[andreilys]

Once you work over 55 hours per week, your productivity at that point effectively becomes zero [1]. You effectively cannot accomplish anything more, productively, as a human, past 55 hours of work per week.

This is just false but I suppose it’s all a matter of what you call “work”. For some people, going to client dinners and golf outings is “work”. I agree coding for 55+ a week is difficult but there are plenty of folks that have this ability to sit down and grind.

The idea that some economist at Stanford discovered a secret 55 hour breaking point for productivity that generalizes to every human on earth is beyond preposterous.

I suspect like many economist papers this does not replicate and is simply a means for generating headlines to help this person get tenure or funding for their work.

[D13Fd]

I just imagine a guy who spends 10 hours a day cracking rocks with a sledge hammer, 6 days a week. It's too bad those last 5 hours worth of rocks just don't count....

[mattkrause]

Obviously, the last rocks don't unsmash themselves. However, if someone plans to work 60 hours a week, they might work 9% slower--perhaps even unconsciously--thereby causing their output to be be the same as if they were only supposed to work 55 hours.

This is borne out in data from a British bomb factory during WWI. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ecoj.12166

Figures 1 and 2 (page 2060 and 2061) show that, across four cohorts doing different tasks, output plateaus at about 48 hours/week. Indeed, output from 70 hour week (10 hr/day x 7 days) was slightly lower than a 48 hour week (8 hr/day, with Sunday off). These workers were pretty motivated by the circumstances and doing skilled but not particularly creative work, so I suspect this is likely an upper bound.

There's lots of interesting data about working conditions from the the Health of Munition Workers Committee.