Thanks for sharing this, you make some good points here. I still feel somewhat torn about this issue. One thing I struggle with is that I find it hard to judge where the minimum actually is, so even accepting that you shouldn’t be at minimum, it still hard to know what to do in practice.
To play devil’s advocate—there is a school of thought, especially prominent in tech and among entrepreneurs that (1) people should work really hard and (2) and that people can work a lot harder than many commonly think.
Some examples that leap to mind.
In Korea, according to news reports I haven’t checked, most people work very long hours. It seems like if lots of people can do this without the added motivation of EA aims, then
Eddie Hearn the very successful boxing promoter says that his work strategy is “to give it 1 million percent until it stops”.
Dominic Cummings—whatever your view of his aims, he is extremely good at getting things done. He is very dismissive of work/life balance in some of his recent blog posts.
Tech entrepreneurs often work extremely hard.
One ‘error theory’ is that we are biased in favour of putting more weight on looking after ourselves than is justified because that makes our life go better.
All of this being said, I have experienced burn out and it’s definitely something to keep you need to manage.
I’m also familiar with this school of thought, but I’m not sure it’s empirically validated?
In the case of Dominic Cummings, I believe you are referring to this post which describes running successful political campaigns. Those seem like they might be an outlier, in that they are an extremely time-bound competition where “do things faster than your opponent” is an obvious win? As Samuel noted, running a startup is also a case where a marginal month of delivery matters, since you likely have <1 year of runway to demonstrate to investors that you should continue being funded. The other examples you cite don’t seem to be of people optimizing for impact.
Lynette Bye put some empirical research into the post How Long Can People Reasonably Work?, but found the literature pretty disappointing. Her top-level conclusions included:
First, as you work more hours, each hour becomes less productive. If I had to guess based on the research, I’d say there are steeply diminishing marginal value around 40-50 hours per week, and negative returns (meaning less total output for the day per additional hour) somewhere between 50 and 70 hours.
…
I’m fairly skeptical any of this research tells us how much to work (you can see more details below). I place more confidence on the anecdotal reports of productivepeople. It’s common for them to report three to five hours of deep work on a top priority each day, plus several hours more of lower energy or more “following curiosity”-type work (three more yet-to-be-released interviews also report in this range; one interview reports more). To be clear, I think they’re describing consistent, intense, “write a book chapter” levels of focus for those three to five hours.
The hyperproductive people I know seem to score well on (1) working on important things and (2) being very focused while working, but vary in how many hours of work they do per week (I’d estimate 30-50).
I am not a hyperproductive person, so I’m not sure you should take productivity advice from me, but “try to do at least one thing I think is actually important per week” seems to give me better results than “try to work really hard”, since the latter can lead to hyperfocused work on things that don’t really matter.
Curious if you know of any sources that were missed in Lynette’s post, or this response, though!
that is all v interesting and informative. I’d probably agree with your view that the correlation between working hours and output is not all that strong. But I do also think that hyperproductive people tend to work extremely hard. I’m mainly going off anecdotes and personal experience though.
“Working really hard carries such a significant risk of burnout that in expectation it’s bad” is completely consistent with “I can point to people I know of who are working really hard and really productive”.
Another example is Sam Bankman-Fried. Apparently he never drinks and never goes on holiday because he thinks it makes him less productive.
I agree that the people cited are not optimising for impact but successes in other realms do seem relevant to which habits are successful in impact-related domains.
I thought I would add my current view here is less in line with my original comment and more in line with the OP. I think something like ‘9-5 EA’ is probably the best approach for long-term impact. I’ve noticed that even if you’re working really hard, it is usually difficult to squeeze that much more impact out of your work. This might in part depend on the type of person you are. Maybe some people can squeeze heroic amounts of effort out of themselves for long periods, but the vast majority of people cannot. One caveat might be if you have to push to finish an important project by some key deadline. But this would be a short-term situation, not a long-term approach
Interesting and relevant article, which just came out; an excerpt:
“I think it’s important that people push themselves to achieve what they can but not push themselves beyond that point, to the point where they are just burning out,” he said. “I think that is something that we have to struggle with constantly, walking that line correctly.”
