Why you should (maybe) work more hours
More = Better?
Okay this post is going to be a short one1. I brought this idea up in three separate conversations in the past week, and that made me realize I should just write a blog post about it.2
Why you might want to work more hours
You know how in your job, you have two broad categories of work:
Category 1: The main work: the work that you are paid for, the work that actually matters at the end of the day. If you're a programmer, this would be building features. If you're a writer, this would be time spent writing. Let’s call this category “Core Work”
Category 2: All other work. Meetings, time spent planning meetings, emails, handling support issues, administrative tasks, etc. These are still important, and still need to be done, but technically aren’t what you are hired for. Lets call this category “Supporting Work”
Now the hours discussion: Say you’re working a standard 40-hour-week, and you’re considering if you should work a 60-hour-week instead.
Initial naive calculation: 60/40 is 1.5 so you think you will be 1.5 times more productive.
However, you didn’t take the two categories into account!
In general, I’ve found that time required for Supporting Work is more or less constant. This is in part because supporting work is frequently urgent and gets prioritized first, whereas core work is more important than urgent, and so gets pushed under the rug when you don’t have enough time (Eisenhower matrix anyone?).
Say your 40-hour-week consists of 20 hours Core Work and 20 hours Supporting Work. If you change to a 60-hour-week instead, that becomes 40 hours Core Work and 20 hours Supporting Work. Which means you increased your Core Work time from 20 hours a week to 40 hours a week.
If you treat your Core Work as the main productivity metric (as you probably should), then that actually means you would be twice as productive!
To illustrate the point further, if your Supporting/Core hours split was 30/10 (I’ve had some friends claim this), then moving from 40-hour-week to 60-hour-week would literally triple your productivity!
This is the best rationale I’ve heard for why you should consider working more hours. 3
Just treading water, or making progress?
This Core/Supporting work split also explains another experience I’ve had. There have been some stretches of weeks recently when I’ve not had the time to work enough hours. When that happens, it feels like I’m barely treading water and am making no progress. Now that I realize this split, it means that my feeling was right - I was actually making no progress (on the things that mattered)
Reminds me a lot of this Casey Neistat video: (It’s only 27 seconds long, please watch)
Fucking brilliant video, right?
Reverse all advice you hear
One of the meta-advice I love is to Reverse any advice you hear, and it is particularly applicable for this piece of advice. All advice is context-dependent, and there are cases where you obviously do not want to work more hours. Hell, that topic could be it’s own separate blog post - “Why you might not want to work more hours”. But for now, some cases that jump to mind:
You’re already overworked. If you’re already working 70 hours a week, adding 10 more hours will probably have very little marginal utility because you’d be too exhausted to be productive4
Work you do doesn’t have leverage/impact. I imagine that if you’re working in a large company, and the work you do isn’t/doesn’t feel immediately impactful, there would be no benefit of working more hours.
The time you’re not working is spent on more meaningful activities like spending time with your family and kids. (I fully concede that this work more hours advice fails for most parents5)
You don’t particularly like the work you do.
You just don’t want to work more hours. This is a completely valid reason too!
Even if you do not want to work more hours, realizing that there is a Core/Supporting Work divide is still useful. Because, it means that if you can reduce the time you spend on supporting work (say via batching, delegation, and other measures), you can increase your productivity while still working the same hours!
tldr;
If you have a job that is impactful, that you like, and have the time, you should probably be working more hours. Increasing the time you work by 1.5x (say 40 to 60 hours a week) could make you 3x as productive6. This is due to the Core/Supporting Work divide. Even if you can’t/don’t want to work more hours, understanding this divide can make you more productive
Short both because of the subject matter and because I have a very short amount of time to write right now. The plan is to write and release this post in 90 mins (Editor Baibhav here: currently at 01:28 hours, just shy of the plan. Hopefully the post is readable enough)
(I learned how to add footnotes btw!)
Meta: Speaking about something multiple times sounds like a good criteria for possible blog post topics
I forgot where I encountered this idea, could also be an amalgamation of things I’ve read like Deep Work or Maker vs Manager schedule
I have a friend in investment banking, this advice is not for him 😂
Do NOT spend less time with your kids and more time working, just because someone on the net told you to!
Don’t believe me? Check my math above :p
How about "work as many hours as you are paid for" ? XD
More discussion in the twitter thread: https://x.com/baibhavbista/status/1863243438973661228