Already looks like he's well into burn out territory. Those numbers have him spending more than a full normal work week per month on "procrastination".
It looks to me that he's having an enormous amount of trouble focusing on work, and trying to compensate by working crazy hours. That's the vicious cycle of burnout -- eroded focus leads to more hours to get things done leads to further collapse in the ability to focus on anything.
I agree. Personally I generally don't believe most people are capable of even meeting 37-40 hours a week of productive time. 30 maybe.
Sitting in a desk for 40 hours (or 60 or 80), sure. Doing work spread out over that time, sure.
But none of my most productive time periods have ever coincided with the time periods I've put in the most hours. And I've yet to see someone get through a 37 or 40 hour work without spending a substantial proportion on them zoning out with non-work stuff or just being slow and lacking in concentration from time to time. Or both. The longer the work, the worse it gets.
These days, I do sometimes still put in ridiculous weeks, but they are rare, and they are often explicitly with the trade-off that I know I'll take productivity hits and where I carefully schedule naps and caffeine etc. accordingly in order to be productive when it counts and "phone it in" when I can get away with merely being physically present (e.g. when someone drags me to meetings I know there's no real reason for me to be at).
In my experience with long weeks like that, most of the time the reason for the long hours is usually 90% about politics and meeting room posturing and someone panicking than it is about actual productivity benefits. It may be worth putting up with occasionally to humour someone important enough to your income, but these days I refuse to let it be a major part of my life.
There are the rare exception where there are genuine crises that really actually need everyone to be present for long periods, but if they are frequent, something is very wrong. In 20 years, apart from dealing with alerts keeping me awake for a few hours here and there, and where I compensate by according rest afterwards, I've maybe experienced 2-3 extended periods of excessive working hours for multiple days after each other where it was actually necessary.
Agreed 100%. I feel like I could get as much done with a 25hr/wk workweek instead of 40hr/wk. I try to stay focused and work hard for those 40+ hrs each week, but things eventually trail off anyways.
Thanks for pointing this out; I think "procrastination" was a lazy label for that time category on my part and doesn't actually reflect what I'm doing.
As I mentioned in a parent (cousin-once-removed?) comment, the RescueTime statistics capture every moment I spend in front of my computer, not just when I'm in work mode. My actual work pattern is more like
- Wake up
- Bike 2 minutes to my office
- Work for 9-10 hours
- Bike home
- Do the things that I labeled "procrastination" (mostly reading things on the Internet)
This leaves me working a pretty normal schedule. I actually find I'm able to focus very well at work, since I'm really excited about my job and have a private office that screens out most distractions.
From Denmark, and that was what shook me as well! Seems like INSANELY much.
We don't know if the data collected is from the total hours of "on-time" of the computer. This would mean that procrastination could be taking up the majority of the spare time. I'm on my computer around 10-12 hours a day studying, working, blogging and just browsing the Internet and would not be surprised if I spend around 286 hours a month at the keyboard. But it's not work all of it.
EDIT: On the frontpage he writes "By day I’m an engineer at Wave. (Also frequently by night because I really like my work.)"
It's somewhat different for working at startups and for founders, but it's a Europe v.s. America culture difference. Americans are very proud to work 70 hours a week and take no or 2 weeks vacation a year, Europeans call them crazy for doing it.
Having worked 70 hour weeks myself, and having worked with Americans doing 70 hours weeks in startups:
Outside of very short intervals, I've yet to meet a single person (myself included) in mentally demanding jobs who actually increase their productivity more than very marginally (in terms of work accomplished in a week) this way. I'm sure exceptions exists, but in 20 years in development and operations work I've yet to meet them.
In fact, I've had to order people to go home and sleep because they measurably increased the defect rates for our code enough to become a net drain.
In other words: I don't just see it as crazy, I see it as inefficient and a quick way to burn out without accomplishing much.
While there may be culture differences involved, the reason I think this is an issue at all is a combination of lack of capturing and reviewing metrics of productivity coupled with a lot of people being delusional about their own work capacity (see the lack of metrics bit) and others being forced to keep up or look lazy in comparison.
I way to often see people having problems getting "enough" work done while being noticeable and obviously slowed down by lack of sleep, for example, only for their response to be to work longer and slow down even more.
What's especially bothersome is that the first cognitive function you lose when you're tired and overworked is self-assessment.
"This is insane! I've never been so productive" has entered my mind many times just as I looked up, understood that this hour-long work was actually six hours and that meant it wasn't productive at all, and finally went home or to bed.
