This is so wild to me because output and work quality rapidly decline at (or well before) 40 hours a week. It sounds like a joke, but I probably have 4 good hours in me a day. Sure, more if I'm really into something, but working 4 hours a day 3-5 (max) days a week will actually achieve peak results in my experience.
I work on hardware development, that matches pretty well the time I can spend on high-creativity design tasks. I fill the rest of the time with tasks that could be outsourced, like assembling prototypes or laying out circuit boards, but I do myself because they are more like relaxing puzzles than demanding work.
When I have to work on single a software-only project, after about two weeks of sitting at a desk for eight hours a day, I absolutely have to do something else.
8 hours of highly concentrated work is a unbearable load to do continuously for days, you definitely need some "normal" task as well. I can't imagine anyone claiming to do "12 hour work days" to engage in anything thoughtful for more than 12 minutes.
There is nothing like the feeling of getting off the nitpicky design tasking to assemble some SMD components under a microscope first thing in the morning.
Especially if it's a known-working design assembling the second or third prototype. Feels like gardening.
That’s for maxxed out knowledge work. Most of running a business is simply doing mid grade knowledge/admin/management work in a responsible, cares-about-the-outcome aligned fashion, which you don’t get from some $50k/y admin person or middle manager.
I would say that less than 25% of a startup CEO’s workload requires the “well-rested, highest quality thinking” that you describe. A lot of it is simply quantity and determination. The output of “having grit” is not that you are suddenly smarter - it’s that you are less willing to stop.
I’d be a far more successful startup CEO if I were cracked out Vyvanse right now because I’d be getting g done mind numbing but necessary tasks with deadlines.
As it is I made a decision a while ago to prioritise personal health over greater business success.
I have been solving this by automating anything that is done more than once. Automation can mean building a micro app or building out a prompt that can be reused later or something in between. More work up front but easier to motivate myself when I know that next time the chore takes a few mins of input and output validation
I've automated everything too - the issue is, so is all my competition. We have to deliver far more for the same price, or less, than we did two years ago.
I'm prescribed vyvanse and man I can only do >40hr weeks for maybe 2-3 weeks before I burn out hard. Not even talking about 70-80 hrs, more like 55-60.
At least for me, the fatigue snowballs hard. I don't take it on the weekends and saturday is hell for me unless I have something to distract me for many hours.
At my dosage, 6ish hours after taking it, my brain still fights tooth and nail doing the mind numbing administrative stuff.
It's actually quite likely op was taking 60mg. In my country they start you off at 20mg and if that doesn't work they increase the dose. If you can take up to 70mg with no real result they pivot to faster acting substances.
The adhd brain that sees results on 60mg would become able to focus "normally" for a "normal" amount of time, get tired as usual, then go to bed at a regular hour.
A lot of hyper productivity people take more than the therapeutic dose but the truth is more complex. Medication that can "fix" the executive function in a lot of adhd brains for a brief period will do crazy things for a non-adhd brain for a longer time, because the non-adhd brain doesn't require fixing or support in that way.
I'd usually break them up into halves or thirds(pop open the capsule, poor some into some juice). A full 60 was a "oh shit final tomorrow plus a report due" dosage. You really feel super-human if your body isn't adjusted to it.
There's a lot of danger to it. My friend who'd give me them would regularly take two, at 120mg. He's extremely successful, has since stopped, but a doctor let him know he had some scarring on his heart from a minor heart attack.
Really amazing albeit dangerous drug. he took them since he was 8 or 9 and had no issue with stopping. It doesn't have remotely the same crash as straight adderall(dextroamphetamine). After over a year I still forget to take it. At my current dose it helps me through really rough ruts. When taking breaks, the withdrawal lasts about 1-2 days and then I'm back to "normal".
All this being said, I really wish these rise-n-grinders would cut this abuse out before it gets further restricted. It's been life changing for me in my normal therapeutic dose.
I think it's pretty well documented how much 'executive time' the current POTUS enjoys. There are lots of people working long hours. That guy isn't one of them.
If you look at the before and after photos of past POTUSes, you can see a visible aging. If we ignore the current POTUS, I think we can say that there are a lot of long hours of stressful trolley problems.
How much of watching fox news, eating big macs, golfing, and cavorting with natalie harp is counted in those “many hours he must be working”?
