By adding more hours your productivity today may increase while your productivity tomorrow drops, because you didn’t have enough sleep, because your neglected relationships are falling apart (and your bad mood affects your productivity at work), etc.
But today, it feels like a net gain.
And tomorrow… well, you will probably have to work overtime to compensate for your decreasing productivity. Also to keep up with your colleagues who are still in their “today” phase.
I agree that sometimes it makes rational sense to work harder than usual. But I also think humans are bad at calculating all the consequences. The work life gives us exact numbers as a feedback, while the personal life mostly gives us only a feeling that something is wrong… until the consequences accumulate and one gets some kind of boolean feedback, such as a divorce or a heart stroke, but by then it’s kind of late to make a balance. So I guess most people in these professions err on the side of working more than is optimal for the best cost-to-output ratio. Problem is, when the other people are doing it, standing out of the crowd is usually very bad signalling.
By adding more hours your productivity today may increase while your productivity tomorrow drops, because you didn’t have enough sleep, because your neglected relationships are falling apart (and your bad mood affects your productivity at work), etc.
But today, it feels like a net gain.
And tomorrow… well, you will probably have to work overtime to compensate for your decreasing productivity. Also to keep up with your colleagues who are still in their “today” phase.
I agree that sometimes it makes rational sense to work harder than usual. But I also think humans are bad at calculating all the consequences. The work life gives us exact numbers as a feedback, while the personal life mostly gives us only a feeling that something is wrong… until the consequences accumulate and one gets some kind of boolean feedback, such as a divorce or a heart stroke, but by then it’s kind of late to make a balance. So I guess most people in these professions err on the side of working more than is optimal for the best cost-to-output ratio. Problem is, when the other people are doing it, standing out of the crowd is usually very bad signalling.