A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

The years when I was at my most productive, in terms of outputting the most value for my employer (products, patents, etc), I was doing about three hours of &quot;focus work&quot; a day on average. I simply didn&#x27;t have the energy to do more than that. The rest of my working hours were spent in low-productivity meetings, low intensity emailing, etc. My performance reviews were consistently top-notch and I was getting promoted at the maximum rate allowed by our organization.<p>My least productive years happened when I was working far longer hours, stressed out and miserable in a company with a &quot;hustle culture&quot; and very poor internal communication&#x2F;documentation habits in my opinion.<p>My opinion is that you should prioritize your own wellbeing and if you feel that the company culture (or your manager) is preventing you from working in the way that you find most enjoyable, go find a different job.<p>Don&#x27;t be pressured into working longer than you want or in ways that you don&#x27;t like, thinking that it will help your career. Your quality of life is more important and you may actually be more productive doing things your way.

Working continuous overtime is one of the worst diseases you can inflict upon your company.<p>1. By making changes outside of work hours (comitting code as a software dev), you&#x27;re upsetting your teammates understanding of the state of the project. Ever had on-call push a 200+ LOC change after hours to hot-fix a bug, then had to have a two hour meeting next morning to figure out what changed and how to re-do the fix properly? When you make changes outside of hours, you put your teammates into that position every time.<p>2. You upset your teams and your companies understanding of their capacity. Because you are not beholdent to work overtime by the contract, if you decide to take a break from overtime for whatever reason, projects will start slipping with no perceptible root-cause. This is a really bad spot to put your team into.<p>3. You&#x27;re likely to become the &quot;rockstar&quot;. This isn&#x27;t necessarily a bad thing, but can be damaging to companies that do not now how to work with them - see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;neilonsoftware.com&#x2F;difficult-people-on-software-projects&#x2F;developers&#x2F;the-rockstar" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;neilonsoftware.com&#x2F;difficult-people-on-software-proj...</a>.<p>4. You will eventually start burning out, there&#x27;s no question about it. Burn out doesn&#x27;t affect just you, it affects the company. Once you start burning out, all sorts of interpersonal and quality problems will develop that will jeapordize a (hopefully) otherwise healthy team.<p>5. You will ocassionally ping your teammates outside of work hours, some of whom, due to various reasons, will feel a need to respond, or &quot;hop on for a quick check&quot;. Yes, the teammates are in control of their actions, no, that does not excuse you from regularly pinging them outside of work hours. This is especially nefarious if there is a power imbalance, such as a more senior engineer (or a rockstar) pinging a more junior engineer.<p>If you&#x27;re finding that you need to continuously work overtime to meet deadlines, speak with your manager, this is a problem for them to solve, not you.

I don&#x27;t even know that The Economist wrote about this, as implied by the wrong link, but the source seems to be this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;news&#x2F;the-surprising-connection-between-after-hours-work-and-decreased-productivity" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;news&#x2F;the-surprising-connection-betwee...</a>

The irony of Slack writing about productivity is not lost on me.<p>&quot;The productivity pit: how Slack is ruining work&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;recode&#x2F;2019&#x2F;5&#x2F;1&#x2F;18511575&#x2F;productivity-slack-google-microsoft-facebook" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;recode&#x2F;2019&#x2F;5&#x2F;1&#x2F;18511575&#x2F;productivity-sl...</a>

The reported results are more nuanced than the headline. Workers who feel pressured to work after hours estimate their own productivity as lower than workers who don&#x27;t; but workers who choose to work after hours – rather than feeling pressured to do so – report slightly _higher_ productivity.<p>It&#x27;s tempting to conjecture that both effects – workers feeling pressured to work after hours, and feeling less productive – are caused by poor management, rather than one causing the other.

I work in AI research in the Bay Area where hustle culture is strong. OpenAI and hot startups have normalised working long hours and taking few vacations.<p>Hustle is great if you have a well defined, measurable objective. With such an aim it is easy to keep track of your progress over time and maximize your work.<p>But when you want to do research, design great composible systems, be creative, write good code, it is better to do it casually. With such endeavors the goal is not well defined or measurable. Pressure to be productive or have demonstrable results often leads to myopic thinking, local minima, unsustainable designs, technical debt and spaghetti code.<p>I haven&#x27;t quite been able to capture why there exist these two modes. The moment I try to talk about the creative type of work my colleagues look at me like I&#x27;m making excuses or that I&#x27;m a slacker.

