Maybe you’re suspicious of this claim, but if I think if you convinced me that JP working more hours was good on the margin, I could do some things to make it happen. Like have one saturday a month be a workday, say. That wouldn’t involve doing broadly useful life-improvements.
On “fresh perspective”, I‘m not actually that confident in the claim and don’t really want to defend it. I agree I usually take a while after a long vacation to get context back, which especially matters in programming. But I think (?) some of my best product ideas come after being away for a while.
Also you could imagine that the real benefit of being away for a while is not that you’re not thinking about work, but rather that you might’ve met different people and had different experiences, which might give you a different perspective.
I see. My model is something like: working uses up some mental resource, and that resource being diminished presents as “it’s hard for you to work more hours without some sort of lifestyle change.” If you can work more hours without a lifestyle change, that seems to me like evidence your mental resources aren’t diminished, and therefore I would predict you to be more productive if you worked more hours.
As you say, the most productive form of work might not be programming, but instead talking to random users etc.
Maybe you’re suspicious of this claim, but if I think if you convinced me that JP working more hours was good on the margin, I could do some things to make it happen. Like have one saturday a month be a workday, say. That wouldn’t involve doing broadly useful life-improvements.
On “fresh perspective”, I‘m not actually that confident in the claim and don’t really want to defend it. I agree I usually take a while after a long vacation to get context back, which especially matters in programming. But I think (?) some of my best product ideas come after being away for a while.
Also you could imagine that the real benefit of being away for a while is not that you’re not thinking about work, but rather that you might’ve met different people and had different experiences, which might give you a different perspective.
I see. My model is something like: working uses up some mental resource, and that resource being diminished presents as “it’s hard for you to work more hours without some sort of lifestyle change.” If you can work more hours without a lifestyle change, that seems to me like evidence your mental resources aren’t diminished, and therefore I would predict you to be more productive if you worked more hours.
As you say, the most productive form of work might not be programming, but instead talking to random users etc.