[axiom]

Unbelievable, 40+ comments and not one contrary opinion.

Alright, I'll be that guy. I have no trouble doing more than 4 hours worth of mentally strenuous work in a day, and neither do most of the people I work with. Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline.

You'll generally find that the most successful people who are best at what they do have no trouble with this either. I'll go further and say that a large number of the people who complain about having to work more than a few hours a day are doing nothing more than rationalizing their lazy HN and/or reddit habits.

[jdietrich]

I think you define "strenuous" quite weakly. The overwhelming majority of jobs don't require very much cognitive effort, even in software. Most developers hardly ever actually do anything legitimately hard in their day-to-day work.

Proving theorems is a completely different class of work to chipping away at your failed unit tests or knocking together a CRUD app in your favourite language. Maybe a tenth of one percent of software developers routinely do work that is intellectually on a par with mathematical research; The rest are for the most part skilled tradesmen, doing work they understand relatively well.

It is universally accepted that all but the most prodigious musicians do not benefit from more than 4 or 5 hours of practice a day. They can often easily do twelve or sixteen hours a day, but the extra time is simply wasted. Once your reserves of concentration are spent, you're just going through the motions without learning anything. Most conservatories go to great lengths to persuade their students to practice less, because young musicians are often convinced that they can attain mastery through sheer force of effort.

I can sit and transcribe or arrange parts all day long. I can play from sheet music until my hands give out, all the while daydreaming about what I'm having for tea or what chores need doing. I can't usefully improvise or compose for more than about two hours at a time, or more than four hours in a day. I can feel the point at which I start playing familiar riffs rather than truly improvising; When I've run out of ideas and I'm just writing pastiche. There are composers who claim to do regular eight-hour days, but when you look deeper they invariably spend most of that day arranging or transcribing or recording into the computer, stuff that's essentially just admin.

[SilasX]

>Most developers hardly ever actually do anything legitimately hard in their day-to-day work.

I might agree with that in an absolute sense. But if we're going to talk about percentiles, and relative to the human population, very few people (percentage-wise) can even do the "easy, boring" part of programming you're referring to.

[Detrus]

It is hard to learn. But once you learn it, not that hard to do CRUD day to day. When you have to learn some new framework/library it gets harder again.

[robertk]

Well, as a mathematician, I can say the same is true of mathematical research. Climbing Mount Bourbaki is a difficult endeavour, but from the top the pastures are relatively peaceful to explore. Most papers are not groundbreaking theoretical sledgehammers, but minor updates on footnotes of a vaster theory.

[SilasX]

This matches my experience about technical, "it's complicated" knowledge in general: the hard part is catching up to what everyone knows, but once there, contributing and improving are surprisingly easy and obvious.

Just recently I was given a task of debugging a major problem with our website that was causing frequent emergencies -- and apparently, was mystifying the developers.

My lead realized I'd need to understand the website's infrastructure first, so he took about 45 minutes explaining how it all fit together and where the problem occurred. But once I got to that point, my reaction was, "Wait -- wouldn't the problem go away if you just ... didn't do $STEP at that point?"

Turned out to be the entire solution to the problem.

[SilasX]

Hey, I'm not the one you need to convince. You should be talking to VCs about your great idea to save money on programming by hiring burger flippers and turning them into mediocre programmers.

[qu4z-2]

Perhaps you missed the part where he said it was hard to learn.

[Smudge]

I'd be shocked if those 12-16 hours you apparently put in for "weeks on end" are truly your most productive. They may certainly feel "mentally strenuous," but that doesn't mean your cognitive limit isn't decreasing as the days and weeks go on.

I find that I can focus intensely for shorter bursts over a couple hours, but then I hit my limit and need to push the really hard stuff aside for a while. Sure, I can crank through a ton of tedious or menial tasks (and there are certainly plenty of them), but that's really not the same.

When I complain about being expected to sit around for 8, 9, 10 hours a day (and I do occasionally complain), it's not because I'm rationalizing lazy habits or want to get out of work. I love my work.

No -- It's because in only 3-4 of those hours I will finish 90% of what I ultimately get done in a day. The trick is in knowing how to optimize those hours of productivity, and when to go home and give your brain time to decompress.

[rwallace]

I believe you were sitting at your desk pressing keys for sixteen hours a day. I also believe you believe you were accomplishing more than you would have at your desk for six hours a day.

