Yeah.... not so much for me. I'm going to give an alternate point of view.
To become world class at something, you need to be obsessed. You need to put in as many hours as possible and just love what you're doing.
"Oh but you won't be as effective after 8 hours of work!"
So what. Let's say I'm only 20% as effective after 8 hours. I'll take it -- 20% of the last 5-6 hours of the day towards my craft over 0% doing 'normal' things (drinks on the patio? Pointless travelling? Whatever my fellow annoying millenials like to do).
This is the kind of mindset you need to reach the top of a field. And it should develop naturally, you should really want it. Whether it means outdoing everyone at your company, getting that prototype done two months earlier, closing more leads, getting that tricky piano passage, whatever.
If you love what you're doing, more is more. Because you probably can't help yourself. If you feel like working more, just do it. Don't let normal social expectations hold you back, especially if you're young, because you only get so long to become great at something.
I'll finish with one final caveat. Figure out what level of sleep, exercise, and nutrition your body needs to sustain your desired work habits. Get those right ASAP, keep trying modifications, and realize it's different for everyone's unique biology. I like 8 hours of sleep a night, weightlifting 3x/week at 45-60mins each, and a certain amount of protein and certain vitamins (and coffee of course, ha). You'd be surprised how these 3 lifestyle factors can make such a huge difference in your energy levels and hormones -- one can literally become a different person!
The theory here is that not only are you at 20% for the last hour: you will be at 90% at the beginning of the second day, 80% on the third and so on. Of course the percentages are totally made up, but it is obvious that there is an amount of work from which no single instance of rest can cause a complete recovery. If the results of such unrest are cumulative, then there must exist some amount of work that is less productive than working less for any kind of sustained endeavor.
The problem is we have no real way of measuring personal productivity, so we have no real way to find where the optimal point is for any individual. Society as a whole has chosen 40 weekly hours as a standard for mostly orthogonal reasons. In aggregate, the number is probably wrong. But it seems crazy to me to argue that there's no (sizable) fragment of the population that would not be as productive, or more so, with less than the 8 hours they work now.
> You need to put in as many hours as possible and just love what you're doing.
I guess that depends on what you consider "work". I do programming stuff in exchange for money, and it's not always the programming stuff I want to do. When I'm not working I do programming stuff (or read about programming stuff) I do want to do, but not in exchange for money.
This tends to be a non-issue, though. If you really love what you're doing that much, then it makes sense, and you are running off of additional energy.
This doesn't apply for, I would say, 99% of people, though, and definitely should not be influencing policies or standard hiring.
To become world class at something, you need to be obsessed. You need to put in as many hours as possible and just love what you're doing.
"Oh but you won't be as effective after 8 hours of work!"
So what. Let's say I'm only 20% as effective after 8 hours. I'll take it -- 20% of the last 5-6 hours of the day towards my craft over 0% doing 'normal' things (drinks on the patio? Pointless travelling? Whatever my fellow annoying millenials like to do).
This is the kind of mindset you need to reach the top of a field. And it should develop naturally, you should really want it. Whether it means outdoing everyone at your company, getting that prototype done two months earlier, closing more leads, getting that tricky piano passage, whatever.
If you love what you're doing, more is more. Because you probably can't help yourself. If you feel like working more, just do it. Don't let normal social expectations hold you back, especially if you're young, because you only get so long to become great at something.
I'll finish with one final caveat. Figure out what level of sleep, exercise, and nutrition your body needs to sustain your desired work habits. Get those right ASAP, keep trying modifications, and realize it's different for everyone's unique biology. I like 8 hours of sleep a night, weightlifting 3x/week at 45-60mins each, and a certain amount of protein and certain vitamins (and coffee of course, ha). You'd be surprised how these 3 lifestyle factors can make such a huge difference in your energy levels and hormones -- one can literally become a different person!