Some thoughts on optimal allocation for people who are selfless but nevertheless human.
Baseline: 40 hours a week.
Tiny brain: Work more get more done.
Normal brain: Working more doesn’t really make you more productive, focus on working less to avoid burnout.
Bigger brain: Burnout’s not really caused by overwork, furthermore when you work more you spend more time thinking about your work. You crowd out other distractions that take away your limited attention.
Galaxy brain: Most EA work is creative work that benefits from:
Real obsession, which means you can’t force yourself to do it.
Fresh perspective, which can turn thinking about something all the time into a liability.
Excellent prioritization and execution on the most important parts. If you try to do either of those while tired, you can really fuck it up and lose most of the value.
Here are some other considerations that I think are important:
If you work hard you contribute to a culture of working hard, which could be helpful for attracting the most impactful people, who are more likely than average in my experience to be hardworking.
Many people will have individual-specific reasons not to work hard. Some people have mental health issues that empirically seem to get worse if they work too hard, or they would get migraines or similar. Others will just find that they know themselves well enough to know when they should call it quits, for reasons captured elsewhere in this doc or not. This makes me usually very reluctant to call someone else out for not working hard enough.
A word on selflessness — I’m analyzing this from the perspective of someone trying to be purely selfless. I think it’s a useful frame. But I also think most people should make the decision about how much they work from the perspective of someone with the actual goals they have. It is a whole nother much more complicated blog post to flesh that out.
Finally, I want to say that although this post makes it seem like I’m coming down on the side of working less hard, I do overall think the question is complicated, and I definitely don’t know what the right answer is. This is mostly me writing in response to my own thinking, and to a conversation I recently had with my friend. My feeling from reading the discussions the Forum’s had about it, the conversation rarely gets past the normal brain take, plausibly because it seems like a bad look to argue the case for working harder. If I were writing to try to shift the state of public discussion, I would probably argue the bigger brain take more. But this is shortform, so it’s written for me.
Thanks for writing this up – I’m really interested in answers to this and have signed up for notifications to comments on this post because I want to see what others say.
I find it hard to talk about “working harder” in the abstract, but if I think of interventions that would make the average EA work more hours I think of things like: surrounding themselves by people who work hard, customizing light sources to keep their energy going throughout the day, removing distractions from their environment, exercising and regulating sleep well, etc. I would guess that these interventions would make the average EA more productive, not less.
(nb: there are also “hard work” interventions that seem more dubious to me, e.g. “feel bad about yourself for not having worked enough” or “abuse stimulants”.)
One specific point: I’m not sure I agree regarding the benefits of “fresh perspective”. It can sometimes happen that I come back from vacation and realize a clever solution that I missed, but usually me having lost context on a project makes my performance worse, not better.
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.
For the sake of argument, I’m suspicious of some of the galaxy takes.
Excellent prioritization and execution on the most important parts. If you try to do either of those while tired, you can really fuck it up and lose most of the value
I think relatively few people advocate working to the point of sacrificing sleep, prominent hard-work-advocate (& kinda jerk) rabois strongly pushes for sleeping enough & getting enough exercise.
Beyond that, it’s not obvious working less hard results in better prioritization or execution. A naive look at the intellectual world might suggest the opposite afaict, but selection effects make this hard. I think having spent more time trying hard to prioritize, or trying to learn about how to do prioritization/execution well is more likely to work. I’d count “reading/training up on how to do good prioritization” as work
Fresh perspective, which can turn thinking about something all the time into a liability
Agree re: the value of fresh perspective, but idk if the evidence actually supports that working less hard results in fresh perspective. It’s entirely plausibly to me that what is actually needed is explicit time to take a step back—e.g. Richard Hamming Fridays—to reorient your perspective. (Also, imo good sleep + exercise functions as a better “fresh perspective” that most daily versions of “working less hard”, like chilling at home)
TBH, I wonder if working on very different projects to reset your assumptions about the previous one or reading books/histories of other important project/etc works better is a better way of gaining fresh perspective, because it’s actually forcing you into a different frame of mind. I’d also distinguish vacations from “only working 9-5”, which is routine enough that idk if it’d produce particularly fresh perspective.
Real obsession, which means you can’t force yourself to do it
Real obsession definitely seems great, but absent that I still think the above points apply. For most prominent people, I think they aren’t obsessed with ~most of the work their doing (it’s too widely varied), but they are obsessed with making the project happen. E.g. Elon says he’d prefer to be an engineer, but has to do all this business stuff to make the project happen.
Also idk how real obsession develops, but it seems more likely to result from stuffing your brain full of stuff related to the project & emptying it of unrelated stuff or especially entertainment, than from relaxing.
Of course, I don’t follow my own advice. But that’s mostly because I’m weak willed or selfish, not because I don’t believe working more would be more optimal
Yeah I agree that’s pretty plausible. That’s what I was trying to make an allowance for with “I’d also distinguish vacations from...”, but worth mentioning more explicitly.
A few notes on organizational culture — My feeling is some organizations should work really hard, and have an all-consuming, startup-y culture. Other organizations should try a more relaxed approach, where high quality work is definitely valued, but the workspace is more like Google’s, and more tolerant of 35 hour weeks. That doesn’t mean that these other organizations aren’t going to have people working hard, just that the atmosphere doesn’t demand it, in the way the startup-y org would. The culture of these organizations can be gentler, and be a place where people can show off hobbies they’d be embarrassed about in other organizations.
These organizations (call them Type B) can attract and retain staff who for whatever reason would be worse fits at the startup-y orgs. Perhaps they’re the primary caregiver to their child or have physical or mental health issues. I know many incredibly talented people like that and I’m glad there are some organizations for them.