It's been shown what actually happens in such a scenario is that your judgment quickly becomes impaired to the point where you are no longer capable of judging how impaired you are; it's the equivalent of being permanently drunk. To be sure, you can still press keys. If the work you're given is far enough below your peak ability, you may even eventually blunder your way into a solution. (Or you may not; last I checked, the failure rate of software projects is still several tens of percent, and stupid hours feature prominently in most of the failures.) But the calendar time to get your job done is longer, not shorter, than it would have been with an intelligent schedule. Degrading yourself like that is nothing to be proud of, and it does nothing but harm to your work as well as yourself.

[wpietri]

Absolutely. When I've seen things like this in person, the reality is often, "I worked 16 hour days for 2 months coding, and then spent another 2 months in QA fixing bugs."

People say that like I'm supposed to be impressed, but they don't seem to realize that programmers can be negatively productive. In 10 minutes of stupid, I can put in a bug that soaks up a day of somebody's time later on. But the people proud of their death marches act as if the bugs are all caused by cosmic rays, not their own previous exhausted fumblings, miscommunications, typos, and oversights.

[vidarh]

If I were to hire someone, and he claimed he can put in 12-16 hour days for weeks on end, I'd be inclined not to hire, based on the expectation that it means that he's either bullshitting me, or does not understand his own limits.

In 17 years of managing many dozen staff, mostly developers admittedly, in a variety of different settings, I've never seen a someone that managed to be productive with mentally strenuous even a full 8 hour day at a time other than very occasionally when they're on a roll. Generally, the ones that do best are those who manage to spread out their work, take proper breaks and intersperse the rest of their mentally demanding work with "menial" tasks, and who goes home and puts their work away completely.

Maybe your're an exception, but if you are, be prepared that people will either disbelieve you or expect you to prove it. More likely, your idea of "sustained 12-16 hour days" only actually involves a few hours of what the rest of us would consider mentally strenuous work a day.

Put in 12-16 hour days for a while with repetitive, simple tasks taking most of the time when working on something that is overall exciting, sure, that works for a while (though eventually that too tends to produce burnout - I've had to order developers home after the strain starter producing negative results with fewer hours than that).

For me, what works best is that whenever I feel that my concentration is slipping, if I don't feel I have time for a proper break, I will switch to mindless tasks, such as updating my todo list (often spending time breaking bigger tasks into tasks that are realistically small enough for windows of a couple of hours), doing my e-mail, or if I'm home I'll do the housework, and I'll try to "switch off" while I do, practicing mindfulness meditation for the truly "mindless" tasks such as cleaning.

Sometimes I get lucky, and my concentration stays on top for longer in one go, and I cherish those moments, but I "pay" afterwards (e.g. crash on the sofa when I get home, or need to slow down the following day).

[riazrizvi]

I think the only thing we might say with confidence is that physically fit and keen-to-impress types are able to sit in their chair for 12-16 hour stretches.

[zasz]

I'm sure you're working hard on demanding things, but a world-class violinist is probably doing something much, much harder than you are. Even if you don't respect violinists, surely you have to respect that an expert mathematician trying to make a new discovery is working on problems much harder than anyone in the corporate world. So I don't think this article applies to you, or other people working long hours either, or to people who should be working long hours.

[mattm]

What is a typical day for you? You are a founder so I assume your day is broken up into many different roles. This is very different from a programmer or writer who is focused on doing basically one thing for his whole work day. Do you have any health issues?

> Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline

I think many of us have done this here. What I've noticed from doing this is I start to make lots of mistakes that I wouldn't normally. At a certain point, this turns into a vicious cycle where I think slower and make more mistakes so I need to work more to fix them.

Maybe you're superman and can really work all those extra hours at full concentration...but probably not.

Here's an easy way you can check. Use a timer and throughout the day start the timer when you are going into work that requires full concentration and then stop it when you're done or someone interrupts you or you need to go to the bathroom or you break off from your task. Meetings and emails don't count.

I think you'll be surprised at the results.

[jonmc12]

I think you may be missing most interesting point of article which is about the cognitive limits of enhancing skill through deliberate practice.

