The backlash against doing work (no, no that one)

A lot of people valorize working long hours in an unsustainable way, e.g., lots of VC Twitter, such as https://twitter.com/danluu/status/870718101528039425, profiles of various successful people (at Google, it was a running joke that the people they featured on their internal profiles were all the same, in that they'd wake up at 4am to exercise for an hour or two, do some reading or mediation, work 10 hours, do more exercise, etc., and then sleep 5 hours), etc. This kind of nonsense seems to have caused a backlash where people say that it's not really possible to work more than N hours a day, where N is somewhere between 1 and 4.

Two articles that claim that which are decent enough that I'll link to are https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/people-dont-work-as-much-as-you-think and https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/01/quitting/ / https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/03/quitting-II/, but I've seen quite a few others that are low enough quality that I don't even want to link them.

The first link says:

1-2 hours a day is a normal limit. The author has done 10-12 hours a day for a week or two, but is completely wrecked afterwards. They believe that's normal and "people who are telling you that they work 60-80 hour weeks is that they’re lying and/or deluding themselves about how much time they actually spend working" and, if anyone is actually doing that it "wrecks [their] mental health to do this"

The second pair of links says:

4 hours a day is as much work as anyone can do and that you should "accept that you max out at 4 hours a day ... it is incredibly difficult to consistently work 4 hours a day. Nearly no one can pull this off"

This seems pretty obviously untrue to me. I agree that many people who say that they're doing 8 hours a day of "real work" are mostly wasting time and are lucky to get 8 hours a week of work in. But I do know people who consistently produce 8+ hours a day of work. It's certainly not normal. Everyone I know who does that is considered superhuman in terms of their output (not measured in hours, but measured in what they actually produce). One colleague of mine I know who's done this, who is now in their 60s, has been doing it for basically their entire career. They've done a lot of great work and they're a generally happy person, contradicting the claim that working this much will necessarily wreck your mental health. Personally, I don't think I'd want to live a life where I worked that much, but that person seems happy and satisfied with their life, so I don't see a problem. John Carmack has also mentioned that he likes working 60 hours a week (https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1051874929631789056) and he finds that statement that one cannot work long work long hours absurd (https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1240755695059943424, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845832).

The thing I don't like about these articles that claim that it's not possible to do a lot of work without destroying your mental health is that they discourage people from building the mental habits that would allow someone to healthily work that much.

For me, this was a pretty long process since I had an upbringing that was pretty negative value with respect to learning good work/focus habits (see https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1477001186247012352 for a bit on this). I didn't really start working on work habits until I got to college, when I could, in a good week, maybe focus for 3-5 hours and I would just not be able to focus at all on most days and perhaps even most weeks when I tried to focus. By grad school, I sort of had it together and could average a few hours of focused work a day if there was a deadline, but couldn't string that together if there wasn't a deadline.

I continued to work on this at my first job and, by the time I left, I could get about 60 hours of focused work done per week for a one-year long period. I think I'm unlikely to choose to have a lifestyle where I'd do that much work for a longer period of time or even that much time again, but it's been useful to me to be able to do that much work. A couple times, I've done a project that was thought to be basically impossible by sitting down and focusing day after day for over a quarter at a time and I'm happy that I did those projects. If people don't want to do that much work, that's fine, but I don't think people should be told that it's literally impossible.

Both of the articles basically have people who looked around and saw that not many people of the people they observed could work more than X hours a day. But this is not very meaningful for someone who's willing to work on the skill of being able to focus for extended periods of time because basically no one seriously works on the skill (just like almost any other skill). If you applied this to people don't specifically train to be good at the thing in other fields and just looked around at people who don't try to improve to see how good they are, you'd conclude that a 1600 chess player is superhuman, as is someone who can run a 3 hour marathon. But people who seriously train look superhuman compared to people who train. Whether or not one should train to be able to work long hours is another question, but a lot of people I know express frustration that they're not able to accomplish what they'd like because they can't focus well enough, so I think it's pretty common to want to improve this and having an artificial cap on one how much one tries to improve because it's believed to be impossible to improve further isn't very useful

Sorry, this post doesn't talk about the specifics about how I learned to focus better because I think it's like https://danluu.com/hardware-unforgiving/, in that it's a kind of knowledge that can't easily be conveyed by reading it. If I ever figure out an angle that I think would be useful to convey, I'll write it up.