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by logicallee 3745 days ago
Why would you say that I'm stating productivity is "infinitely" scalable? Is a billion "infinitely" more than a million?

I'm saying if you want to accomplish something great and groundbreaking, it's better to work 24 hours a day at it than three hours a day, and, yes, you can stop after a year or two. You literally have as much life left, but you can accomplish a huge amount more, by concentrating the work rather than spreading it out. I don't know why this is, it just is.

But you know what's even easier than working three hours a day? Working zero hours and signing up for unemployment benefits. You certainly won't suffer from exhaustion or burnout.

You can choose smallness, but just be aware that you are doing so. That's what choosing to work three hours a day means. I don't think I'm saying something even a tiny bit controversial and I am utterly perplexed at the votes I received on it.

If you want to do something big, then concentrate your work on it, don't spread it out over a longer time period. You literally are not able to achieve as much in the exact same number of hours, if the hours are spread out over a longer time period.

I can't believe anyone finds this even the slightest bit controversial or finds any objection to what I've written.

1 comments

Why would you say that I'm stating productivity is "infinitely" scalable?

Because you're saying that doing more work is always more effective than doing less work, all the way up to the maximum possible amount of work. That's the definition of infinite scaleability.

I'm saying if you want to accomplish something great and groundbreaking, it's better to work 24 hours a day at it than three hours a day

And that's what I'm saying isn't true, although I'm using the lower value of 6 hours rather than 3. Typical people can't work 24 hours a day for months on end without having a catastrophic crash in the end. Similarly, typical people can't put in more than about 8 hours solid work without becoming less effective, to the point of negative effectiveness. Personally, if I work for 14 hours a day I make lots of mistakes and have to spend time fixing them, which means I'm not really doing 14 hours work - I'm doing 14 hours minus the time it takes to fix things. I might as well just do the 6 or 8 or 10 hours that I can do without things going wrong.

Saying that you can work for any number of hours a day ad infinitum without ever getting burnt out is controversial because anyone who's been a developer for more than a few years knows it isn't true.