Prior to EA, I worked as a software engineer. Nominally, the workday was 9-5 Monday-Friday In practice, I found that I achieved around 20-25 hours of productive work per week, with the rest being lunch, breaks, meetings, or simply unproductive time. After that, I worked from home at other non-EA positions and experimented with how little I needed to get my work done and went down to as few as 10 hours per week—I could have worked more, but I only cared about comfortably meeting expectations, not excelling.
For the last few months I’ve been upskilling in AI alignment. Now that I’ve cared more about doing the best job I can, I’ve gone back up to around 20 hours per week of productive work, but the work itself is usually more difficult. I’ll be working in an office in a team for the next couple of months on a job I care about maximising impact in, so it’ll be interesting to see if that affects my work habits.
I don’t work more hours because I find it difficult to make myself focus for longer in a week than this—in addition to having difficulty getting myself to start work, I seem to make less progress when I do. I don’t work fewer hours because I do want to be as productive as possible in this field, and I’d like to be able to work more than I do.
Despite the number of hours worked I’m actually pretty happy with the results I’ve achieved both in EA and outside of it. I’d love to be able to get 30-40 of deep focused work per week in to improve those results further, but I’m not sure how to manage that at this point. (I haven’t really thought about how many hours I’d work per week if I could do as many focused hours as I wanted, to be honest.)
Also a software engineer, and this also is a pretty spot on description for me. 25 hours of productive work is about my limit before I start burning out and making dumb mistakes.
Prior to EA, I worked as a software engineer. Nominally, the workday was 9-5 Monday-Friday In practice, I found that I achieved around 20-25 hours of productive work per week, with the rest being lunch, breaks, meetings, or simply unproductive time. After that, I worked from home at other non-EA positions and experimented with how little I needed to get my work done and went down to as few as 10 hours per week—I could have worked more, but I only cared about comfortably meeting expectations, not excelling.
For the last few months I’ve been upskilling in AI alignment. Now that I’ve cared more about doing the best job I can, I’ve gone back up to around 20 hours per week of productive work, but the work itself is usually more difficult. I’ll be working in an office in a team for the next couple of months on a job I care about maximising impact in, so it’ll be interesting to see if that affects my work habits.
I don’t work more hours because I find it difficult to make myself focus for longer in a week than this—in addition to having difficulty getting myself to start work, I seem to make less progress when I do. I don’t work fewer hours because I do want to be as productive as possible in this field, and I’d like to be able to work more than I do.
Despite the number of hours worked I’m actually pretty happy with the results I’ve achieved both in EA and outside of it. I’d love to be able to get 30-40 of deep focused work per week in to improve those results further, but I’m not sure how to manage that at this point. (I haven’t really thought about how many hours I’d work per week if I could do as many focused hours as I wanted, to be honest.)
Also a software engineer, and this also is a pretty spot on description for me. 25 hours of productive work is about my limit before I start burning out and making dumb mistakes.