There was an academic paper a few years back "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance" ( a nice summary here - http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the...). The paper breaks down 3 types of activity: work, play and deliberate practice. Work is exercising skills you already know; Play is creativity, fun, exploration; Deliberate practice is building a skill - where expertise is achieved through focused training in a particular skill. The article suggests there is evidence that it takes about 10yrs to acheive expert status in a skill. Malcom Gladwell introduced a similar topic through pop-sci writing "Outliers" - suggesting there was evidence that becoming an expert required 10k hrs of practice.

To me, practice requires the absolute most concentration - unlike 'work', with 'deliberate practice', by definition, you can't supplement skill with experience for efficiency.. to learn you have to evolve skill from more experiences. And I believe thats why the linked articuled a 'cognitive limit' of 4 hours by way of a violinist practicing in spurts of 2x2hrs=4hrs per day.

The last paragraph in the article talks about "four hours of intense concentration per day", and I'm not sure I buy that abstraction because "concentrating" and "training" are 2 different things. The author (and interviewee) is inferring that concentration is the constraint, but I'd suggest its more likely learning/trainability speed constraint.

So, a different interpretation, but I may be agreeing with you own observations. I think deliberate practice shows an upper bound for cognitive limit - but in the sense of new patterns being formed in the brain. I don't think deliberate practice necessarily shows the upper bound for concentration based on the information presented.

[the_cat_kittles]

Absolutely right on the money, very well put. To me, mental practice (where you are really growing) feels just like going to the gym. You work out, and your body becomes exhausted. At that point, its counter productive to continue to work out. You rest for a while, and you come back stronger.

[rayiner]

Anecdotal example: I used to work for a small company where the programmers did both algorithmic design and the implementation. Looking back on that work, I could write code to sling bits from point A to point B all day (and did the 12-16 hour weeks you mentioned for months on end). But there is no way in hell I could do algorithm design for 12+ hours a day for weeks on end. It's extremely dense work. There's no mental breaks while waiting for the linker to run, or long stretches of babysitting the program in the debugger, or breaks of mechanically typing out something you've already thought of. It's just you and a pad of paper, thinking the whole time.

The article refers to mathematical work, which is by its nature very dense, much more dense than other intellectually-demanding jobs like programming. As a programmer, you might spend half an hour now and then thinking through all the potential race conditions in a parallel algorithm. But you don't do it non-stop all day, day in and day out. Most of your time is spent on things that require far less concentration.

[1123581321]

Thanks for being "that guy." I think that your day probably has one or two peaks in it where you do your best work, and the rest is more low energy work (not bad, just not the most effective work on tough stuff.) Also, not all hard workers are created equally, so among those who do hard work, some can do more than others. I agree they become more successful but I do not agree their working habits can always be duplicated.

I certainly agree it is tempting to read about four hours of concentration and use the article to justify four hours of mediocre work.

[peteretep]

I have happily programmed for long stretches - refactoring, doing project work, mentoring others. Once you've been a developer a while, you can produce magic without very much mental strain.

Break away from that and do something truly difficult - specification meetings where you're designing a process for huge pieces of hardware that haven't yet been built - studying something complicated and unfamiliar to you - etc - and perhaps you'll find - like me - that you've only got a few hours available to you before your brain turns to mush.

[hmbg]

It might be correct about the 4 hours. It might also be irrelevant for most people. For most disciplines, accomplishing anything consists of some cognitively very demanding work, and a lot of 'admin'. Some violin players and mathematicians may get by on doing only the hard stuff, but most have to apply for grants, participate in conferences, transcribe/arrange, maintain equipment, etc.

For a startup founder I think this is especially true. A lot of the things you do won't be very cognitively demanding. That doesn't mean you can skip it if you want to get anywhere. It doesn't even mean those 'menial' task create less value in your context than the hardcore 100% concentration parts.

Maybe when you've settled down to a predictable working pattern and managed to configure your environment to cater to all the necessary but trivial tasks (and create enough value in your 4 hours to pay for other people taking care of the rest) you can realize this. I'm not there yet.

[saraid216]

How many of you are over 25 years old?

[cafard]

Upvoted.

It seemed to me that the research cited was likely a bit thin. I couldn't tune a guitar, so I have no idea about violin players. But there have been notable cases of very hard-working creative types--Flaubert and Sand come to mind, and Herbert Simon (Turing Award, Nobelist in economics) claimed that a 60-hour work week was about right for him.