How hard should one work?
Some thoughts on optimal allocation for people who are selfless but nevertheless human.
Baseline: 40 hours a week.
Tiny brain: Work more get more done.
Normal brain: Working more doesn’t really make you more productive, focus on working less to avoid burnout.
Bigger brain: Burnout’s not really caused by overwork, furthermore when you work more you spend more time thinking about your work. You crowd out other distractions that take away your limited attention.
Galaxy brain: Most EA work is creative work that benefits from:
Real obsession, which means you can’t force yourself to do it.
Fresh perspective, which can turn thinking about something all the time into a liability.
Excellent prioritization and execution on the most important parts. If you try to do either of those while tired, you can really fuck it up and lose most of the value.
Here are some other considerations that I think are important:
If you work hard you contribute to a culture of working hard, which could be helpful for attracting the most impactful people, who are more likely than average in my experience to be hardworking.
Many people will have individual-specific reasons not to work hard. Some people have mental health issues that empirically seem to get worse if they work too hard, or they would get migraines or similar. Others will just find that they know themselves well enough to know when they should call it quits, for reasons captured elsewhere in this doc or not. This makes me usually very reluctant to call someone else out for not working hard enough.
A word on selflessness — I’m analyzing this from the perspective of someone trying to be purely selfless. I think it’s a useful frame. But I also think most people should make the decision about how much they work from the perspective of someone with the actual goals they have. It is a whole nother much more complicated blog post to flesh that out.
Finally, I want to say that although this post makes it seem like I’m coming down on the side of working less hard, I do overall think the question is complicated, and I definitely don’t know what the right answer is. This is mostly me writing in response to my own thinking, and to a conversation I recently had with my friend. My feeling from reading the discussions the Forum’s had about it, the conversation rarely gets past the normal brain take, plausibly because it seems like a bad look to argue the case for working harder. If I were writing to try to shift the state of public discussion, I would probably argue the bigger brain take more. But this is shortform, so it’s written for me.
Thanks for writing this up – I’m really interested in answers to this and have signed up for notifications to comments on this post because I want to see what others say.
I find it hard to talk about “working harder” in the abstract, but if I think of interventions that would make the average EA work more hours I think of things like: surrounding themselves by people who work hard, customizing light sources to keep their energy going throughout the day, removing distractions from their environment, exercising and regulating sleep well, etc. I would guess that these interventions would make the average EA more productive, not less.
(nb: there are also “hard work” interventions that seem more dubious to me, e.g. “feel bad about yourself for not having worked enough” or “abuse stimulants”.)
One specific point: I’m not sure I agree regarding the benefits of “fresh perspective”. It can sometimes happen that I come back from vacation and realize a clever solution that I missed, but usually me having lost context on a project makes my performance worse, not better.
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.
For the sake of argument, I’m suspicious of some of the galaxy takes.
I think relatively few people advocate working to the point of sacrificing sleep, prominent hard-work-advocate (& kinda jerk) rabois strongly pushes for sleeping enough & getting enough exercise.
Beyond that, it’s not obvious working less hard results in better prioritization or execution. A naive look at the intellectual world might suggest the opposite afaict, but selection effects make this hard. I think having spent more time trying hard to prioritize, or trying to learn about how to do prioritization/execution well is more likely to work. I’d count “reading/training up on how to do good prioritization” as work
Agree re: the value of fresh perspective, but idk if the evidence actually supports that working less hard results in fresh perspective. It’s entirely plausibly to me that what is actually needed is explicit time to take a step back—e.g. Richard Hamming Fridays—to reorient your perspective. (Also, imo good sleep + exercise functions as a better “fresh perspective” that most daily versions of “working less hard”, like chilling at home)
TBH, I wonder if working on very different projects to reset your assumptions about the previous one or reading books/histories of other important project/etc works better is a better way of gaining fresh perspective, because it’s actually forcing you into a different frame of mind. I’d also distinguish vacations from “only working 9-5”, which is routine enough that idk if it’d produce particularly fresh perspective.
Real obsession definitely seems great, but absent that I still think the above points apply. For most prominent people, I think they aren’t obsessed with ~most of the work their doing (it’s too widely varied), but they are obsessed with making the project happen. E.g. Elon says he’d prefer to be an engineer, but has to do all this business stuff to make the project happen.
Also idk how real obsession develops, but it seems more likely to result from stuffing your brain full of stuff related to the project & emptying it of unrelated stuff or especially entertainment, than from relaxing.
Of course, I don’t follow my own advice. But that’s mostly because I’m weak willed or selfish, not because I don’t believe working more would be more optimal
This is a good response.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned here is vacation time and sabbaticals, which would presumably be very useful for a fresh perspective!
Yeah I agree that’s pretty plausible. That’s what I was trying to make an allowance for with “I’d also distinguish vacations from...”, but worth mentioning more explicitly.
Sorry I missed that! My bad
A few notes on organizational culture — My feeling is some organizations should work really hard, and have an all-consuming, startup-y culture. Other organizations should try a more relaxed approach, where high quality work is definitely valued, but the workspace is more like Google’s, and more tolerant of 35 hour weeks. That doesn’t mean that these other organizations aren’t going to have people working hard, just that the atmosphere doesn’t demand it, in the way the startup-y org would. The culture of these organizations can be gentler, and be a place where people can show off hobbies they’d be embarrassed about in other organizations.
These organizations (call them Type B) can attract and retain staff who for whatever reason would be worse fits at the startup-y orgs. Perhaps they’re the primary caregiver to their child or have physical or mental health issues. I know many incredibly talented people like that and I’m glad there are some organizations for them.