I can’t imagine he actually works that much. His output isn’t really there. We already know he doesn’t read the daily briefing (reports suggest he never reads anything at all) and it’s pretty clear 99% of what his admin does is the result of legwork from people who are not him.
Even if he's carted around as a show pony that's a lot more than I will be doing at 80. The real take away is that we need an upper age cap for holding federal office - 61 or younger to run/appointment and mandatory retirement at 70. We could try to say that office holders shouldn't have an age limit but be subjected to mental fitness tests, but those will end up being gamed or the results won't be released properly for national security reasons.
Some people moonlight other gigs (overemployed) and put unusually high levels of pressure to perform in themselves. So, 2/3x-ing that normal output is unsustainable but profitable. Context switching does take a toll when you’re putting out fires that have meetings attached. This was just an anecdotal example of a person who is running themselves into the ground. Startup culture of the 2010s fostered a lot of the myths of ultra-productivity and wealth without the backstory of drug abuse.
Why don't more people talk/blog about their drug (ab)use? As a parallel, there has been a generational change in body building where performance enhancing drug users are now much more open about it. Even a few years ago, it was a widely known secret, but almost no one talked about it publicly. For the most part, the stars in the industry have been responsible about how they share the info. They spend plenty of time telling you horror stories and negative side effects. And they stress that you need to build a plan with your doctor, even if you are using drugs that are not prescribable.
Your comment reminded me that a few years ago a Microsoft engineer stabbed a random guy on campus, and afterword it was discovered he had a public journal of his own drug habits
People don't talk about it because it's often illegal and definitely something you will be shamed for. And in many contexts it's "cheating".
It also totally torpedoes the carefully crafted Linkedin narrative of one as a superior hustler if it turns out that the one weird trick to hustling more is just benzos.
> People don't talk about it because it's often illegal and definitely something you will be shamed for. And in many contexts it's "cheating".
That is exactly the point I made in my previous post. I wonder what made body builders become more open? All of your conditions are broadly true for body builders until the most recent cultural change. It is still illegal today, yet many body builders are now openly talking about buying and using illegal performance enhancing drugs.
> the one weird trick to hustling more is just benzos.
> It sounds like a joke, but I probably have 4 good hours in me a day
No joke at all. I eventually decided to never open email until lunchtime so that I could get four hours of productive work done while I was still fresh. Then lunch, then email, then plan what I'd do the next morning. I had to do the seriously difficult stuff in the morning or I'd be too worn out to do it right.
To be honest, I really think some people use the “I'm so productive“ as an excuse for why they’re doing drugs and cover for addiction (even if mild). A lot of this so-called productivity is spinning wheels and jumping around.
One of the subreddits I used to read religiously (sorry, offensive name incoming...) was /r/bartards. It was diary-like entries from people who were addicted Benzodiazapines. I've never used them, but wow is it easy to see the lessons there. Here's a few things you should know about these drugs, all of which were very easy to learn if you read 2 or 3 stories on this subreddit:
1: Benzo's, as they call them, reduce inhibitions greatly, and also reduce short-term memory. If you take a 1 MG Xanax with no tolerance, and you have a bottle of 10 more pills, somewhere within the next 12 hours, you will take all 10 of those extra pills. The "High" has a very "I don't feel it" quality, because all that's really happening is your inhibitions are vanishing. So, geez, I don't feel it, I'll take more! Keep in mind, a 1 mg Xanax is usually supposed to be cut into 4 doses.
2: Driving on Benzo's almost always results in a "Americas Most Dangerous Police Chases" type behavior. The driver will likely have taken, now, 11 mgs of Xanax, and will awaken in a jail cell 2 to 3 days after the car incident, completely unaware of what has transpired. Guaranteed they fought the cops 100% of the way to that cell, too, so they don't know where the bruises came from.
3: A real Benzo fiend "blacks out" all the time. A common theme in this subreddit would be "I took 1 MG, had a 100 pills left. Woke up 1 week later with pictures on my phone of myself and 3 other people having an orgy. No pills left. I don't remember any of this." It's astonishing how much people can down in such a binge. Seems it's hard to OD. HOWEVER.....
4: If you are addicted to benzos and you quit cold turkey, you can die. Seizures, blackouts, flu-like symptoms. Its BAD. This is not Heroin. You have to slowly taper off of them, like you were decompressing from a deep ocean dive, over weeks, if not months. Or else you DIE!