Still, Bankman-Fried has a higher threshold for burnout than most.
Ellison, the co-CEO of Alameda Research, said Bankman-Fried is able to work harder than most because he is truly motivated to give his crypto wealth away and make a positive impact on the world.
“I think if that’s really what you care about, I think you can sustain it,” she said. “I think you can do a lot more than a lot of people realize, and I think that’s what Sam is trying to do.”
But as FTX grows into a crypto empire, even some of the most devoted employees could reach their personal breaking points.
“I think about less than 50% of the 10 people I started with are there, and I think a lot of us knew that what we were doing was not sustainable,” Croghan said.
And newer recruits, who lack the same close bond and shared vision as early employees and the company’s founder, may not be as well-equipped to handle the long hours
I disagree with the ideas suggested by this comment and I think the ideas Tessa says are more correct.
Most people in the roles mentioned (boxing promoters, political strategists, and some kinds of “tech entrepreneurs”) work hard because they need to win zero sum games, or succeed in achieving coordination (with similar features to a zero sum game). This can produce super normal outcomes, but these are the nature of “winner takes all” and not because the proximal value of the output is high. The level of effort usually can only be sustained for short periods of time. By the way, these people have strong incentives to create personal brands of being relentless.
If you examine the actual work involved in these long hours, the work is often of the sort of attending “meetings” and coordination, which can be undemanding, and often blurs into social activities that most people enjoy and are not paid for.
We should heavily discount anecdotes like the Korea hours. I have experience from these Asian cultures and various business cultures. These cause me to round off all the excess work to “presenteeism”, which is false because it produces low net output and requires lower effort.
Thanks, I appreciate this detailed response! My advice for what to do in practice is something like “focus on output against priorities, not marginal hours”. I no longer believe that, for most people, there is a real trade-off between hours spent on self-care* and amount of impact. If someone is making themselves miserable, I think “put real effort into becoming less depressed” is a likely good short-term bet for increasing productivity, but this post is meant to be about a general pattern, not just advice for people struggling with their mental health.
* aside: I don’t love “self-care” as a phrase, since it always conjures images of someone, like, reclining in a bubble bath whilst eating chocolates. Which is a fine thing to do, obviously, but I would love a phrase that more clearly points to “taking the time and actions you need to feel okay doing your life”.
When I first read this and some of the other comments, I think I was in an especially sensitive headspace for guilt / unhealthy self-pressure. Because of that & the way it affected me at the time, I want to mention for others in similar headspaces: Nate Soares’ Replacing Guilt series might be helpful (there’s also a podcast version). Also, if you feel like you need to talk to someone about this and/or would like ideas for additional resources (not sure how many I have, but at least some) please feel free to direct message me.
Thanks for sharing this, you make some good points here. I still feel somewhat torn about this issue. One thing I struggle with is that I find it hard to judge where the minimum actually is, so even accepting that you shouldn’t be at minimum, it still hard to know what to do in practice.
To play devil’s advocate—there is a school of thought, especially prominent in tech and among entrepreneurs that (1) people should work really hard and (2) and that people can work a lot harder than many commonly think.
Some examples that leap to mind.
In Korea, according to news reports I haven’t checked, most people work very long hours. It seems like if lots of people can do this without the added motivation of EA aims, then
Eddie Hearn the very successful boxing promoter says that his work strategy is “to give it 1 million percent until it stops”.
Dominic Cummings—whatever your view of his aims, he is extremely good at getting things done. He is very dismissive of work/life balance in some of his recent blog posts.
Tech entrepreneurs often work extremely hard.
One ‘error theory’ is that we are biased in favour of putting more weight on looking after ourselves than is justified because that makes our life go better.
All of this being said, I have experienced burn out and it’s definitely something to keep you need to manage.
I’m also familiar with this school of thought, but I’m not sure it’s empirically validated?
In the case of Dominic Cummings, I believe you are referring to this post which describes running successful political campaigns. Those seem like they might be an outlier, in that they are an extremely time-bound competition where “do things faster than your opponent” is an obvious win? As Samuel noted, running a startup is also a case where a marginal month of delivery matters, since you likely have <1 year of runway to demonstrate to investors that you should continue being funded. The other examples you cite don’t seem to be of people optimizing for impact.
