[neltnerb]

I did an experiment in college where I tried to see just how much work I could take on and stay sane. I'm very successfully academically (PhD at 26 from a very respected institution), and I found that if I did not have at least eight hours of unscheduled, unplanned time to just do nothing useful it severely impacted my ability to perform on any task.

And I'm an extreme outlier in terms of innate skill, I say without intending it as pride. It's just reality.

Without time to decompress and be mindless, you are constantly building up stress and pressure until you lose overall performance capacity.

[haldujai]

This is why education is not a one size fits all model. For students like yourself there are dozens of schools in district 2 one could attend instead of this institution. Like I previously mentioned, people who attend this school do so by choice.

Additionally, innate skill does not translate to the ability to handle stress, discipline, or work ethic. Your schedule is entirely unrealistic outside of academia today (or being your own boss), judging from the population of successful people (in finance, software engineers, researchers, politicians, etc) you'll see that most people get by with less than 2 hours of unscheduled time whether forced or by choice.

Personally, I find unscheduled time and being mindless hampers my productivity. I function best under pressure and produce my best work. The most academically successful year of my life was when I was spending 80 hours a week on research, class, and studying (1-2 hours). My point in this is that what works for you is not necessarily the minimum requirement for success.

Also, I am aware of the physiological consequences of stress before anyone gets to that point.

[neltnerb]

Yeah, I've seen that people are different in how much down time they need to function. I've actually studied it quite a bit in grad school from observing my fellow grad students.

My observations, in a graduate level lab under a very famous professor.

Exactly one person was able to work constantly and do excellent work. He's just a freaking genius, I have no clue how he did it with a child, but apparently he only slept three hours a night. He graduated in 5 years.

About ten people worked really hard, were always stressed and tired, and accomplished almost nothing useful because they never allocated time to actually thinking about what they were doing. These were usually people who had been in the military (Korean and US largely). They usually took 5-8 years to graduate.

About five people worked reasonably hard, but had outside interests. They took seven years to graduate on average.

And then there's lazy people like me, who somehow managed to accomplish work just as useful, but who worked far less and thought far more. I graduated in four years.

Yeah, the sum of anecdotes isn't statistics. But I saw this pattern over and over again in graduate school.

But to your point, if you have a 9-5 normal job, how many hours during that time are you doing effectively what I described? Basically just sitting there staring at your monitor, or getting coffee, or getting lunch, or whatever. I bet the vast majority of employees (yes, I have been employed in industry) spend that eight hour minimum I describe staring blankly into space, they just do it in the office.

Everyone has different limits. Yeah, that term I pushed myself to my limits I was doing serious, no distraction work for about 80 hours a week. I forced myself to take Saturdays off entirely, no homework allowed. That does leave the bare minimum 8 hours required to be a functional human plus sleeping 7 hours a night, and that is what I had to do. I wouldn't repeat it though, and I wouldn't even consider doing it long term.

[narwally]

I hate the fact that it is possible to push yourself 80 hours a week and get ahead. That kind of work pace is possible, but hardly healthy, and in my experience tends to produce outbreaks of mental illness.But if it is possible to push yourself that hard to get ahead professionally, then of course a ton of people will be doing it, because if they don't they fall behind.

It's even more depressing when you realize that the majority of people that push themselves to these unhealthy extremes aren't even working on the kind of stuff that matters.