This is a bit of a summary of what other people have said, and a bit of my own conceptualisation:
A) If the work is not competitive (not a winner-takes-all market), then:
For some jobs, marginal returns on quality-adjusted time invested will decrease, and you lose less than 20% of impact. This is true for jobs where some activities are clearly more valuable than others, so that you cut the less valuable ones.
For some jobs, marginal returns on quality-adjusted time invested will increase, and you lose more than 20% of impact. This could be e.g. because you have some maintenance activities that are fixed costs (like reading papers to stay up to date), or have increasing returns because you benefit from deep immersion.
B) If the work is competitive (a winner-takes-all market), either:
you are going to win anyway, in which case the same as above applies, or
you are going to lose anyway, in which whether or not you spend 20% of your time on something else doesn’t matter, or
working less is causing you to lose the competition, in which case you lose 100% of value.
Of course, this is nearly always gradual because the market is not literally winner-takes-all, just winner-takes-a-lot-more-than-second. For example, if you’re working towards an academic faculty position, then maybe a position at a tier 1 uni is twice as impactful as one at a tier 2 uni, which is twice as impactful than one at a tier 3 uni, and so on (the tiers would be pretty small for the difference only being 2x, though).
On average, the more “competitive” a job, and the closer the distance between you and the competition, the more value you lose from working 20% less.
Nearly every job has some degree of “competitiveness”/”winner-takes-all-market” going on, but for some jobs this degree is very small (e.g. employee at EA org), and for others it’s large (academia before you got a tenure-track position, for-profit startup founder).
For academic research, I’d guess that from looking at A) alone, you’d get roughly linear marginal returns, and how much B) matters depends on your career stage. It matters a lot before you got a tenure-track position (because the market is “winner-takes-much-more-than-second” and competition is likely close because so many people compete for these positions). After you got a tenure-track position, it depends on what you want to do. E.g., if you try to become the world-leader in a popular field, then competition is high. If you want to research some niche EA topic well, then competition is low.
This is a bit of a summary of what other people have said, and a bit of my own conceptualisation:
A) If the work is not competitive (not a winner-takes-all market), then:
For some jobs, marginal returns on quality-adjusted time invested will decrease, and you lose less than 20% of impact. This is true for jobs where some activities are clearly more valuable than others, so that you cut the less valuable ones.
For some jobs, marginal returns on quality-adjusted time invested will increase, and you lose more than 20% of impact. This could be e.g. because you have some maintenance activities that are fixed costs (like reading papers to stay up to date), or have increasing returns because you benefit from deep immersion.
B) If the work is competitive (a winner-takes-all market), either:
you are going to win anyway, in which case the same as above applies, or
you are going to lose anyway, in which whether or not you spend 20% of your time on something else doesn’t matter, or
working less is causing you to lose the competition, in which case you lose 100% of value.
Of course, this is nearly always gradual because the market is not literally winner-takes-all, just winner-takes-a-lot-more-than-second. For example, if you’re working towards an academic faculty position, then maybe a position at a tier 1 uni is twice as impactful as one at a tier 2 uni, which is twice as impactful than one at a tier 3 uni, and so on (the tiers would be pretty small for the difference only being 2x, though).
On average, the more “competitive” a job, and the closer the distance between you and the competition, the more value you lose from working 20% less.
Nearly every job has some degree of “competitiveness”/”winner-takes-all-market” going on, but for some jobs this degree is very small (e.g. employee at EA org), and for others it’s large (academia before you got a tenure-track position, for-profit startup founder).
For academic research, I’d guess that from looking at A) alone, you’d get roughly linear marginal returns, and how much B) matters depends on your career stage. It matters a lot before you got a tenure-track position (because the market is “winner-takes-much-more-than-second” and competition is likely close because so many people compete for these positions). After you got a tenure-track position, it depends on what you want to do. E.g., if you try to become the world-leader in a popular field, then competition is high. If you want to research some niche EA topic well, then competition is low.