Investment banker here. The culture of software&#x2F;tech better valuing work life balance is alluring. Whats described in the article is pretty alien to me. I typically have 4-6 hours of meetings a day (client calls) and am also expected to do 6+ hours of document&#x2F;email work a day on top of that. I have to do somewhere between 2-10 hrs of work every weekend. It is impossible to keep up, so i am always disappointing somebody and i just live with that. The compensation is excellent (I’ve earned up to 720k in a good year) but i feel like this job will kill me. I actually want to get into programming and robotics and actually build something. Im worried its too late to switch and ill get knocked down to a much lower salary as a jr dev at 35yrs old. Its hard to walk away from that paycheck. Ideas?

There are ways where an employee that works 40 hours has less than half the impact than someone who works 60 hours. But plainly high quality code is not one of them. It works when you get a block of intense focus time and then go off to spend a lot of low-energy time in a breadth of business matters, including casually learning how to do your job better.<p>In the first year or so it often doesn&#x27;t make an obvious difference, because you just seem to produce as much hard output as the others, but you have a faster exponential growth curve. The combined quality and quantity of your work can outpace others. If you&#x27;re both talented and lucky, at some level of depth and breath you may become the best, help the company corner a market, at which point the impact of your labor becomes superlinear to your efforts, which makes the difference even more obvious.<p>The main problem is that this difference in impact is primarily captured by the employer in most places. Employers are either oblivious to the difference or short change the better employees because they only have to pay everyone market rates, as outsiders are often in an even worse position to distinguish the quality of the two types of employees. Maybe you became L7 by making much more than 2x as much impact as an L6, but you only get maybe a 30% pay bump.

&gt; Three out of every four desk workers report working in the 3 to 6pm timeframe, but of those, only one in four consider these hours highly productive.<p>It’s nice to see some data on this. A lot of people talk about a 4-day workweek, but personally I think a 6-hour work day would be better.<p>At least in white-collar jobs, I think most people could fit the same amount of productivity into fewer (focused) hours.<p>Plus a day that’s roughly 9-3 instead of 9-5 would have the benefit of being aligned with school schedules (at least here in the US) and make things easier for working parents.

How is productivity measured in their study though? As it&#x27;s survey based I presume self reported?<p>I worry that expectations may have a confounding effect: those required to work long hours may feel less productive relative to the higher expectations of their work culture?<p>I could well believe they actually <i>are</i> less productive as well, on some objective scale, but not sure a survey could prove this.

This aligns with my findings over the years. The more over invested I am in something the quicker productivity grinds to a halt. Mostly because I enthusiastically cornered myself and end up creating more problems than I’m solving.<p>Apathetic lazy me scoots on past workaholic me fairly easily on because it’s afraid of making itself busy later by accident.

1998 article with quotes from Jim Goodnight, CEO of analytics software company SAS: One big difference is that Goodnight and most of his staff work a 35-hour week. &quot;We want people to go home and be with their families,&quot; he says. &quot;This will make them more productive when they are at work. I would prefer that rather than have them non-productive for 12 months while they are getting over a divorce.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afr.com&#x2F;companies&#x2F;fewer-rising-to-technologys-growing-challenge-says-data-warehouse-chief-19980518-kb41k" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afr.com&#x2F;companies&#x2F;fewer-rising-to-technologys-gr...</a>

This is a very good article. The core is that &quot;productivity&quot; is extremely hard to measure for most white-collar jobs, or indeed anything that isn&#x27;t piecework or an assembly line. Even if you can assign a number to annual or monthly productivity (salespeople have monthly targets), you can&#x27;t assign it to individual minutes of the day.<p>So people end up producing the <i>appearance of productivity</i> instead. Often at the expense of actual, unmeasured productivity.

Do you know what is a great productivity boost? Muting all slack notifications.

My own experience completely agrees with the reported findings. But Slack is the #1 offender in terms of feeling &quot;obligated to work after hours&quot;

How much does “productivity” applications like Slack contribute to this problem?

Wrong link&#x2F;title

Other points of reference:<p>0. <i>Fire the workaholics</i> by DHH &#x2F; Signal v. Noise (2008) and Ch. 2 of <i>Rework</i> (2010)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signalvnoise.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;902-fire-the-workaholics" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signalvnoise.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;902-fire-the-workaholics</a><p>1. <i>Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11.</i> - pg<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;hwh.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;hwh.html</a>

Person reports working extra hours. Person also reports feeling behind schedule.<p>I mean, is it really surprising these two are correlated? I&#x27;m pretty sure the causation works as follows: they&#x27;re working extra hours because, like, they felt behind.<p>Some people who aren&#x27;t behind may work extra hours anyway...for fun? But I&#x27;m guessing that&#x27;s less people. Not to mention there&#x27;s cognitive bias at play: these people might not even self-report that as &quot;working extra hours&quot;.

Yet another ink blot study where everyone will look at the results and see what they want to see. Work however long you want JFC.