[encoderer]

Just curious: Do you think your workload will decrease in the future, or that the workloads of the highly paid professionals here are less than what's required from you in school?

Don't expect life to get easier. More rewarding, IMO, but not easier.

[superuser2]

I would assume that a highly paid professional spends a much greater percentage of his or her day engaged in actual work, is more efficient than I am, and is required to produce a higher quality output than I am. I'm sure it's cognitively harder, but I doubt it's anywhere near the number of hours.

My dad is an accountant. He gets to work at 7:30am and gets home at 4:30pm. He spends about as many hours at work as I do at school, but when he logs off for the day, he's done. I can't remember the last time I actually completed my obligations for the day. If you do manage to do a good job on all the problem sets and readings before losing consciousness, there's always a test to be studying for or a paper to be revising. I procrastinate because there is literally no such thing as "after homework is done."

I don't mean to complain - I gave myself this courseload and I've done well enough with it that I'll be going to my dream school next year (UChicago - yes, I know, the workload will increase exponentially). Sleep deprivation is a price I chose to pay. But I do think that most professionals have a day which ends - usually before 7pm, but at some point it ends - and several hours to commit to a social life, family, side projects, pleasure reading etc. as they please. Obviously not in 80hr/week fields like law and not in startups about to ship, but on balance. Is this not accurate?

[encoderer]

Yes and no. First though, congrats on Chicago. It's a great school and a great place to live. A long history of great work there.

There are a lot of great, lucrative careers that give you a clear boundary between work and home. Some of these are that way by nature, but really all can be. There are niches even in law and medicine, that provide for a if not 40 hour work week, something close to that. These often will be the jobs that pay the below-median salary in that field.

But anything that resembles entrepreneurship is going to feel a lot more like what you are doing now than what you see in your dads career. (Also worth noting on the subject of your dad that you presumably didn't see him when he was starting his career.) Sure, what I said in the previous graf applies to entrepreneurship as well, but... the disposition that drives a strong work/life balance seems often orthogonal to the ambition that leads you to working for yourself to begin with.

So if that life interests you -- if building and growing something is your destiny -- then my POV here is to know that everything you wrote about your current life, the "last time I completed", the "always a next thing to do", the "no such thing as done", all of that applies wholly to entrepreneurship.

Of course, like I mentioned a couple days ago, it can be tremendously rewarding.

I'm only 30, I have a lot to figure out still, so take all that with more than a grain of salt.