No. It was, once, until I realized that I could have my startup or my sanity, and I chose my sanity. (And then my life became my work once again once I got put on an important project at my employer, go figure, but again I figured that I could choose my smarts or my sanity, and again I decided to go for sanity.)<p>Ironically, I've found I became <i>more</i> effective once I let go a little bit and gave myself permission to be lazy once in a while. My startup failed despite my best efforts, and I struggled for almost 2 years after getting a job to get promoted. And then once I said "fuck it", the promotion came within 4 months, I started becoming respected within the organization and known as the "go-to" guy for projects, people started listening to my ideas, and I became a whole lot happier inside and outside of work.<p>I suspect that what's going on is that that hyper-focus causes you to ignore the world around you and miss opportunities. I wrote a helluva lot of code in that time period, but most of it was solving the wrong problems. Once I took a step back and said "Okay. Enough code. I'll start paying attention to people instead", I got a much better sense of what they actually want. I write a lot less - and a lot of the time, I just get someone else to write it for me ;-) - but what I do write generally makes someone happy.