task to doing one, at which point it generally becomes easier to continue with that task for a while. Performing this mental motion a few times per workday is enough for me to get close to full time hours in, but doesn’t feel enough for sixty hours. If I don’t perform this mental motion successfully, I wind up in a state of internal tension where I’m not actually putting in consistent mental effort towards solving the next problem in front of me. I do have a fix for this already—I work better in an office, where everyone around is also working.
So, the natural solution here would be “Find yourself an office type environment doing valuable work where it is entirely normal and expected for people to work these kind of hours.” This runs into the second issue, which is that on the rare occasions I have worked 10+ hours in a day, or generally pushed myself harder to try and stretch the edge of my conscientiousness, I tend to get headaches. Which are both unpleasant and also reduce my productivity, which ruins the entire point of the exercise. (The headaches are a known problem—I’m on a headache preventer that minimizes them. I could try upping the dosage, but I’ve already been told by one doctor that I should probably try not to be on this medication indefinitely.)
This also means that it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to an environment where everyone’s expected to work 60 hours, if I then don’t end up being able to do that even with the social and logistical environment set up in my favor. So it’d have to be an environment where it was both normal and expected to work 60 hours AND to work 40, AND the work was object-level valuable in my opinion, to be worth trying this experiment. This could be possible—I haven’t actually tried to seek out such an environment. But I do notice that I still do anticipate failing the original 60-hour goal due to the problem in the second paragraph.
Outside of the office, I generally find it difficult to get appreciable amounts of work done. It feels like it takes a significant exertion of willpower to go from not doing a work-related task to doing one, at which point it generally becomes easier to continue with that task for a while. Performing this mental motion a few times per workday is enough for me to get close to full time hours in, but doesn’t feel enough for sixty hours. If I don’t perform this mental motion successfully, I wind up in a state of internal tension where I’m not actually putting in consistent mental effort towards solving the next problem in front of me. I do have a fix for this already—I work better in an office, where everyone around is also working.
So, the natural solution here would be “Find yourself an office type environment doing valuable work where it is entirely normal and expected for people to work these kind of hours.” This runs into the second issue, which is that on the rare occasions I have worked 10+ hours in a day, or generally pushed myself harder to try and stretch the edge of my conscientiousness, I tend to get headaches. Which are both unpleasant and also reduce my productivity, which ruins the entire point of the exercise. (The headaches are a known problem—I’m on a headache preventer that minimizes them. I could try upping the dosage, but I’ve already been told by one doctor that I should probably try not to be on this medication indefinitely.)
This also means that it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to an environment where everyone’s expected to work 60 hours, if I then don’t end up being able to do that even with the social and logistical environment set up in my favor. So it’d have to be an environment where it was both normal and expected to work 60 hours AND to work 40, AND the work was object-level valuable in my opinion, to be worth trying this experiment. This could be possible—I haven’t actually tried to seek out such an environment. But I do notice that I still do anticipate failing the original 60-hour goal due to the problem in the second paragraph.