5: You can go online right now and get a prescription for this stuff from some disgraced doctor through a startup like those Viagra, ADHD, or GLP1 pharma mills.
6: DON'T EVER TAKE A BENZO, EVER. Maybe 1 before eye surgery where they can't anesthetize you and you leave without any more pills.... Something like that. Otherwise, avoid.
My personal experience with Xanax was that a psychiatrist prescribed 0.25mg pills for daily use, but out of caution I decided to only take it during episodes of high anxiety. I was going through a very emotionally volatile time in my life and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.
I would take 1-2 pills occasionally to this end and it worked to stabilize my mood. Initially once or twice a week.
When I told the psychiatrist about this he shrugged his shoulders and the next prescription was "take 1 as needed."
I simultaneously did cognitive behavioral therapy. Life also got better.
Over time the frequency with which I took the pills went down. Eventually I went about 2 months without taking any and decided there was no need to refill the prescription or see the guy again.
I still keep some hydroxyzine on hand. It's an antihistamine with mild anxiolytic effects that tends to induce drowsiness. Occasionally if I'm really stressed out and anxiety is hitting hard I'll pop one of those at bedtime to ensure I get a good sleep, that's usually all it takes for me to set things right and do my best the next day. They're not as strong as benzos nor do they have the infamous downsides.
All this to say, I don't doubt the Reddit stories are real but I think there's a bit of Internet effect going on there, I wouldn't agree with #6 and I think tightly controlled use of benzos can be helpful.
One of the characteristic diagnostics for ADHD conditions is that "uppers", substances that would normally make someone more jittery and excitable, have a calming effect on ADHD sufferers when taken in theraputic doses.
Benzo blackouts are the most clear cut blackouts ever. No feeling of time lost, no amount of cues can bring back any memories, you just wake up and the pills are gone. It doesn't always mean you did something crazy though, you can very well have just had a normal week. And you can learn stuff, you just won't remember learning it. Like if you watch a show you can know what happened on the show a week later but just have no memory of watching it.
The timing of dose reductions increase as one does down. And the amounts one can drop each time decrease a lot. Separately that lack of inhibition is the secret sauce for high power executives to deliver deceptive or outright false speeches and do horrible things like lie under oath or do mass firings.
Feels like a bit of a Reddit LARP. These extreme stories are a good reminder to not abuse the drugs, but the nuanced take here is that your average person is not going to chug the whole bottle in one sitting the moment they get their first prescription. Like many drugs, they can be useful when used responsibly and under the supervision of a _good_ doctor (which can be a bit of challenge in some cases, I know). A blanket statement to completely dismiss a class of drugs is not useful.
These are rather extreme cases. Very few of those who use benzos, tens of millions in US alone per TFA, will go on binges ever. Most problems are from the dependence caused by long-term prescription-level dosing.
6: DON'T EVER TAKE A BENZO, EVER. Maybe 1 before eye surgery where they can't anesthetize you and you leave without any more pills.... Something like that. Otherwise, avoid.
I bit of a harsh take. I started having out of nowhere physical panic attacks (GAD) in my early thirties and they worked wonders. 0.25mg did it. Taken when needed, not daily or as a party drug. I don't use them anymore, for a long time, but they were a crutch that I needed at the time. Breathing into a brown bag wasn't it.
Yeah, I use them, like, one or two days in a row every six months. They're a godsend for getting out of a bad state or for getting through something difficult. Sometimes you just need to function and do the thing.
That’s a model of addiction as a “habit” with a loss of self-control. But the other definition of addiction is really more like “continued use of the substance is required to eliminate a syndrome which only occurs when use of the substance is reduced or discontinued.” I think the latter model is more useful because there are tons of medications out there where responsibly using them leads to addiction. Even SSRIs could be addictive under that definition.
What you describe is called physical dependence, which differs from addiction because it does not involve getting high, does not involve increasing doses to chase the feeling.
But it does mean you can't just stop cold turkey without risk of harm. This is true of benzos, and also many antidepressants (which are very different from benzos) and other psychiatric meds. Often a long period of tapering is required, with "hyperbolic" dosing reduction (each reduction is a small percentage of the previous dosage). This is called a "hyperbolic taper."