Yeah, I finally beat that by writing a fresh todo list each day with an estimate of how much time I will put in towards each entry today and when I expect to start (rather than how much it will take to complete it). Then I annotate it with when I actually start and stop and notes on why I didn't make my projected start time....
It quickly becomes very sobering reading and quickly made my todo lists drastically shorter to start with, and made me more careful about ensuring I rested enough..
> Outside of very short intervals, I've yet to meet a single person (myself included) in mentally demanding jobs who actually increase their productivity more than very marginally (in terms of work accomplished in a week) this way. I'm sure exceptions exists, but in 20 years in development and operations work I've yet to meet them.
I think this rule-of-thumb holds true when you are doing intellectually stimulating, challenging work that requires that you be your "best self".
Unfortunately there are a lot of jobs out there, the great majority of jobs in point of fact, where marginal productivity doesn't drop off precipitously past 40 or 60 or even 80 hours. Investment banking comes to mind....
I don't know any investment bankers, so maybe that's true. Certainly there are jobs that requires little enough of you that you can keep doing the same thing for twice as long. But I'm not convinced that it is "the great majority of jobs".
Even in a lot of manual jobs the true cost of reduced attention gets obscured in increased error rates, increased accidents (and according insurance and compensation costs) and burn outs (resulting in higher churn and increased hiring costs).
I'm sure some have numbers that prove it's better for them to push staff harder (and places with extremely high salaries like investment banking certainly can take larger productivity drops and still come out ahead than most places), but most places I've worked and most companies I've contracted for, have no clue at all even how to measure their staffs productivity, much less do it on a regular basis.
In a few jobs I for the first time (for my managers) started delivering weekly reports that did not just report what we'd done, but combined the reported time spent with average salaries by function and assigned them to products and feature requests etc.. Doing that in my experience always leads to uncomfortable conversations in the team afterwards when management realises what different decisions actually costs. (Amusingly, or depressingly, a common response to me actually asking for average salary information was confusion even when I explained that I was going to report on costs; apparently this is quite unusual for development teams in tech companies to do other than in aggregate for whole departments, which is just plain ridiculous)
Generally I take anyone claiming to be just as productive over long hours with a huge amount of salt unless they can explain exactly how they've actually measured it - usually it turns out people are "self reporting" what they think is the case because they feel busier. Often because their productivity has actually suffered, and made them busier.
It's reductionist to say Americans are "proud" of this. Maybe some loud faction is. A lot of educated Americans (anecdotally I'd say the majority) envy Europe and think there is a lot wrong with our work-driven culture.
There have been numerous studies since WWII that have shown that working more than 40 hours per week only gets you more from your workforce for a very short period of time. As in 2 weeks. And for that two week period the amount of increase you get only happens if you're not going over 10% increase. So ~50 hours.
Generally speaking, those who are working 70 hours a week are doing what could be considered productivity theater.
I typically work about 37 hours a week at a small company in Palo Alto - my work productivity is very high, since it's less of a pressure cooker for coding. However, I do typically spend about 4 hours outside of work a day on open source - the trick for me is that I do open source at my own leisure, which gives me as much space as I want, say if I want to take time off for vacation, a date, etc.
I evidently need to make this more clear in the article, but RescueTime captures all time I spend in front of the computer, not just work time. My actual work time is about 50h/week, which is probably about average for software people in my area. In fact, it's probably on the low end if you factor in that everyone else spends 10h/week commuting into San Francisco.
I find my job incredibly exciting and rewarding, so I don’t find that amount of work burdensome. YMMV, of course :)
Caution. Behind tools like Rescuetime is the idea that our work can be boiled down to time and motion studies. In software, there isn't a strong relationship between time spent and the value created. Much of our best work is conceived or discovered when we're not writing code, often not even thinking about code, but dreaming or distracting ourselves. It is a generally highly creative field and where it isn't creative it is of low value.
Its a work/life balance thing. With a detailed read, op is accounting for online shopping, bill paying, buying travel tickets. If your balance is toward living at work, you're going to spend dozens of hours "doing living" while physically at work.
The "productive" and "very productive" sectors only add up to a normal 40 hr week.
Op makes op's manager look good because "butts in seats". I actually work more than op but I do online bill pay and purchase train tickets for travel and do social media mostly at home rather than at work, resulting in my boss looking bad like I'm a slacker because I only put in a little more "butts in seats" than 40 hours.
