You always have to do a fixed baseline of background work: Answering emails, meetings, filling out the forms for your company dental plan. Say that’s 20 hours. So, a 60-hour week is not 50% more quality work-time (coding, etc.) than a 40-hour week, it is 100% more. Of course, it’s best to arrange things to minimize the scut-work and focus on the highest-value effort.
Another argument: You want to avoid clock-watching. When you’re hyped up, you work longer hours because you have the momentum and the urge to fix that one last problem. If you keep the work-day to 8 hours, it’s hard to maintain that sense of drive.
Ideally, you maintain a sense of drive for the 8 hours (going over occasionally as needed) -- if you can manage that, it’s the best combination.
These are reflective-decision arguments: Do X to make sure your mind focuses on certain goals. If we were reflectively consistent we wouldn’t need to fool our own minds. As with other forms of rationality, you will do better if you can maintain reflective consistency than if you try to hack your way around it.
One argument for a longer work week:
You always have to do a fixed baseline of background work: Answering emails, meetings, filling out the forms for your company dental plan. Say that’s 20 hours. So, a 60-hour week is not 50% more quality work-time (coding, etc.) than a 40-hour week, it is 100% more. Of course, it’s best to arrange things to minimize the scut-work and focus on the highest-value effort.
Another argument: You want to avoid clock-watching. When you’re hyped up, you work longer hours because you have the momentum and the urge to fix that one last problem. If you keep the work-day to 8 hours, it’s hard to maintain that sense of drive.
Ideally, you maintain a sense of drive for the 8 hours (going over occasionally as needed) -- if you can manage that, it’s the best combination.
These are reflective-decision arguments: Do X to make sure your mind focuses on certain goals. If we were reflectively consistent we wouldn’t need to fool our own minds. As with other forms of rationality, you will do better if you can maintain reflective consistency than if you try to hack your way around it.