As an example, for some benzos, you drop the dosage by 5-10% reduction (from the previous dose, not the original) every 2 to 4 weeks. So D = D0*(1-X)^n where D0 is original dose, X is fraction reduced per period, N is the period number. This should be done under medical supervision.
I look at it from a close but slightly different angle. I think the spinning wheels and jumping around that you describe is an aesthetic of being productive as opposed to actual productivity and that the drugs can genuinely fuel it. So many people (here I refer to other topics in addition to productivity) think they're doing A when really they're doing B which merely has a strong aesthetic that resembles A.
Not a joke at all. It is well documented.
Attention peaks a few hour after you wake up then it's all downhill from there. It seems counterintuitive, but somebody working at full capacity for "only" 4h a day can be more efficient that somebody working 12h every day (of course, these all ballpark numbers and depend on a lot of factors, sleep being one of the most crucial one).
Funny how all of this changes with agentic development - once you setup your agents and the initial productivity euphoria , most of the time you spend in deep brainstorming and leave agents to “handle the details”.
Which is both liberating - a lot less punishing mentally and not requiring so much flow focus, but on the other hand you have to keep more loosely held context in your head.
And agents need you attention constantly throughout the day, you leave them working overnight. While you are not in the office etc, and it’s hard to justify when an agent just needs “a quick look” or some confirmation and direction. You leave being paged all the time so you never really relax.
I think a lot of developers will end up feeling what founders actually go through, for better or worse, but also without actually getting the golden ticket option founders usually hold.
It’s just a very different mindset for work, though maybe requiring less chemicals to actually make work
Once everyone is using these tools, the rat race will have caught up and we'll have no choice but to race with the other rats. The punishment will resume.
I likewise have about 4 good hours of thinking work capacity in a day. But even finding that can difficult because you have to navigate all the trivial non-thinking admin tasks, meetings, forms, approvals, and other soul-sucking semi-work which does not progress a project, but yet a project can exist without. Management will always find a way to fill up every last minute with this category of non-thinking semi-work so its a fight to even find a little window to do the hard thinking work.
If people were honest this is probably it true of most. I can do light physical work for 8 hours pretty easily. I can only do knowledge work to a high level 3-5 hours a day.
This isn’t true for everyone. I have witnessed people whose curves are more gradual. Their performance exceeded mine and the gap increased with increasing duration. The principal difference I’d say is task focus. After many hours my attention falters, but I know people whose attention diminishes more gradually.
I could see someone like that using more hours productively. In a sense, someone who is awake 18 hours lives 12% more life than the 16 h me.
Probably no surprise some (Western) European countries allow you going to the GP, telling you are exhausted/burned-out/anxious, whatever fits the extreme fatigue, and you get some time of commonly agreed off, prescribed, paid. Everyone is better off that way (except the manufacturers of stimulants. Coffee excluded here! :-) ). Also, overtime is not a trend. Preserved for exceptional circumstances, for a brief period that an otherwise balanced person can handle. Europe is economically uncompetitive, the rest of the world makes circles around it performance and money-wise, also many abuse the system, still, without people a society is nothing, economy alone is crap if it is not for the people, as much people as possible so the streets are not crawling with too much crazy. We need to have a life first. Most of my European friends would never think of living in the US or Asia prolonged, only for an energetic period to boost some aspects (financial, experience, knowledge), mostly when they are young (but not with children, no!). Those places are not liveable from a European perspective.
> Europe is economically uncompetitive, the rest of the world makes circles around it performance and money-wise, ...
Don't buy the propaganda. You're talking about the second-richest part of Earth, with undeniably the world's highest average quality of life. It's also a big place with massive differences.
You have to understand that when Germans are being dramatic over the economic state of their country, they are describing issues that the vast majority of countries would absolutely love to have. Economic growth of only 0.9% is very bad if you have a lot of catching up to do, but Germany doesn't, so it just amounts to being slightly behind other rich countries.
"Deteriorating Europe" is a Russo-American psyop. Luckily we have better memory - we've heard this song for at least 100 years by now, and yet here we are. That's not to say that there aren't issues, but Europeans are largely unbothered by things like the GDP growth difference between the Eurozone and the US, because it's quite clearly driven by a runaway stock market and unfathomable inequality. You can't eat GDP figures.
