[mratzloff]

> perform worse at your current job by putting in less hours

Citation needed.

Edit: So self-evident is this equation to some people that they down vote the mere suggestion that working longer hours does not make you better at your job.

[wutbrodo]

What on Earth are you talking about? For the cases where your job requires longer hours even when they don't track productivity, the part of the sentence that you conveniently left out was "..by putting in less hours or get a job that isn't so rigid as to require a number of hours above what you find to be your healthy level."

For the cases where your work doesn't blindly want longer hours but measures your productivity in a saner way, if you can perform better at your job in less hours (which is totally plausible in many situations), then OBVIOUSLY you should be doing it already.

The fragment of a sentence that you quoted is narrowly referring to a situation where 1) you're still getting productivity out of your marginal hour and 2) your work doesn't arbitrarily require absurd hours as detached from productivity.

> So self-evident is this equation to some people that they down vote the mere suggestion that working longer hours does not make you better at your job

I can't even imagine what would drive someone to spend their weekend time feverishly imagining statements that no one is making so they can feel smug about disagreeing with them.

[mratzloff]

> I can't even imagine what would drive someone to spend their weekend time feverishly imagining statements that no one is making so they can feel smug about disagreeing with them.

I'm sorry my comment upset you. It wasn't my intention.

My point was that in many cases people are inclined to work longer as a result of social pressure when it has no positive impact on productivity. In that case, are longer hours "required"? Or is it strictly a choice? My interpretation of what you said was perhaps more binary than you intended.

In those cases, one can simply work less, shrug off the social pressure, and perform at the same level. You allude to this (sort of) in your second paragraph, but this is not as obvious to many people as you state and, I think, benefits from saying explicitly.