[milesvp]

I took some pretty meticulous notes in the last couple of years working for myself. I found that 2x2hour chunks of active mental effort 5 days a week is very sustainable. Add another 1 hour a day and burnout starts to become a statistical risk, but with very low probability. Each half hour after that and the rate goes up exponentially. Burnout starts with high distractability. It takes an hour to do what should take 15 minutes, which leads to the feeling that you should effort more to make up for the “lost” 45 minutes. And from there the spiral begins.

I’m not at all surprised at the 4 day movement that’s starting to gain momentum. I suspect if I could have boxed my time differently I could have fit my 25hours of effort into 4 days given the breaks necessary to really concentrate, and still had time to update, meet and coordinate with clients, while maintaining the rest of my output. I think we do spend a lot of time spinning our wheels as we get more fatigued throughout the week, and that can encompass an entire workday’s worth of effort.

[ido]

I don't disagree with anything you said but I just want to point out that this is very individual. Some people (not me) really can work a lot of hours and be very productive in those hours.

I can do it for a short amount of time (couple weeks per year maybe) & need to rest afterwards, with my usual leisurely pace being about 6-7 hours per day, 5 days a week. I've known people who were able to get 50+ (sometimes a big +) hours per week and get a lot done consistently. Others get stressed by half as many hours.

[sharemywin]

I curious if the type of work or how much your interested in the "work" effects your burn-out.

[milesvp]

Yeah, I haven't been able to figure this part in, especially since a lot of what I like to do in my spare time looks a lot like what I do for work.

I know that the brain has limited reservoirs of chemicals, and limited ability to purge waste products. So just basic theory suggests you'd need "rest" in order to deal with basic limits, regardless of how much you like the activity. I also know that things you "like" take less "effort" to do. So that's bound to effect things. But it's really hard to remove all the gross parts from a given job, and I find those parts tend to become the limiter in terms of effort.

But what I've found, is that if I'm doing dev work during the day, and I try to do too much similarly difficult work in my off hours, it brings me that much closer to burnout. Maybe I just don't like dev work enough... but even doing things like playing games competitively I notice my rank goes up when I'm mentally well rested, and goes down when I'm mentally exhausted. And while I don't particularly care about rank, I've seen people spiral down in rank as they continue to try to "recover" from losing rank by playing more that day.