Depending on where you work, in Europe it can be just as bad. It doesn't matter whether Europe is economically uncompetitive (is it?), if the people themselves think they have to compete and become deprived of time and energy then they will burn out regardless. I see it happening left and right lately.
The only thing here is that there generally is a fairly robust social net ready to catch you if you do, as you mention. But my honest opinion is that this is not a solution, it's a bandaid for the real problem: why do people feel like they have to work themselves into the ground in order to be able to live?
You are right though, many here including myself cannot imagine living in those circumstances in other continents. I think that is another problem in itself, that people are becoming complacent here due to the low risk. That might even be part of the reason why people are so careless with their work-life balance, because they can't really lose it all like in other places, so maybe people stop paying attention to things that are actually important. Just guessing.
Meh. It's competetive enough. Productivity per hour worked is about the same (sometimes higher) than in US. We just work reasonable hours.
> Those places are not liveable from a European perspective.
If the sacrifices these people make were at least for something that was obviously good - I could maybe understand that. But it's mostly making the world worse (either through financial schemes, addictive social media, marketing, AI, or other pointless bullshit).
Imagine wasting your life slaving away at making better ways to get people addicted to nicotine. That's IT now.
Really? The last time I checked, Germany was sitting well in the middle of Europe
* contrary to many countries it has had export/import surplus since decades. Not a single year with a deficit since 1952. Compare this e.g. with the USA, which had the last surplus in 1975.
* it's tiny, look at it on a globe. And yet it's number 3 worldwide on economic power. Two years surpassed Japan that is larger by size and has double the people
* in June it had the highest exports ever in it's history
And that is just ONE of the European countries. Others, like Switzerland and Netherlands aren't shabby either, especially normalized to inhabitants or country size.
It really, really varies, person to person, optimized time vs non-optimized time. With keto plus several other optimizations, I'm sometimes good (focused, motivated, energized) for over 12 hours. Alternatively, I can have days where I never reach "good" at all.
For reference, I'm in my late 60's, and I don't inject anything. I've had a wide range of life-long health issues, but partly because I've optimized to be acceptably focused and productive while living with those issues (that I've been resolving one-by-one), I can have some pretty long periods of focus.
> It sounds like a joke, but I probably have 4 good hours in me a day.
Four hours? Woah. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work. The rest of the time I just stare at my desk; but to Lumbergh, my boss, it looks like I'm working.
", but working 4 hours a day 3-5 (max) days a week will actually achieve peak results in my experience."
Yes, we max out on focus time ...
... but no, you're not a concert violinist. The rest of you time is all the other stuff - meetings, light reading, sales reps, catching up with professional colleagues, filling out forms, HR stuff, all the inquires from he newbies, returning emails, etc. etc..
The 3hrs focus/day is one kind of work, all that non-focus time is the 'work part of work'.
Literally most jobs is like that, it's 100% that kind of thing, there is no 'peak performance' it's just putting one foot in front of the next.
No, I literally mean 4 hours a day is my max productivity. If I spend more time doing that stuff you list, then my actual output decreases in quality. This is why I avoid working for companies that value process over output.
Since we can hire Engineers that have the 'stamina' to be productive for most of regular hours, like almost everyone else in the world, you might find yourself in a tough position; maybe learn to play the violin.
I'm always the top performer on my team (or entire company) and have my pick of places to work. I would attribute some of my success to knowing how to perform at a high level and that includes limiting the time I work.
I mean maybe a bit of a controversial opinion but this is how I hide at my desk job to try to build my own stuff. Like I give 3-4h of focused work to my employer and 6to myself every day. Some days I need to work more for work some I can do more stuff for myself.
> This is so wild to me because output and work quality rapidly decline at (or well before) 40 hours a week.
I see this comment regularly here. There are lots of people who can and do work for much more than 40 hours a week, and these are productive hours. Also, it is a sliding scale of productivity. It's not like hour 41 is 100% unproductive. However, I do appreciate that most normies are probably more productive if they work less than 40 hours a week, but make those hours very focused.
I am yet to see such a person rawdog it without any performance enhancing substance or "winding down" in unhealthy ways without becoming severely depressed in the process.
This is so wild to me because output and work quality rapidly decline at (or well before) 40 hours a week. It sounds like a joke, but I probably have 4 good hours in me a day. Sure, more if I'm really into something, but working 4 hours a day 3-5 (max) days a week will actually achieve peak results in my experience.