Lynette Bye put some empirical research into the post How Long Can People Reasonably Work?, but found the literature pretty disappointing. Her top-level conclusions included:
The hyperproductive people I know seem to score well on (1) working on important things and (2) being very focused while working, but vary in how many hours of work they do per week (I’d estimate 30-50).
I am not a hyperproductive person, so I’m not sure you should take productivity advice from me, but “try to do at least one thing I think is actually important per week” seems to give me better results than “try to work really hard”, since the latter can lead to hyperfocused work on things that don’t really matter.
Curious if you know of any sources that were missed in Lynette’s post, or this response, though!
that is all v interesting and informative. I’d probably agree with your view that the correlation between working hours and output is not all that strong. But I do also think that hyperproductive people tend to work extremely hard. I’m mainly going off anecdotes and personal experience though.
I also have the impression that some of the most productive people I know (within the EA community specifically) work very long hours.
“Working really hard carries such a significant risk of burnout that in expectation it’s bad” is completely consistent with “I can point to people I know of who are working really hard and really productive”.
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Another example is Sam Bankman-Fried. Apparently he never drinks and never goes on holiday because he thinks it makes him less productive.
I agree that the people cited are not optimising for impact but successes in other realms do seem relevant to which habits are successful in impact-related domains.
in free solo, alex honnold said “Nobody achieves anything great by being happy and cozy”. Warrior mindset seems very common in super-high achievers.
I thought I would add my current view here is less in line with my original comment and more in line with the OP. I think something like ‘9-5 EA’ is probably the best approach for long-term impact. I’ve noticed that even if you’re working really hard, it is usually difficult to squeeze that much more impact out of your work. This might in part depend on the type of person you are. Maybe some people can squeeze heroic amounts of effort out of themselves for long periods, but the vast majority of people cannot. One caveat might be if you have to push to finish an important project by some key deadline. But this would be a short-term situation, not a long-term approach
Interesting and relevant article, which just came out; an excerpt:
This comment reads pretty differently two years later 😅
I disagree with the ideas suggested by this comment and I think the ideas Tessa says are more correct.
Most people in the roles mentioned (boxing promoters, political strategists, and some kinds of “tech entrepreneurs”) work hard because they need to win zero sum games, or succeed in achieving coordination (with similar features to a zero sum game). This can produce super normal outcomes, but these are the nature of “winner takes all” and not because the proximal value of the output is high. The level of effort usually can only be sustained for short periods of time. By the way, these people have strong incentives to create personal brands of being relentless.
If you examine the actual work involved in these long hours, the work is often of the sort of attending “meetings” and coordination, which can be undemanding, and often blurs into social activities that most people enjoy and are not paid for.
We should heavily discount anecdotes like the Korea hours. I have experience from these Asian cultures and various business cultures. These cause me to round off all the excess work to “presenteeism”, which is false because it produces low net output and requires lower effort.
Thanks, I appreciate this detailed response! My advice for what to do in practice is something like “focus on output against priorities, not marginal hours”. I no longer believe that, for most people, there is a real trade-off between hours spent on self-care* and amount of impact. If someone is making themselves miserable, I think “put real effort into becoming less depressed” is a likely good short-term bet for increasing productivity, but this post is meant to be about a general pattern, not just advice for people struggling with their mental health.
* aside: I don’t love “self-care” as a phrase, since it always conjures images of someone, like, reclining in a bubble bath whilst eating chocolates. Which is a fine thing to do, obviously, but I would love a phrase that more clearly points to “taking the time and actions you need to feel okay doing your life”.
yeah that seems right to me
When I first read this and some of the other comments, I think I was in an especially sensitive headspace for guilt / unhealthy self-pressure. Because of that & the way it affected me at the time, I want to mention for others in similar headspaces: Nate Soares’ Replacing Guilt series might be helpful (there’s also a podcast version). Also, if you feel like you need to talk to someone about this and/or would like ideas for additional resources (not sure how many I have, but at least some) please feel free to direct message me.