There’s also an argument that impact diminishes by <20%: the hours you’ll cut out first will be your least important hours (assuming you’re prioritizing well).
I think the main argument for >20% is that you might get increasing returns from deep immersion and mastery of a field (this is a version of the point you made about “making it in the heavy tail”).
I think it depends on the type of work you’re doing. If you work at an EA org and do very generalist tasks with a lot of prioritizing on the go (for example, some of all of the following: hiring, headhunting/recruiting, developing strategy docs, mentoring, etc.), I could imagine that you lose <20%.
By contrast, if you’re a researcher doing cutting-edge work, you may benefit from deep immersion, so I’d expect you to lose >20%.
Also, if you’re on a career path where getting promoted is important (for instance because you want to make it to an influential position in government or academia), you almost certainly lose >20% because of the inherent competitiveness of the career track.
Another case where you lose >20% with 20% less hours: earning to give as normal employee (not as entrepreneur).
Salary is ~ linear with the hours worked. You can only donate the part of the salary above a certain baseline because you need the rest for your living costs*. Let’s say you can donate 40% of your salary if you work 40h/week. If you work 32h/week, can only donate 20% of a full-time salary. That’s 50% less impact for 20% less hours.
Caveat 1: You can also donate a fixed percentage, then it doesn’t work like this. Caveat 2: I’m neglecting non-donation impact here.
Thanks Lukas that’s helpful. Some thoughts on when you’d expect diminishing returns to work: Probably this happens when when you’re in a job at a small-sized org or department where you have a limited amount to do. On the other hand, a sign that there’s lots to do would be if your job requires more than one person (with roughly the same skills as you).
In this case here the career is academia or startup founder.
There’s also an argument that impact diminishes by <20%: the hours you’ll cut out first will be your least important hours (assuming you’re prioritizing well).
I think the main argument for >20% is that you might get increasing returns from deep immersion and mastery of a field (this is a version of the point you made about “making it in the heavy tail”).
I think it depends on the type of work you’re doing. If you work at an EA org and do very generalist tasks with a lot of prioritizing on the go (for example, some of all of the following: hiring, headhunting/recruiting, developing strategy docs, mentoring, etc.), I could imagine that you lose <20%.
By contrast, if you’re a researcher doing cutting-edge work, you may benefit from deep immersion, so I’d expect you to lose >20%.
Also, if you’re on a career path where getting promoted is important (for instance because you want to make it to an influential position in government or academia), you almost certainly lose >20% because of the inherent competitiveness of the career track.
Another case where you lose >20% with 20% less hours: earning to give as normal employee (not as entrepreneur).
Salary is ~ linear with the hours worked. You can only donate the part of the salary above a certain baseline because you need the rest for your living costs*. Let’s say you can donate 40% of your salary if you work 40h/week. If you work 32h/week, can only donate 20% of a full-time salary. That’s 50% less impact for 20% less hours.
Caveat 1: You can also donate a fixed percentage, then it doesn’t work like this.
Caveat 2: I’m neglecting non-donation impact here.
Thanks Lukas that’s helpful. Some thoughts on when you’d expect diminishing returns to work: Probably this happens when when you’re in a job at a small-sized org or department where you have a limited amount to do. On the other hand, a sign that there’s lots to do would be if your job requires more than one person (with roughly the same skills as you).
In this case here the career is academia or startup founder.