More evidence on the already pretty massive pile that meetings are absolutely terrible. Very, very few things are so important and intolerant to asynchronous communication that they require forcing n people to drop whatever they're doing and become unproductive for a quarter of the workday.
Had a guy interviewing for an intern position once say, after my coworker showed him a bit of code, "the biggest file I saw today was 500 lines, so I'm pretty sure I can handle it. I'm used to working on PHP scripts with thousands of lines. Now that's scary." He lost my vote in three sentences.
There's a laundry list here[1], but I'm seeing precisely none that are both cross platform and self hosted. Rescuetime's big thing is that it's mostly automatic (since it's tracking window titles), and that seems to be their secret sauce.
Yup. For OSX, Timing is a completely local version that does automatic time tracking, down to the "open file" level. By far my favourite utility for work!
You can just as easily look at this and say you've gotten 50% worse at it.
That app can't evaluate what you actually accomplished in a given time period.
So one might also interpret the results as it took you twice as long to solve engineering problems than in the previous month.
And considering that 280 hours is about 12 hours a day 5 days a week that sounds about right.
I don't know of any one that is capable of doing thought intensive work for more than 4-5 hours a day effectively, 12 hours sounds like pushing code lines around while not solving any real problems.
Serious question: what's so crazy about having worked 268 hours in a month? That's only about 50% more time spent working than a standard 40-hour workweek, i.e., about 10 hours per day during the week (220 hours worked over 22 days, Mon–Fri) plus another 6 hours per day over the weekend (48 hours over 8 days, Sat/Sun).
There are few things at play. First there is mounting evidence that working more than 40 hours makes you less productive [1]. So you're not helping and probably hurting things working beyond that. Second, there is a very real revulsion at working on the weekends, especially if there no time shift like working Tues-Sat. Combined this type of effort doesn't scale, which leads to point three. Third, management has a tendency to death march permanently. Since everything requires so many hours, no one has time to stop, reflect and improve processes to reduce that type of effort.
Taken together, many people with a problem solving mind see those involved as wallowing in their own failure. A natural response to such behavior is revulsion.
I am surprised you do not find crazy to spend 10h/day + 12 in the weekend at work. It is normal for you or in your zone/country? Here in EU it would be considered madness (and legally in some states you couldn't even do it)
Your employer risks some (huge) fines, depending on where you live. Here in France, we have "Work Inspectors" who verify sponteously those rules − they can be called by employees themselves, too.
Of course, if you are self-employed, there is no way that those rules can be enforced… but it will be frowned upon by your relatives, because we know that it is wrong in the long term.
Usually they don't need to count. In general working hours are stipulated in the contract, so if they find someone in the office outside the hours they have stipulated in the contract the managers better have a good explanation....
Then, if they consider the evidence is enough there's an official investigation where they can search for emails/phone call logs/documents that attest that the employees were working or asked to work outside of "working hours" and a trial takes place.
In my current workplace there are no such strict rules, but if management finds someone working noticeably more than 40h a week they'll want to know why that person needs more time than the rest to do his job. I guess that's as weird for non Europeans as working >40h a week is for them.
Normally I work 8h/day, 5days/week.
Last month I was demanded to work also on a pair of weekends. Man, I still am not totally recovered from the stress...
What's crazy about it is there is a wealth of scientific information that says even shoveling coal you won't be very effective doing that over the long run, let alone an intellectual pursuit
Well one important financial reason is that the more hours you work, the less money you make per hour, unless you have a huge equity stake. So your effective wage actually decreases if you spend more time at work.
Other reasons are work/life balance, enjoying time to relax, spending time with friends or family, mental health reasons, and things like that.
By that logic you should try to get away with 30 or 35 hours a week (behind your manager's back, if necessary) in order to increase your "effective wage," which actually doesn't get you anything.
The vast majority of salaried employees see no change in quality of life if they work 35, 40, or 45 hours one week to the next. In fact, if you work a lot, one would think you're less likely to go out and spend your money in your limited free time.
The times I've worked 60+ hours a week have always been better for my bank account than the times I've worked 35-40.
I would say (nontechnical) comunicatio is mostly just a big waste of time, with a few exceptions which are vital. Except it is difficult to get one without the other.
Where I live (Denmark) the work week is 37 hours (so roughly 150hrs/month) and if i stretch that to even 40 I can feel the toll it takes.
Sure, when I was 25 I could work 200-300hr months, but that did eventually land me in hospital due to stress and generally being burned out.
Take care of yourself and don't work too hard. It's not worth it.